IPL 2025 Mega Auction

Two captains at the top

Lucknow Super Giants paid ₹27 crore for Rishabh Pant, the most any player has cost, minutes after Punjab Kings paid ₹26.75 crore for Shreyas Iyer, who had led Kolkata to the title months earlier. Both were bought to captain. The outcomes diverged: Iyer scored 604 runs and led Punjab to the final, while Pant made 269. Kolkata paid ₹23.75 crore to bring back Venkatesh Iyer, who scored 142.

Punjab starts over

Punjab kept only two uncapped players and arrived with the largest purse, spending more than any franchise has at a single auction. Besides Iyer, they paid ₹18 crore each for Arshdeep Singh, whom they won back with a Right to Match card, and Yuzvendra Chahal. It was the most complete rebuild in this archive, and it came within one match of a title.

The youngest buy

Rajasthan Royals paid ₹1.1 crore for Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, a 13-year-old batter from Bihar, the youngest player ever bought at an IPL auction. He made a hundred off 35 balls in the season that followed. The Rajasthan Royalspage places him in the franchise's habit of developing young Indian batters.

Bengaluru at last

Royal Challengers Bengaluru spent the second most, and won their first title in the final against Punjab. After seventeen seasons as one of three original franchises without a trophy, they finally had one. The Bengaluru page covers the long wait.

Reading the numbers

More than ₹639 crore was spent, the most at any auction, and overseas players took two fifths of it, the familiar mega-auction share. Punjab alone spent more than ₹110 crore; Rajasthan, Mumbai and Hyderabad, who had each kept five or six players, spent the least.

The two finalists were the two biggest spenders, a first for a mega auction in this archive. Daryl Mitchell, Adil Rashid and Alzarri Joseph were among the capped players left unsold.