November 6, 2024 - The player auction for the 2025 Indian Premier League (IPL) will take place on November 24 and 25 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced yesterday. Earlier, the venue was supposed to be Riyadh but it was later switched to Jeddah.

This is the second consecutive year that the auction will be held abroad. The previous auction abroad was for IPL 2024 and was conducted in Dubai.

A total of 1,574 cricketers have registered for the auction, including 1,165 Indians and 409 overseas players. Each franchise can build a team of up to 25 players, and a total of 204 players will be bought during the auction. The list includes 320 capped players, 1224 uncapped players and 30 players from Associate Nations.

The registered players may be retained by their respective 2024-team with the team owner’s Right to Match (RTM) cards.

Cricketers will enter the auction with a base price and teams may start the bidding process from the base price or hike the offer price. Of the 1,165 stars, 23 Indian players have registered themselves in the highest bracket of Rs 2 crore. The IPL captains, who were let go off after the 2024 season - Rishabh Pant, KL Rahul, and Shreyas Iyer - have registered themselves in the Rs 2 crore category.

The other Indian players with a base price of Rs 2 crore are:

Ravichandran Ashwin, Mohammed Shami, Yuzvendra Chahal, Deepak Chahar, Shardul Thakur, Khaleel Ahmed, Venkatesh Iyer, Avesh Khan, Ishan Kishan, Mukesh Kumar, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, T Natarajan, Krunal Pandya, Harshal Patel, Arshdeep Singh, Washington Sundar, Umesh Yadav and Devdutt Padikkal.

Surprisingly, England's star all-rounder Ben Stokes is absent from the list of 1,574 players for the 2025  auction while Italian cricketer Thomas Draca became the first player from Italy to register for the IPL auction.