The IPL auction is pencilled in for 16 December in Goa, the day India play Sri Lanka in Bengaluru
A BCCI logistics message has told the ten franchises to plan for ITC Grand Goa, with a briefing the day before. The formal email confirming it has not gone out yet.
Oct 19, 2026
The IPL’s ten franchises now know where to book their rooms. A WhatsApp message from the BCCI’s logistics team, first reported by Cricbuzz on Saturday, says the player auction will be held on 16 December at ITC Grand Goa, with the auction briefing the day before. Several franchises confirmed they had received it, and the message asked each of them how large a delegation they would be sending.
What has not arrived yet is the formal email to owners and chief executives that normally locks a date in. The message was meant to get travel bookings moving, so until the board’s written notice lands, 16 December is pencilled in rather than fixed.
Goa was settled in September
The city is no surprise. BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia told ANI on 23 September that “we are going to host it in Goa in the month of December,” which ends a run of three auctions abroad: Dubai in December 2023, Jeddah in November 2024 and Abu Dhabi in December 2025. The last one held in India was the mini-auction in Kochi in December 2022.
Goa has done this once before, a long time ago. It hosted the 2009 auction, the one where Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen both went for $1.55 million.
The same day as Bengaluru
16 December is also the second ODI between India and Sri Lanka, a day-night game in Bengaluru due to start at 2pm IST. The three-match series opens in Delhi on 13 December and ends in Ahmedabad on 19 December, with three T20Is in Rajkot, Cuttack and Pune to follow.
The clash matters more for the players than for the bidding. Owners, coaches and analysts do the buying, and none of them need to be in Bengaluru. But any franchise captain who is also in India’s ODI side would be in a dressing room in Bengaluru while his franchise spends its purse in Goa. It is not clear whether either event will be moved.
A small auction to close the cycle
This one is a mini-auction, the last of the 2023-27 cycle, so most teams will be filling a handful of gaps rather than starting again. Before then, every team has to submit its retained and released lists, and the money freed by each release goes back into the purse it takes to Goa.
Some of the biggest moves for 2027 have already been made away from the auction table. In June, Lucknow Super Giants traded Rishabh Pant back to Delhi Capitals at ₹15 crore, well short of the ₹27 crore they paid for him in Jeddah, and Kuldeep Yadav went the other way at his existing ₹13.5 crore.