The 2025 Mega Auction: Record Bids and the Buys That Shaped a Season
Pant at ₹27 crore, Iyer at ₹26.75 crore and a 13-year-old from Bihar. What happened in Jeddah, and how it played out.
Every few years the IPL holds a mega auction: most squads are broken up and rebuilt almost from scratch. The one before the 2025 season, held over two days in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in November 2024, broke the league's price record twice in a matter of minutes.
How a mega auction works
Before the auction, each team could keep up to six players from its old squad, through retentions or the Right to Match (RTM) card, which lets a team match the winning bid for one of its former players. Everyone else went back into the pool.
Each team had a purse of ₹120 crore, with the cost of any retained players taken off before bidding began.
The big retentions
- Heinrich Klaasen was retained by Sunrisers Hyderabad for ₹23 crore, the most of any player.
- Virat Kohli (RCB) and Nicholas Pooran (Lucknow) were kept for ₹21 crore each.
- MS Dhoni was retained by Chennai for ₹4 crore as an "uncapped" player, under a rule that treats Indian players who have not played international cricket for five years as uncapped.
The biggest buys
| Player | Bought by | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Rishabh Pant | Lucknow Super Giants | ₹27.00 cr |
| Shreyas Iyer | Punjab Kings | ₹26.75 cr |
| Venkatesh Iyer | Kolkata Knight Riders | ₹23.75 cr |
| Arshdeep Singh | Punjab Kings (RTM) | ₹18.00 cr |
| Yuzvendra Chahal | Punjab Kings | ₹18.00 cr |
| Jos Buttler | Gujarat Titans | ₹15.75 cr |
| KL Rahul | Delhi Capitals | ₹14.00 cr |
| Jofra Archer | Rajasthan Royals | ₹12.50 cr |
| Trent Boult | Mumbai Indians | ₹12.50 cr |
| Josh Hazlewood | Royal Challengers Bengaluru | ₹12.50 cr |
Shreyas Iyer's ₹26.75 crore beat the previous record, Mitchell Starc's ₹24.75 crore from the 2023 auction, but it lasted only minutes. Lucknow then went to ₹27 crore for Rishabh Pant, and made him captain.
A 13-year-old in the room
The story of the second day was Vaibhav Suryavanshi, a left-handed batter from Bihar. Rajasthan Royals bought him for ₹1.10 crore at the age of 13, making him the youngest player ever signed at an IPL auction.
Five months later, aged 14, he hit a hundred from 35 balls against Gujarat Titans in only his third IPL match.
How it played out
- Punjab's spending paid off. With Iyer as captain and Arshdeep and Chahal in the attack, Punjab topped the league table and reached the final.
- RCB built a champion side. Hazlewood led the attack, and Krunal Pandya, bought for ₹5.75 crore, was player of the match in the final as RCB won their first title.
- The most expensive player struggled. Pant had a tough season with the bat until a century in Lucknow's last league match, and his team missed the playoffs.
It was a reminder of the oldest rule of IPL auctions: the price of a player tells you how much a team wanted him, not how the season will go.
Stats in this article are correct to the end of the 2025 IPL season.
