IPL player database

About the IPL player database

The IPL player database holds a page for every player in CricArcade's Indian Premier League records, from the first season in 2008 to 2026: batting, bowling and fielding by season and by franchise, player-of-the-match awards, and the seasons spent as captain or as champion. Each page opens with a short reading of the career: the best seasons with bat and ball, the titles won, and the longest unbroken spell with one franchise.

Where a player went through the auction, the page also shows every appearance there, taken from CricArcade's IPL auction archive: the set, the base price and the result, sold or unsold, with the Right to Match card marked where a franchise used it. A season without an auction entry is not a gap in the record; it means the player was retained or signed outside the auction that year, and the page says so rather than leaving the reader to guess. Each franchise name links to its own history.

Most pages also carry a ball-by-ball detail section: the share of dot balls faced and bowled, how often a boundary came off the bat or a wicket off the ball, and fielding dismissals split into catches, run-outs and stumpings, rather than the combined figure the season table shows. These come from a ball-by-ball reconstruction of 1,243 IPL matches, cross-checked against Cricsheet. They are career totals, not a season-by-season breakdown like the rest of the page, and a page carries them only where they agree exactly with the runs and wickets already shown for that player; a handful of players whose careers could not be matched with confidence go without this section rather than risk a wrong number.

Everything here is a real result. Deliberately left out: the ratings the T20 Franchise Manager game gives its players, and the salaries players were retained at, which the auction record does not cover. Use the filters below to narrow the list by franchise, or by Indian and overseas players, and sort it by runs, wickets or matches.

How the IPL got faster

Every career on this page was played against a moving target. In 2008, the IPL's batters scored 129.1 runs per hundred balls between them, and a six came roughly once every 21 balls. By 2026 the rate was 156.5, and a six arrived every 12 balls. Fours and sixes, which made up 63% of all runs in the first season, made up 68% in the latest. Bowlers paid for it: the league's economy rate went from 8.05 to 9.73 runs an over.

The climb was not steady. The slowest season of all was 2009, the one played in South Africa, at 116.9, and it was 2014 before a season scored as quickly as the first one had. The biggest change came at the end. Every season from 2023, the year the Impact Player rule let a side bring in a specialist substitute and so bat deeper, has set a new high, and the 2026 figure of 156.5 is the fastest the league has scored. That is why the player pages here compare each season with the league around it, not with a single all-time average: a strike rate of 140 was exceptional in 2009 and ordinary in 2026.

The run-makers

Only 10 players have scored 5,000 IPL runs. The five most prolific are Virat Kohli (9,346), Rohit Sharma (7,331), Shikhar Dhawan (6,769), David Warner (6,567) and KL Rahul (5,828), and Virat Kohli also leads the database in matches played, with 282. Volume is one measure and speed another: among players with 2,000 runs or more, the fastest scorers are Andre Russell (174.1), Abhishek Sharma (171.3) and Heinrich Klaasen (166.7), all quicker than the league as a whole has managed in any single season, even its fastest. The most sixes belong to Chris Gayle (359), Rohit Sharma (324) and Virat Kohli (317), and the most hundreds to Virat Kohli (9), Jos Buttler (7) and Chris Gayle (6).

The wicket-takers

31 bowlers have reached 100 IPL wickets. The five with the most are Yuzvendra Chahal (233), Bhuvneshwar Kumar (226), Sunil Narine (209), Piyush Chawla (192) and Jasprit Bumrah (190). In a league built for batting, the rarer skill may be keeping the runs down over a long career: among bowlers with at least 1,200 balls bowled, the lowest economy rates belong to Muttiah Muralitharan (6.69), Sunil Narine (6.78) and Dale Steyn (6.92), runs per over that look more remarkable with every season the league's scoring rate climbs.

One-club players and journeymen

810 players have turned out across the league's 19 seasons, for 15 franchises: 19 different team names appear on the scorecards, since Royal Challengers Bangalore became Royal Challengers Bengaluru, Delhi Daredevils became Delhi Capitals, Kings XI Punjab became Punjab Kings and Rising Pune Supergiants became Rising Pune Supergiant. Movement is the norm. Only 4 players have spent ten seasons or more with a single franchise and never played for another: Virat Kohli (19 seasons, Royal Challengers Bengaluru), Sunil Narine (15 seasons, Kolkata Knight Riders), Kieron Pollard (13 seasons, Mumbai Indians) and Jasprit Bumrah (13 seasons, Mumbai Indians).

At the other end, the most well-travelled players, by number of franchises represented, are Aaron Finch (9), Jaydev Unadkat (8) and Ishant Sharma (7). The longest careers of all, by seasons played, belong to Manish Pandey (19), Rohit Sharma (19) and Virat Kohli (19), while 259 players appeared in a single season and never returned.

Captains, champions and match-winners

The most seasons as captain belong to MS Dhoni (15), Rohit Sharma (11) and Virat Kohli (9). The most titles won as a member of the champion side belong to Ambati Rayudu (6), Rohit Sharma (6) and Hardik Pandya (5). And the most player-of-the-match awards, the closest thing the scorecard has to a verdict on who decided a game, went to AB de Villiers (25), Chris Gayle (22) and Virat Kohli (22).

The price of a player

689 of the players here went through at least one auction. The highest prices ever paid were Rishabh Pant (₹27 cr to Lucknow Super Giants in 2025), Shreyas Iyer (₹26.75 cr to Punjab Kings in 2025) and Cameron Green (₹25.20 cr to Kolkata Knight Riders in 2026). Many of the league's best-known names barely appear in the auction record at all: a player retained season after season never goes back under the hammer. Each player page sets the auction history beside what the player then did on the field, and the full record of every sale is in the IPL auction archive.

The ball-by-ball story

A season table shows what a player scored. It says nothing about how: whether an innings was built on singles or boundaries, or whether a bowler's economy comes from tying batters down ball after ball or from the occasional expensive over between wickets. A ball-by-ball reconstruction of the IPL's matches, cross-checked against Cricsheet, fills that gap. Among batters with at least 1,500 balls faced in the archive, dot balls are rarest against Sai Sudharsan (29.1%), AB de Villiers (30.5%) and Shubman Gill (31%). Clearing the rope is a separate skill again: the quickest to a six, by balls per six faced, were Andre Russell (one every 6.8), Nicholas Pooran (one every 8.3) and Chris Gayle (one every 9.3). Among bowlers with at least 1,200 balls bowled, the highest dot-ball rate belongs to Dale Steyn (46.7%), Morne Morkel (43.5%) and Munaf Patel (43.5%), all three out-and-out pace bowlers.

The same reconstruction credits a run-out to the fielder who actually effected it, on top of the combined catches-and-stumpings figure in the season tables. The busiest in the database are MS Dhoni (53), Dinesh Karthik (46) and Robin Uthappa (45), and all three are wicketkeepers: no other fielding position gives a player as many run-out chances over a career. Every IPL player page linked from the table below carries its own dot-ball rate, balls per boundary, balls per wicket and fielding breakdown, published only where this source and CricArcade's own season data agree exactly on the player's runs and wickets.