Livingstone cost SRH ₹13 crore for two games, and CSK have traded for him at ₹6 crore

Sunrisers Hyderabad paid ₹13 crore for Liam Livingstone at the IPL 2026 auction and picked him twice. He made 1 and 14. On Thursday he became a Chennai Super Kings player, at less than half that fee, in a four-player trade that sends Khaleel Ahmed and Nathan Ellis the other way.

The IPL announced the deal on 5 November. Livingstone moves to CSK on a reduced fee of ₹6 crore, and the Australian allrounder Jack Edwards goes with him on his existing ₹3 crore. Khaleel joins SRH at ₹4.8 crore and Ellis at ₹2 crore, both on their current fees.

A season on the bench

Livingstone was SRH’s most expensive buy at the last auction, and he barely featured. He was left out of most of their games, and in June he said on a podcast that he had asked head coach Daniel Vettori why. His account was that the owners were keen on Salil Arora, the ₹1.5 crore youngster who played 14 matches and made 156 runs. He stopped short of saying the owners picked the team, only that they had a say in it.

Whatever went wrong in Hyderabad, the rest of his T20 record is long. He has more than 8,000 runs and over 150 wickets in the format, the wickets from a mix of off-spin and leg-spin. At ₹6 crore, CSK are taking a cheap punt on a middle-order hitter who can bowl a few overs, and it is hard to see much downside.

Edwards finally gets an IPL chance

Edwards is the other half of CSK’s gain, and the more interesting one. CSK bid for him at the 2026 auction and lost out to SRH, who then lost him for the whole season to a foot injury. He was the only uncapped overseas player bought at that auction. He has since made his ODI and T20I debuts for Australia and took five wickets in his second ODI, against South Africa in Johannesburg.

What SRH get

Khaleel is going back to the franchise he played for from 2018 to 2021. He took 15 wickets in 14 matches for CSK in IPL 2025, then played five games in 2026 before a right quadriceps injury ended his season. SRH already traded for T Natarajan from Delhi Capitals in October, so they now have two left-arm seamers who know the franchise well.

Ellis leaves CSK having played one game for them in two seasons; he missed the last one through injury. He played for Sunrisers Leeds, SRH’s sister side in the Hundred, earlier this year.

Without Khaleel, the left-arm new-ball work at CSK is likely to fall to Mukesh Choudhary and Gurjapneet Singh. Any other trades have to be done soon. Teams must hand in their retention lists by 17 November, two days later than first planned, and the mini-auction is in Goa on 16 December.

Follow every IPL 2027 trade and retention