The year the defending champions did it again
For eighteen seasons Royal Challengers Bengaluru were the punchline. Two years on from that, they are the team everybody is trying to catch. The 2026 IPL ran from 28 March to 31 May, 74 matches across thirteen venues, and it finished with Rajat Patidar's side chasing 156 in Ahmedabad to become only the third franchise to win back-to-back finals.
Getting the season on the calendar took some doing. The T20 World Cup final was on 8 March, so the BCCI first pushed the IPL to 26 March to leave a three-week gap, then to 28 March. The fixture list itself came out in two parts, because the assembly elections in Assam, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal had not been dated. Only the first twenty matches were released on 11 March. The full league schedule followed on 26 March, two days before the opening game.
Fifteen years old and taking the league apart
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was the story before the season and somehow exceeded it. A year after becoming the youngest centurion in IPL history, he made 776 runs for Rajasthan Royals, took the Orange Cap, was named Most Valuable Player and Emerging Player of the season, and broke Chris Gayle's record of 59 sixes in a single edition, a mark that had stood since 2012. He reached 1,000 IPL runs in 23 innings, faster than any Indian before him. In the Eliminator at Mullanpur he made 97 from 29 balls. He is fifteen.
The batting records did not stop there. On 25 April at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, KL Rahul made 152 not out from 67 balls for Delhi Capitals, the highest score by an Indian in IPL history, and finished on the losing side. Punjab Kings chased 265 with seven balls left, Prabhsimran Singh hitting 76 from 26. Sunrisers Hyderabad put 255 on RCB at Uppal in late May. Qualifier 1 at Dharamshala saw RCB make 254 for 5 against Gujarat Titans, the highest total in any IPL playoff, and win by 92 runs.
Ahmedabad, again
The final was the tightest match of the knockouts and the lowest-scoring. Gujarat Titans, into their third final in five seasons, could only manage 155 for 8. RCB got there in 18 overs for the loss of five wickets. Virat Kohli, in his eighteenth IPL season, was Player of the Match; earlier in the year he had become the first player to score more than 600 runs in four consecutive editions. Kagiso Rabada's 29 wickets for Gujarat took the Purple Cap and were not enough.
There is a second line in the record book worth noting. RCB had won the Women's Premier League earlier in 2026, making them the first organisation to hold both Indian titles in the same calendar year. For a franchise whose supporters spent nearly two decades chanting "ee sala cup namde" without result, two IPL trophies and a WPL trophy inside eighteen months is an odd sort of vindication.
The wider argument the league is having has not gone away. Totals kept climbing, the impact player rule stayed, and the governing council's plan to expand to 84 matches was deferred again. Whatever else 2026 settled, it did not settle that.