IPL 2027 retentions
Which IPL grounds favour spin, and do their sides buy for it?
Every IPL fan knows the theory: a side with a turning home pitch should fill its squad with spinners and let the ground do the rest, because a spin-friendly home ground ought to be an edge worth paying for. Five seasons of matches say it isn’t. Only one IPL ground clearly favours spin, and a ground’s lean rarely lasts from one season to the next. Home sides get nothing from their own conditions that visitors don’t get too, and sides do not buy for their grounds anyway. So the home pitch is a weak reason to buy spin, and the reason that holds at every ground is the price.
Our post on IPL fees, Who is overpaid in the IPL?, found that at the open auction a seam bowler costs about twice as much as a spinner who does the same job per match, across IPL squads from 2022 to 2026. That saving is there at every ground, whatever the pitch. Retentions are widely reported to be due by 15 November, though the BCCI has not confirmed the date, so every side is about to decide whether its home pitch should shape what it pays for spin.
A ground’s spin edge is how many runs an over spin bowling saved against seam at that ground, beyond the usual gap between the two across the IPL. The bowlers and batters who played there are allowed for, so a ground gets no credit simply because its own side happens to have good spinners, and loses none because it has poor ones.
Which IPL grounds favour spin bowling?
The first problem for the theory is that it has only one ground to work with: Eden Gardens is the one IPL ground where spin’s advantage clearly stands out. From 2022 to 2026, spin saved 0.6 runs an over more against seam there than it did across the IPL, the strongest lean of any side’s home ground. Spin also took more wickets against seam at Eden Gardens than across the league, and the ground has kept its lean longer than most, favouring spin over seam in each of the four seasons from 2023 to 2026.
Two grounds lean just as firmly the other way. At Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium and at Hyderabad, seamers did better by 0.5 runs an over each, which makes them the clearest seamers’ grounds in the league. Delhi’s Arun Jaitley Stadium comes closest to Eden Gardens for spin, but its lean is small enough to come from a handful of odd matches. The same goes for every ground in the middle, from Lucknow’s Ekana Stadium to the Wankhede, where a side building an attack to suit the pitch would be guessing.
Even at Eden Gardens, the turn is there for both sides. Sides bowled 43% of their overs with spin there from 2022 to 2026, against 32% at Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, and the visitors were part of that. They bowled 38% of their balls with spin at Eden Gardens, against 34% at other grounds, so Kolkata’s opponents leaned on spin there too and had the same conditions to work with.
Is Chepauk still a spinner’s ground?
Chepauk shows the second problem: a ground’s lean does not last. From 2008 to 2021 Chennai’s ground was the best in the IPL for spin against seam, with spin saving 0.3 runs an over more there than across the IPL and taking more wickets as well. That record is where its reputation as a spinner’s ground comes from.
Since 2022 the ground has leaned slightly to seam, by 0.2 runs an over. It has become a cheap place to bowl for seamers and spinners alike, with both conceding fewer runs than par, so bowling of every kind got easier there while spin’s old advantage went. Visiting sides still bowled more spin at Chepauk than at other grounds from 2022 to 2026, 39% of their balls against 35%.
Chepauk’s slide fits a pattern across the league, where one season’s spin edge at a ground barely predicted the next season’s, and the grounds that favoured spin from 2008 to 2021 were no more likely to favour it from 2022 onwards. A ground’s lean behaves more like the weather than the climate. Eden Gardens’ four straight seasons are the exception, and even that run is too short for a side to build a whole attack around it.
Do home sides gain from a spin-friendly ground?
The third problem is that the home side gets no more from its pitch than the visitors do. From 2023 to 2026, once home matches were back, home spinners did no better at their own grounds than visiting spinners did there, and if anything the visitors’ spinners did better, by about 0.2 runs an over. That covers four full seasons of home and away cricket, so it is no quirk of a single summer.
Local knowledge did nothing for the batters or seamers either: home batters played spin about 0.2 runs an over worse at their own grounds than visiting batters did from 2023 to 2026, and home seamers did no better than visiting seamers in either period. The familiar idea that a side knows its own conditions best has left no trace in how home players perform.
Nor did the spin grounds bring home wins, since sides at the grounds that favour spin most did not win more at home from 2023 to 2026. Kolkata won 12 of their 26 decided home games at Eden Gardens, and Delhi won 8 of their 23. Paradoxically, the best home record belonged to Gujarat, who won 17 of their 30 decided home games at the ground that favours seam most.
Do IPL sides buy players to suit their home ground?
Sides do not buy for their grounds, which is just as well given how little the grounds give back. From 2022 to 2026, sides whose home grounds favoured spin did not spend more of the purse on spinners. They did not buy batters who play spin better, judged on each batter’s IPL record against spin away from that ground before each auction, and they did not buy better seamers to go with their spinners.
Chennai spent more on spin than any other side, 27% of the purse on average, a budget that suits the Chepauk of old far better than the pitches it has had since 2022. Their spinners now are Noor Ahmad and Akeal Hosein. Noor costs ₹10 crore against a fair price of about ₹3.9 crore in our post on fees, so Chennai are paying top rates for spin at a ground that no longer rewards it over seam.
Gujarat spent the second-largest share, 26% of the purse, building around Rashid Khan at the ground that favours seam most. Mumbai went the other way, spending 8% on spin and building the IPL’s best seam attack by our ratings around Jasprit Bumrah, at a Wankhede that leans slightly to spin. Lucknow added the left-arm wrist-spinner Kuldeep Yadav by trading Rishabh Pant to Delhi Capitals in June 2026, and their Ekana Stadium sits about average for spin against seam. Across the league, what a side spends on spin has little to do with where it plays.
What does an IPL squad need beyond spin for its home pitch?
Kolkata show both the appeal and the limit of an attack built for its ground. Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarthy are the best spin pair in the IPL by our ratings, well clear of every other side’s, and they play at the ground that favours spin most. Both cost ₹12 crore in 2026 squads, well under their fair prices in our post on fees, Narine by about ₹15 crore.
The limit is that the matches which settle a season are mostly played somewhere else. Nine of the 20 IPL playoff matches from 2022 to 2026 were at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, the ground that favours seam most. By our ratings Kolkata’s seam bowling is among the weakest of the ten sides, with Matheesha Pathirana injured, so the attack that suits Eden Gardens has little else to turn to on a seamer’s pitch.
Opponents give a side a second reason to carry both kinds of bowling. IPL batting orders vary more against spin than against seam, and a batter’s record against spin carries over from one season to the next: Sunrisers Hyderabad’s leading batters score 0.7 runs an over above par against it, while Rajasthan Royals’ fall below par. So a squad with good spinners and good seamers can pick the attack each opponent handles worst, wherever the match is played. The batting half of that plan is where an auction edge may lie. A batter who scores about half a run an over more against spin than his peers costs only about 10% more than an average batter with the same rating, which means sides can buy a skill that counts against every opponent’s cheap spinners for little more than the going rate.
Should IPL sides buy spin for their ground on retention day?
Spin is worth buying on retention day because it is cheap, and a spin-friendly home pitch adds very little to that case. A spinner rated as highly as a seamer does the same job for about half the fee, and the saving is the same at Eden Gardens as at Ahmedabad, in a league game at home or a final on another side’s ground. What a turning home pitch adds on top fades from one season to the next, and every visiting side gets the same turn.
Our ratings place Sunrisers’ spin bowling last of the ten sides, with the part-timers Liam Livingstone and Abhishek Sharma as their best spinners, so a frontline spinner bought at the December auction would shore up their weakest suit at the cheap end of the market, seam-friendly ground or not. Chennai already spend more on spin than anyone at a Chepauk that now leans to seam, so their saving lies in what they pay, starting with Noor’s fee, rather than in more spinners. Mumbai have the best seam attack in the IPL by our ratings and have barely bought spin at all, so they could add a frontline spinner at the auction, where spinners come cheap.
Kolkata face the easiest call of all. Eden Gardens happens to suit Narine and Varun, but grounds shift and visitors share the turn, and the money the pair save belongs in the seam bowling around them. So on 15 November the case for keeping them rests on what they cost, and owes very little to where they will be playing.