IPL 2026 Mini Auction

Green and Kolkata

Kolkata Knight Riders paid ₹25.2 crore for Cameron Green, above Mitchell Starc's ₹24.75 crore from 2024 and so the most paid for an overseas player. They also paid ₹18 crore for the Sri Lankan fast bowler Matheesha Pathirana, and spent more at this auction than any other franchise by a distance. Green played 14 matches, scoring 322 runs and taking seven wickets.

Uncapped records

Chennai Super Kings paid ₹14.2 crore each for two uncapped players, Kartik Sharma and Prashant Veer, comfortably the highest prices yet for players without an international cap. Kartik Sharma scored 295 runs in 11 matches. Mumbai Indians spent the least of any franchise, a little over ₹2 crore.

How it played out

Royal Challengers Bengaluru, who spent modestly here, won the title for the second year running. The full list of buys and their seasons is below, and the 2025 mega auction shows how most of these squads were first assembled.

Reading the numbers

Overseas players took about three fifths of the money in 2026, lower than most mini auctions because of the record uncapped prices. Kolkata and Chennai together accounted for half of all spending; Mumbai and Punjab, whose squads were largely settled, spent the least.

The champions were sixth of ten on spend, and Kolkata, the biggest spenders by far, did not win the title. Among the capped players left unsold were Devon Conway, Daryl Mitchell, Gus Atkinson and Gerald Coetzee, and more than three quarters of the players offered went unsold, one of the lowest sale rates in the archive.

The pattern across the mini auctions in this archive holds here too: the size of a franchise's spend at a mini auction says very little about how its season goes, because the core of every squad was built at the mega auction before it.