It's been two days since the IPL 2026 retention list was announced by all the franchises. Amongst them, Ravindra Jadeja's mega trade from Chennai Super Kings to Rajasthan Royals hogged the headlines. Of course, CSK did get Sanju Samson in return while they also gave Sam Curran along with Jadeja. Latest reports suggest that Jadeja could be the next RR captain and this was allegedly part of the deal.
Initially, it was expected to be a simple deal. Jadeja and Samson were both in the Rs 18 crore retention bracket, which meant that a direct swap was possible. However, the Royals wanted one more player in this deal, for which they would pay CSK the previous sold amount of the extra player. All seemed good but there was a glitch here.
Royals were short of funds to get the Curran deal going, as they needed to pay Rs 2.40 crore to secure the English all-rounder. Therefore, RR negotiated with CSK to get Jadeja at Rs 14 crore, so that they could get an extra Rs 4 crore in the purse. Generally, pay cuts aren't common in big IPL deals but Jadeja agreed for this, though it came at a cost. If he had insisted on Rs 18 crore, RR would have had to take Rs 4 crore from their mini-auction purse to pay him. All this were conditions included in Rule no.59.1 of IPL's guidelines.
The 36-year-old all-rounder was reportedly given the guarantee of IPL captaincy to be part of this deal. While Riyan Parag led RR in IPL 2025 due to Samson's injury, the Assam batter doesn't boast of captaincy experience. The same holds true for Dhruv Jurel and Yashasvi Jaiswal too. Currently, RR don't have a readymade captain in the squad and it means that Jadeja could be the ideal stop-gap solution.
While there isn't any official confirmation from the RR side yet, it does seem like Jadeja would be the frontrunner for captaincy, unless the Royals manage to get a player with captaincy credentials from the mini-auction. A lot of permutations and combinations are still to be done before the final call will be made.