IPL and the player auctions just continued to churn out new stories and trends as INR 639.15 crore were spent and splashed by 10 teams to acquire services of 182 players to fill up their squads across two days at the mega auction in Jeddah on November 24 and 25. India's Rishabh Pant ended up scripting history as the most expensive player in IPL history after Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) made a headline-grabbing bump to their final bid from INR 20.75 crore to INR 27 crore taking it out of reach of the wicketkeeper batter's previous team, Delhi Capitals.
Punjab Kings picked Shreyas Iyer, the other top Indian captaincy option, up for grabs for INR 26.75 crore, having gone into the auction with the biggest purse. Punjab made other big buys in the form of Arshdeep Singh and Yuzvendra Chahal giving them IN 18 crore each. While Punjab Kings and LSG made the expensive bids, Chennai Super Kings were miserly and rather shrewd in their picks and whom they wanted to go for, ending up with a pretty well-rounded squad and similarly for Gujarat Titans, who have quality backups apart from a solid first XI.
With the auction done and dusted, here's a look at the possible strongest XI for every team ahead of the 2025 edition of the IPL-
Strongest Playing XIs of all 10 teams
Chennai Super Kings
Ruturaj Gaikwad, Devon Conway, Rahul Tripathi, Shivam Dube, Rachin Ravindra/Sam Curran, MS Dhoni (wk), Ravindra Jadeja, R Ashwin, Matheesha Pathirana, Khaleel Ahmed, Noor Ahmad
Impact: Deepak Hooda/Anshul Kamboj
Delhi Capitals
Jake Fraser-McGurk, KL Rahul (wk), Abishek Porel, Harry Brook, Tristan Stubbs, Ashutosh Sharma, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Mitchell Starc, T Natarajan, Mukesh Kumar
Impact: Sameer Rizvi/Mohit Sharma
Gujarat Titans
Jos Buttler (wk), Shubman Gill (c), Sai Sudharsan, Shahrukh Khan, Sherfane Rutherford/Glenn Phillips, Washington Sundar, Rahul Tewatia, Rashid Khan, Kagiso Rabada, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna
Impact: Mahipal Lomror/Ishant Sharma
Kolkata Knight Riders
Quinton de Kock, Sunil Narine, Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Venkatesh Iyer, Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Harshit Rana, Vaibhav Arora, Varun Chakravarthy, Anrich Nortje
Impact: Ajinkya Rahane/Manish Pandey/Mayank Markande
Lucknow Super Giants
Mitchell Marsh, Rishabh Pant (wk), Aiden Markram, Nicholas Pooran, Ayush Badoni, David Miller, Abdul Samad, Avesh Khan, Ravi Bishnoi, Mohsin Khan, Mayank Yadav
Impact: Shahbaz/Akash Deep
Mumbai Indians
Rohit Sharma, Will Jacks, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Varma, Hardik Pandya (c), Naman Dhir, Robin Minz (wk), Deepak Chahar, Allah Ghazanfar, Jasprit Bumrah, Trent Boult
Impact: Mitchell Santner
Punjab Kings
Prabhsimran Singh (wk), Marcus Stoinis, Shreyas Iyer, Glenn Maxwell, Nehal Wadhera, Shashank Singh, Marco Jansen, Harpreet Brar, Arshdeep Singh, Lockie Ferguson, Yuzvendra Chahal
Impact: Vyshak Vijakumar/Vishnu Vinod
Rajasthan Royals
Sanju Samson (c/wk), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Nitish Rana, Riyan Parag, Dhruv Jurel, Shimron Hetmyer, Wanindu Hasaranga, Maheesh Theekshana/Fazalhaq Farooqi, Jofra Archer, Sandeep Sharma, Tushar Deshpande
Impact: Shubham Dubey/Akash Madhwal
Royal Challengers Bengaluru
Phil Salt (wk), Virat Kohli, Rajat Patidar, Krunal Pandya, Liam Livingstone, Jitesh Sharma, Tim David, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Yash Dayal, Josh Hazlewood, Swapnil Singh
Impact: Suyash Sharma/Rasikh Salam/Devdutt Padikkal
Sunrisers Hyderabad
Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan (wk), Heinrich Klaasen, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Abhinav Manohar, Pat Cummins, Harshal Patel, Adam Zampa, Simarjeet Singh, Mohammed Shami
Impact: Atharva Taide
