IPL in 2026: The league that begins before the first ball

It is Monday morning in the week that IPL 2026 begins, and a five-star hotel in Bengaluru has given over its ballrooms to cricket. Inside each one: lights, a camera crew, a stylist, a director with a shot list, and IPL stars in full kit being told where to stand. The players move between ballrooms quick and purposeful. A line or two of dialogue. A product held at a specific angle. Then next door. Some of the A-list Indian stars will get through four shoots before the morning is done. The same drill is playing out in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and other IPL cities too. Pre-season practice camp will happen in the evening.

On Tuesday night, the valuations came in. USD 1.78 billion for Royal Challengers Bengaluru. USD 1.6 billion for Rajasthan Royals. Nobody blinked. If anything, there was mild disappointment that the two-billion mark hadn't been breached. The extraordinary has simply become the baseline.

Twenty days ago, India became the first team to win a third T20 World Cup, the first to successfully defend their title, and the first to win one at home. They did so by plundering three scores of 250 or more in their final four games. And the team that did it was, in almost every meaningful sense, the IPL generation made flesh.

Consider what that actually means. Seven of the 10 captains leading franchises this season – Rajat Patidar, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Ajinkya Rahane, Shubman Gill, Riyan Parag – were not in the squad that lifted the T20 World Cup. The team that won could afford to leave them out. When the IPL was conceived, the most optimistic promise was that India would develop so much talent that selection itself became an embarrassment of choices. That promise was always suspected of being a little grandiose. It wasn't.

The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium is where the league itself began in 2008. For 17 years after that, the caravan opened elsewhere because RCB never won and earned the right to open the season. Until now.

In June last year, after RCB won their first title, crowds poured onto the streets of Bengaluru to celebrate. Eleven people died in a stampede outside the stadium. A plaque was unveiled at the stadium two days ago. Eleven seats will be kept empty in their honour. The stadium has been a hive of construction activity even 24 hours out from the start of the new season because newly proposed safety standards have to be adhered to.

The IPL chugs along even when the world outside the boundary is doing its thing. The middle-class Indian who buys the ticket, who streams the game: that person is paying more for everything, including the match ticket. And yet the cricket remains, by some commercial sleight of hand, both premium and ubiquitous.

This season those contradictions have faces. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Ayush Mhatre were already IPL stars before they won the Under-19 World Cup together earlier this year. The system didn't just discover them, it had already absorbed them. They will share a frame with MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, Ravindra Jadeja and Virat Kohli, the OGs who were the IPL before the IPL fully knew what it was. At the IPL, it is just the Tuesday fixture list.

Which brings us, finally, to the season itself. RCB are defending champions, which they would like you to know they are not defending so much as 'attacking' a second title.

Their rivals CSK come to the season carrying, for the first time, the memory of a wooden spoon. Last year forced them to reshuffle the deck. Ravindra Jadeja, one of the great CSK men, returned to Rajasthan Royals where he began, with Sanju Samson, Player of the World Cup, going the other way in a mega trade. CSK also signalled a changed identity, signing the 19-year-old Karthik Sharma and 20-year-old Prashant Veer at INR 14 crore each in the auction.

Mumbai Indians haven't won in five years. They look as strong as ever going into this one. At some point the squad depth and the tactical intelligence has to produce something.

These three marquee teams are also curiously assigned games at second venues of other sides. All three will play Rajasthan Royals in Guwahati. Dharamsala, the second home of Punjab Kings, will host MI and RCB. RCB themselves will play MI and KKR at Raipur, their other home venue for this season.

The other teams carry their own storylines. KKR, champions two seasons ago, are navigating sustaining a title-winning culture. DC and PBKS looked like genuine contenders last year; only PBKS became one, making the playoffs for the first time in 11 years before stumbling at the final step.

SRH boast two of India's top three in their top three. GT and LSG are building identities in a league where identity is hard-won. And RR, freshly valued, carry the weight of being worth their valuation while still feeling like the league's romantic story.

Finally, there is the other thing. The modern cricket calendar is crowded. The result is visible in the absences at the start of this season, particularly among fast bowlers. Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins, Nathan Ellis, Akash Deep, Sam Curran, Matheesha Pathirana among others will not start the season. This is the contradiction the IPL has not yet resolved. Which means there is now a familiar second wave of players disentangling themselves from Pakistan Super League contracts, and arriving to the IPL as replacement signings.

Back in that Bengaluru hotel, the last shoot wraps sometime in the mid-afternoon. The cricketer hands back the product, poses for a few pictures, and heads upstairs to change. In a few hours he hits the nets, doing the other thing, the thing that started all of this.

Nineteen years. The IPL is an adult now. Adults are supposed to know the difference between momentum and direction. The IPL has always had both. The Chinnaswamy will fill tomorrow, the lights will come up, and it will all feel, as it always does, like the only thing happening in the world.