IPL 2025: RCB Released Its Auction Strategy; See The Leaked Slide From The Preparation 

Royal Challengers Bangalore, one of the most popular franchises of the Indian Premier League IPL, recently released their auction strategy, which they followed when they went for the IPL 2025 mega auction. IPL governing council conducted its mega auction last month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The Guiding Principles

They first discussed the guiding principle they followed for the auctions.

The main principles they talked about-

• Building an Indian core 
• Quick run scorer overseas batters
• Consistent Players, Not just those who score once in a while
• Strong Pace Bowling

Management discussed building a strong Indian core as the first step toward winning the trophy. 

It was also mentioned that during the last season, 65% of the IPL caps (matches played) in the squad were from Virat Kohli and Dinesh Kartik, 479 from these two, and the next player was Mohammed Siraj with 67 IPL matches which was a concern as most of the experience was from just two players.

They also prepared an Excel sheet with the probable playing XI combination they are looking for, In which most of the Playing XI included the foreign opening batters.

The management next talked about the overseas batter, where the team spoke about Phil Salt in detail. Before starting the conversation on opening batter, they talked about how spending the money on two overseas players would end up as a waste of overseas slots since they couldn't play a lot of balls.

The Opener’s search

For the opening overseas slot in the team, the team picked up a bunch of names like Phil Salt, Faf DuPlessis, Jos Butler and Will Jacks. They talked about getting a kind of opener duo who can score 80 runs in the powerplay, management discussed about Faf in detail, but they counted the age factor for him, which played a significant role in dismissing him from the role. With Phil Salt's impressive numbers in the past season, they settled on him as their first pick. All members were surprised when they learned about the fact that with Phil Salt, there is a probability of 35% that he will hit 16+ runs in an over.

Bowling Options?

Then, the discussion went on to the pace department, where management discussed overseas and Indian options. Josh Hazelwood, Trent Boult, Mitchell Starc, and Nuwan Thusara were mentioned in the conversation for the overseas bowler. All the bowlers' numbers were analysed, and the management chose Jose Hazelwood as its first choice, but if they couldn't get him, the following options were Kagiso Rabada, Trent Boult, Mitchell Starc, etc.

For the Indian bowler, names like Bhuvaneswar Kumar, Pasidh Krishna, Mohammad Siraj, and more came to the discussion, but Dinesh Kartik particularly favoured Bhuvneshar Kumar. He said “After Jaspreet bumrah in India still Bhuvaneswar Kumar is the best T20 bowler”

RCB ended up buying Bhubaneswar Kumar in the auction.

What RCB missed in the auction

It's not like RCB got all the players in the option they wanted. The team did their fair share, and they were eager to buy players like Venkatesh Iyer and Yazuvendra Chahal. They bid for Iyer till the 23 crore price point, but Kolkata Knight Riders used RTM for him. The team also missed on Chahal, who got sold to Punjab Kings for a whopping 18 crore price.

RCB Squad For IPL 2025

Experience, Balance and Power, the ultimate base,

Our Class of ‘25 is ready to embrace! 👊#PlayBold #ನಮ್ಮRCB #IPLAuction #BidForBold #IPL2025 pic.twitter.com/4M7Hnjf1Di

— Royal Challengers Bengaluru (@RCBTweets) November 25, 2024