CRICARCADE
Updates
Leaderboard
← Guides / The Right to Match Card

The Right to Match Card Guide

By · Published · Sources

The first lot of the 2025 mega auction was Arshdeep Singh, base price 2 crore. Six franchises bid: Chennai, Delhi, Gujarat, Bangalore, Rajasthan, and finally Sunrisers Hyderabad, who won the war at 15.75 crore. The auctioneer, Mallika Sagar, turned to the Punjab Kings table. Punjab had not retained Arshdeep. They had let him walk into the auction deliberately, keeping only two uncapped players, and now they raised the paddle: Right to Match. Under the old rules, that would have been the end of it. But 2025 had a twist. Hyderabad were given one final chance to raise, and pushed the price to 18 crore. Punjab thought, and matched. Arshdeep Singh, the most expensive Indian fast bowler in IPL auction history, was going home.7 min read

What RTM is, and what it is not

That is the Right to Match card: the IPL auction's mechanism found nowhere else in cricket. A franchise can release a player, watch other teams bid for him, and then take him back anyway.

RTM is not retention. Retention (see the retention guide) keeps a player out of the auction entirely at a fixed slab deduction. RTM lets him go into the auction and buys him back at whatever the room decides he is worth. Retention is certainty at a fixed cost; RTM is flexibility at a market cost. Franchises use them as alternatives: keep the irreplaceable core by retention, and keep the market's hand off the rest with RTM.

The difference matters most when the room disagrees with you. Retain a player and you pay the slab whether he is worth it or not. RTM him and you pay what the market says, which might be less. But the market might also say more, and then you are matching a price you would never have chosen, in front of everyone, with the clock ticking. That is the drama of the card.

How the bidding works

When the bidding for a player ends, the auctioneer turns to the franchise that released him. It may exercise its RTM card and match the winning bid, signing the player at that price, or decline and let him go to the winning bidder.

The 2025 mega auction added a twist that changed the tactics. Once a team signalled RTM, the winning bidder got one final chance to raise the bid before the card was exercised, and the RTM team had to match the raised figure or walk away. In the old days, matching the hammer price was enough; in 2025, the team holding the card could be forced to pay more than the hammer price. The Arshdeep auction was the textbook demonstration: the hammer had fallen at 15.75 crore, Punjab signalled RTM, Hyderabad raised to 18, and Punjab matched 18, not 15.75. RTM stopped being a free look and became a genuine second auction.

The same auction showed the other side of the card. Delhi Capitals had released Rishabh Pant, their captain, into the mega auction. When Lucknow Super Giants bid 27 crore, a record, Delhi were offered the RTM. They declined. Pant went to Lucknow, and Delhi's decision not to match became one of the defining stories of the auction. The card is only as good as the nerve of the hand holding it.

2014: the card is dealt

The RTM card was introduced at the 2014 mega auction, where 13 players were bought back with it. The concept was simple: franchises had built identities and fan attachments in six seasons, and the league wanted a mechanism that let teams keep their players without the rigidity of fixed retention slabs. Let the market set the price, then let the old team match it. It was an elegant solution to the continuity problem, and it immediately produced the auction's most theatrical moments: the pause, the turn to the old franchise's table, the paddle raised or lowered.

2018: nineteen homecomings

The card returned at the 2018 mega auction, and 19 more players were reclaimed: 32 RTM buys across the two auctions. The 2018 auction remains the great showcase of RTM as strategy, because the stories are so vivid.

Sunrisers Hyderabad watched Kings XI Punjab win a bidding war for Rashid Khan at 9 crore, then played their card and took the 19-year-old Afghan leg-spinner home. It was the defining RTM of the cycle: a franchise identifying its most irreplaceable asset and refusing to lose him at any price the room could set.

Mumbai Indians did the same with Krunal Pandya. Royal Challengers Bangalore won the bidding at 8.8 crore, and Mumbai matched, making Krunal the most expensive uncapped player in IPL history at the time. The message was clear: Mumbai's scouting had found him first, and no market price would take him away.

The auction also showed the card declined. Kolkata Knight Riders chose not to exercise RTM on Manish Pandey, and Sunrisers took him for 11 crore. Delhi used both of their RTM cards on bowlers, reclaiming Mohammed Shami and Kagiso Rabada. Kolkata used theirs on Piyush Chawla at 4.2 crore and Kuldeep Yadav at 5.8 crore. Royal Challengers brought Yuzvendra Chahal home at 6 crore. Every one of these was a public valuation: the room said what a player was worth, and the old franchise said whether it agreed.

2022: the card is withdrawn

Ahead of the 2022 mega auction, RTM was scrapped entirely. Franchises were instead allowed four direct retentions and no cards. The logic was a clean reset for a ten-team league with two new franchises: everyone should build from the auction, with retention as the only continuity tool. The 2022 auction, the biggest rebuild in IPL history, happened without a single RTM. Punjab's decision to retain only Mayank Agarwal and the uncapped Arshdeep Singh was made in this world: no safety net, no second look, just the auction.

2025: the card returns, with teeth

RTM came back for the 2025 mega auction, folded into a combined allowance: each team could keep up to six players through retention and RTM together (maximum five capped, maximum two uncapped), so a team's RTM cards equalled six minus the players it had already retained. A team that retained nobody had six cards; a team that retained six had none. At least eight of the ten franchises carried at least one RTM card into the Jeddah auction.

And the final-raise twist changed everything about how the card plays. Under the old rules, rival franchises knew that bidding against the old team was partly futile: whatever they bid, the card would match it. The rational move was to bid anyway, to force the old team to pay full price, but there was no way to break the card. In 2025, the winning bidder gets the last word before the match. Arshdeep's price went from 15.75 to 18 crore on that single rule. The card is no longer a free look. It is a negotiation, conducted in public, with the auctioneer as mediator.

The strategy in one section

RTM is an option, and options have value even unexercised. Holding cards into the auction forces rivals to bid knowing the old franchise is watching, which can inflate prices for everyone. A franchise holding an RTM card on a popular player casts a shadow over his entire auction: every bidder knows the old team might simply take him at the end.

Using a card early burns flexibility later. The teams that play it best treat RTM slots like retention slots with a variable price tag: decide in advance which players are worth matching at any price, which are worth matching only cheaply, and which were released because they were meant to be released. Punjab's 2025 plan was the model: retain almost nobody, keep the purse huge, and use RTM as a targeted weapon on the one player they could not lose. Delhi's non-use on Pant was the same logic in reverse: decide the price is wrong, and let him go, however painful.

There is also the signalling game. When a franchise declines RTM, as Kolkata did with Pandey in 2018 and Delhi did with Pant in 2025, it tells the room something about its valuation. When it matches, as Punjab did at 18 crore, it tells the room something else. The paddle is a press release.

Methodology note

RTM mechanics and history follow the IPL's regulations and announcements for each season, as reported at the time. Season-by-season mechanics varied, so the description above distinguishes the pre-2025 rule (match the hammer price) from the 2025 twist (the winning bidder's final raise). Auction anecdotes are drawn from contemporary reporting of the 2018 and 2025 mega auctions.

Keep reading

RTM sits inside the wider auction format: our guide to Mega Auctions and Mini Auctions covers when a mega auction happens and why it changes the rules, and our guide to IPL Retention, Season by Season covers the alternative franchises choose instead of it. RTM has to work inside the same overseas cap as everything else, which our guide to Overseas Player Rules in the IPL explains. And for the auction from first principles, start with How IPL Auctions Work.

Sources