IPL 2025: Real reason behind Rishabh Pant’s exit from Delhi Capital revealed

Known for his attacking batting, subtle cricketing acumen and, shrewd leadership skills tailor-made for the shortest version of the game, aggressive wicketkeeper-batsman Rishabh Pant is definitely a hot property for any franchise in the cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL).

However, Delhi Capitals were not able to retain Pant and he became the costliest player in IPL history as the left-hander was sold to Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) in the recent mega auction for a whooping price of Rs 27 crore.

Revealing the reason behind not retaining Pant in the team for IPL 2025, Delhi Capitals co-owner Parth Jindal recently said that the franchise did everything possible to retain the southpaw ahead of the IPL mega auction. However, the star wicketkeeper-batter was on ‘different wavelengths’ on how to operate the team, leading to his departure.

“It was just a different philosophy of how he wanted the franchise to operate and how us (the owners) wanted the franchise to operate. That is what caused it (Pant’s departure). There is nothing to do with money,” said Jindal.

“Money has never been an issue for Rishabh. And money has never been an issue for us. I guess the three of us (Kiran Grandhi, Jindal and Pant) were on different wavelengths. He (Pant) took a call at the end of it. We tried everything, but he decided eventually that it was time to move on,” he added.

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Jindal further said that there were certain expectations that Pant had and there were certain expectations that the owners had on how to run the franchise.

“We gave Pant some feedback regarding leadership. We told him ways in which he could improve on that, but we were quite clear that we know his ambitions, we know where he wants to go. He has made it amply clear that his dream and desire is to captain India and that starts with captaining an IPL team,” said Jindal.

“DC management realised that buying back Pant from the auction was an impossible task. The minute we didn’t retain him, I knew he was gone. We did do the right-to-match for him at Rs 20.25 crore, but again, the budget went extremely high. We were okay to stretch up to Rs 22-23 crore,” he added.