Royal Challengers Bengaluru's long road to the title

There is a very specific kind of heartbreak that only follows a team you can't dismiss as hopeless, and for the better part of two decades that was Royal Challengers Bengaluru's whole personality. Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers were both there from the very first season in 2008, before either of them had really become who they'd become, and they stayed for the long haul, one of the longest player-franchise relationships the IPL has ever had. A team built around two all-time greats should, on paper, have been unbeatable. Instead it became the league's most talked-about nearly-team, brilliant most Aprils, gone by the semi-final, year after year after year.

The early seasons set the tone without ever really threatening it. 2008 was rough, just 8 points from 14 games, a squad leaning on Jacques Kallis and Anil Kumble that hadn't found its shape yet. 2009 was better, Kevin Pietersen signed for 7.5 crore and 18 points to show for it, and by 2011 RCB were genuinely good, 20 points from 16 games, their best return yet. None of it ended in a trophy, and that became the pattern rather than the exception. A talented, expensively assembled squad would put together a strong season, everyone would start talking about their year, and then it wouldn't be.

2012 and 2013 kept the pattern going without changing its shape. Vinay Kumar was the headline buy in 2012 at 5.34 crore, and RCB won 8 of 15 for 16 points, solidly competitive, nothing more. 2013 was a touch better, 8 wins from 16 for 18 points, with Jaydev Unadkat, R.P. Singh and Moises Henriques the fresh faces brought in that auction. Two more seasons filed under the same heading: good enough to matter, not good enough to matter in May.

The auction room told the same story from a different angle. In 2014 RCB paid 14 crore for Yuvraj Singh, the single biggest buy in the dataset at that point, and finished with just 10 points. Big names kept arriving through the mid-2010s, Dinesh Karthik for 10.5 crore in 2015, Shane Watson for 9.5 crore in 2016, both genuinely strong seasons on 18 points, both ending the same disappointing way. 2017 was the low point of the whole stretch, just 6 points from 13 games, in the same year they'd paid a startling 12 crore for Tymal Mills. Spending big and finishing short became such a recognisable shape for this franchise that it stopped being a surprise.

2018 to 2020 didn't offer much relief either. Chris Woakes arrived for 7.4 crore in 2018 alongside Yuzvendra Chahal at 6 crore, and the season brought just 12 points from 14 games, one of the weaker returns of the decade. 2019 was similar, 11 points from 14, Shivam Dube and Shimron Hetmyer the notable buys. 2020 improved slightly to 13 points, with Chris Morris signed for a full 10 crore, the kind of fee that raises expectations a middling points tally doesn't meet.

It didn't really let up through the back half of the 2010s and into the 2020s either. 2021 brought two of the most expensive buys in the team's real auction history in the same window, Kyle Jamieson for 15 crore and Glenn Maxwell for 14.25 crore, and RCB finished on 18 points, good, not good enough. 2022 added Harshal Patel and Wanindu Hasaranga at 10.75 crore each and matched that same 18-point return. 2023 brought Will Jacks in for a comparatively modest 3.2 crore and produced 14 points from 14 games, respectable, forgettable. By this point RCB weren't just unlucky, they were reliably, almost impressively unlucky, good enough nearly every single year to make the near miss actually sting.

Then, finally, it broke the other way. 2025 was the best season the franchise had ever put together, 22 points from 15 games, and for the first time in RCB's history it ended with the trophy rather than the post-mortem. What made it feel less like a one-off and more like an actual shift is what happened next: 2026 was, statistically, the same season all over again, 22 points, 11 wins, and a second final won, this time a five-wicket chase down of Gujarat Titans with Kohli finishing 75 not out.

The recruitment around those two title years reads differently to the RCB of the 2010s too. 2025's auction spent big and spread it around rather than betting everything on one marquee name, Josh Hazlewood at 12.5 crore, Philip Salt at 11.5 crore, Jitesh Sharma at 11 crore, three separate ten-crore buys in one window, something the franchise had never done before at that scale. 2026, by contrast, was quiet: Venkatesh Iyer at 7 crore was the headline signing, everything else modest, which points to a squad that was mostly kept together rather than rebuilt. Winning once can look like a lucky auction. Winning again a year later on a squad that barely changed looks like something else.

None of the near misses get erased by two titles. If anything they're what make 2025 and 2026 worth telling as a story rather than a foregone conclusion, because for a long time the smart money on RCB was always the same bet: brilliant, then gone. For two years running now, they haven't been.