There’s something quite uncomfortable happening with the IPL, and most people who’ve been watching since the early seasons can feel it even if they can’t quite name it. The cricket is technically better. The scores are higher. The production is slicker. And yet, something is off – Â the way a rerun of a great film feels slightly flat, even when nothing specific has changed.
Start with the cricket itself, because that’s where the feeling begins. IPL 2025 was the first season to record more than 50 totals of 200-plus runs, meaning a team crossed 200 roughly every three innings. On the surface, that sounds thrilling. In practice, it’s the opposite. Only six matches across the entire season were decided by fewer than 10 runs, and only four games were effectively alive on the final delivery. What we’re watching, increasingly, is not high-stakes cricket but a batting exhibition, numbers piling up without the tension that makes numbers mean anything. When 220 can be chased without breaking a sweat, 220 stops being a number worth fearing, and once that fear disappears, so does a chunk of the drama.
The game has evolved, obviously. Batters are better, pitches are flatter, and coaches have cracked the code on powerplay batting in a way they simply hadn’t a decade ago. But the IPL’s identity used to rest on genuine uncertainty, on the feeling that anything could happen in the final over. That feeling is becoming rarer, and it’s harder to stay emotionally invested in a contest you’re fairly confident you already know the answer to.
The Disappearance of Rivalries
Which brings us to what’s happened off the field, because this is where the real shift has occurred. The IPL was never just cricket. It was always television, spectacle, bollywood, brand and for a long time, that mix worked because the cricket’s unpredictability gave the circus something real to orbit around. But slowly, the commercial machinery has started eating the product it was built to sell.
The rivalry between Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings was the spine of the league for a decade. Rohit versus Dhoni, blue versus yellow, the swagger of Mumbai against the cool of Chennai – it was the IPL’s version of El Clásico. But brand loyalty and actual excitement are different things, and CSK haven’t really felt like genuine contenders in a couple of years. The rivalry exists in memory more than in the present, and the IPL hasn’t produced a new one to replace it. There’s no fixture that makes you rearrange your evening plans the way MI vs CSK once did.
A large part of that is the Dhoni problem, and it’s one the league still hasn’t figured out. For years, Dhoni was IPL’s emotional anchor, the reason millions of people who didn’t particularly care about CSK still tuned into their games, still wanted to see what he’d do in the last two overs, still argued about him at dinner tables. His presence didn’t just lift CSK; it lifted the entire occasion. What’s happened over the last few seasons isn’t a retirement, it’s a slow fade, and that’s been harder to process than a clean exit would have been. The league is caught between honouring him and moving on from him, and it’s not doing either particularly well. When he’s gone – properly gone – there isn’t an obvious personality waiting to fill that space. Virat Kohli is the game’s biggest star, but he occupies a different kind of cultural territory. Rohit is beloved but not in the same friction-generating way. The IPL ran for years on the energy that these figures created just by walking out to bat. That energy is thinning.
Part of the problem is also structural. The mega-auction cycle, introduced to keep things fresh, has had the side effect of gutting team identities. When a squad is rebuilt from scratch every few years, the attachment fans develop to their players gets severed before it fully forms. You can’t manufacture the loyalty that MI and CSK built over a decade by reshuffling rosters every other season. The commercial logic is sound. The emotional logic is damaging.
The Valuation Drop
The commercial signs are hard to ignore now. The IPL’s ecosystem value dropped 20% in 2025, falling from $12 billion in 2024 to $9.6 billion – its lowest in years, and a decline comparable only to the COVID-hit 2020 season. The exit of real-money gaming sponsors left a gap of roughly Rs 1,500 to 2,000 crore in the ecosystem.
And then there’s the media rights situation, the consolidation under a single platform ended the competitive tension that once drove auction fever among broadcasters. When a single platform owns the rights, the incentive to outdo itself is simply lower. The IPL no longer needs to sell itself; it just needs to exist. And leagues that stop selling themselves tend to stop improving. Even RCB, despite winning their maiden title, saw their brand value fall by 10% – a team ending an 18-year wait couldn’t move the commercial needle positively. That’s not a league in pink health.
RCB Won. Now What?
And that brings us to the thing nobody really wants to say out loud but everyone who follows the IPL is quietly feeling. RCB’s wait for a title was one of the great unresolved narratives in cricket. The perennial underachievers, Kohli’s only missing trophy, the fanbase that kept showing up despite everything, louder, somehow, after every defeat. It gave every season a background hum of will they, won’t they that even non-RCB fans were tracking.
Now it’s done. RCB lifted the trophy in 2025, ending an 18-year drought. It’s a beautiful ending to a beautiful story. It’s also the closing of a chapter that the IPL doesn’t have a replacement for. The MI-CSK rivalry has faded. The Dhoni era is winding down. Rohit and Kohli are at the back end of their IPL careers. For the first time in a while, the league is entering a moment where it doesn’t have a clear emotional narrative to give casual fans a reason to care – and that’s a harder thing to fix than flat pitches or falling valuations.
Not a Decline, BUT A SHIFT
The IPL isn’t dying. It’s too large, too embedded in Indian culture, and too commercially entrenched for that. The 2025 season generated over 384 billion minutes of online watch-time, a record. The audiences are there. But there’s a difference between a league people watch out of habit and one they watch with their hearts in their mouths. The scores keep climbing. The tension keeps dropping. Somewhere in that gap is the thing the league needs to find again – not more sixes, but more reason to care about them.