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The IPL has ten teams today and all ten of them are worth enormous amounts of money. But the tournament has not always had the same ten faces. Since 2008 five franchises have walked into the IPL, played their cricket and then disappeared. Some lasted one season. Some lasted a few years. None of them are playing anymore. Their stories are different but the endings are all the same. They are gone and they are not coming back.
What really happened to 5 IPL teams that are no longer playing in the league?
1) They won the IPL and then went bankrupt
Deccan Chargers were one of the original eight teams when the IPL started in 2008. They were based in Hyderabad, owned by Deccan Chronicle Holdings and had enough talent in their squad to be competitive. Their first season was terrible. VVS Laxman captained a side that could not win a single home game, finished last and looked like a team that might take years to sort itself out.
Then 2009 happened. Adam Gilchrist took over as captain and changed everything about how the franchise operated. The beige kit that the players reportedly hated was replaced with vibrant blue. Gilchrist ignored the star names and backed young players. Rohit Sharma won the Emerging Player of the Tournament award. The squad went to South Africa with limited gear and resources due to sponsor issues and Gilchrist somehow turned that into a tight knit team with a genuine belief in each other. They won the 2009 IPL title. The same franchise that had finished last twelve months earlier lifted the trophy in South Africa and nobody had seen it coming.
They followed it up with a semi-final in 2010 and a playoff spot in 2011. Then the financial problems that had been building in the background finally caught up with them. Deccan Chronicle Holdings were drowning in debt. They could not pay player salaries on time and could not provide the Rs 100 crore bank guarantee the BCCI required.
The BCCI gave them a deadline. They missed it by one day. The BCCI terminated them immediately. A last minute attempt to sell the franchise to a real estate company was rejected and that was that. Sunrisers Hyderabad replaced them in 2013 and the Chargers were gone. The only defunct IPL franchise to have won the title and the only team in the tournament's history to go from last place to champions in a single year.
2) One season a termination and an Rs 800 crore legal battle
Kochi Tuskers Kerala came in as one of two expansion teams in 2011 and lasted exactly one season before the BCCI terminated their contract. On the field they were decent for a first year team. They finished fifth, missed the playoffs but showed enough to suggest they could have been competitive if given more time. Mahela Jayawardene captained them, Brendon McCullum and Ravindra Jadeja played for them and they won six of their fourteen games.
What killed them had nothing to do with cricket. The ownership consortium behind the franchise was constantly fighting among themselves about who owned what percentage of the team. The internal disputes got so bad that they defaulted on their annual bank guarantee of Rs 156 crore. The BCCI called it an irremediable breach and terminated them after just one season.
Their story did not end there though. Between 2015-2017 an arbitrator ruled that the BCCI had wrongfully terminated the franchise and ordered the board to pay over Rs 800 crore in compensation. The team never came back but the legal case haunted the BCCI for years. They are the only IPL franchise to have been terminated by the BCCI and then beaten them in court.
3) Three seasons no playoffs and a very public fallout with the BCCI
Pune Warriors India also came in as an expansion team in 2011 and lasted three seasons before walking away ahead of 2014. They were owned by the Sahara Group and were actually the most expensive franchise in the league at the time of purchase at $370 million. The problems started almost immediately.
Sahara had bid for the franchise based on a 94 match season. The BCCI later reduced the number of games to 74 and Sahara felt they had been cheated. They asked for a reduction in franchise fees to reflect the fewer games. The BCCI said no.
The relationship between Sahara's owner Subrata Roy and the BCCI got worse over time and in 2013 after the BCCI encashed their bank guarantee to recover unpaid fees Roy pulled the team out voluntarily saying his franchise was being denied natural justice. Three seasons, no playoffs, three different captains in one year and a bitter exit. Sourav Ganguly captained them in their first season and Yuvraj Singh played for them but the combination never worked and the financial dispute with the BCCI overshadowed everything else. They are the most quietly forgotten of the five defunct franchises.
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4) Two year tenants who nearly won it all
Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiant are different from the other three because they were never meant to last. They were brought in specifically to replace Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals who were both suspended for two seasons between 2016 and 2017 following the IPL spot-fixing and betting scandal. Both franchises knew from day one that they had two seasons and then they were done. They were not building something permanent. They were keeping the lights on while the original teams served their ban.
Gujarat Lions were based in Rajkot, captained by Suresh Raina in both seasons and were genuinely competitive. They topped the table in 2016, their debut season, and reached the playoffs in 2017 as well before going out at the eliminator stage both times. When CSK and RR came back in 2018 the Lions were gone. The gap they left behind in Gujarat was eventually filled by Gujarat Titans who came into the IPL in 2022 and won the title in their very first season.
Rising Pune Supergiant had a wilder two year ride. In 2016 under MS Dhoni's captaincy they finished fifth. Then ahead of their second and final season the captaincy was taken away from Dhoni and given to Steve Smith which was one of the more surprising decisions the IPL had seen in a while. Dhoni played the entire 2017 season as a regular player without the captaincy armband, the only full IPL season in his career where that happened.
Under Smith the team went on a remarkable run to the final. They beat Mumbai Indians twice in the playoffs before losing to them by just one run in the final. Ben Stokes was brilliant throughout that campaign and Rising Pune Supergiant came within one delivery of winning the IPL in their last ever game. Then CSK came back and they were gone. The owners of Rising Pune Supergiant, the Sanjiv Goenka Group, returned to the IPL in 2022 with Lucknow Super Giants and have been a permanent fixture since.
What the 5 left behind
Five franchises and five very different endings. Deccan Chargers went bankrupt and missed a bank guarantee deadline by one day. Kochi Tuskers were torn apart by internal ownership disputes and then spent years in court. Pune Warriors walked away from a fee argument that their owner felt was unfair and never looked back. Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiant ran out of time when their contracts expired and the original teams returned.
Between them they left behind one IPL title, one legal judgement worth over Rs 800 crore, one final that went down to the last ball and one record that no active franchise has ever touched. The IPL today is bigger and richer than it has ever been. But somewhere in its history there are five clubs that never got to see what they might have become. Some never got the chance. Some ran out of money. Some ran out of time. The IPL moved on. It always does.
