IPL 2025: Rating Teams based on their final squads

7. Kolkata Knight Riders - 6.5/10

Kolkata Knight Riders retained Rinku Singh, Sunil Narine, Varun Chakravarthy, Andre Russell, Harshit Rana and Ramandeep Singh ahead of the IPL 2025 mega-auction. Half of their job was done before the auction, as all these players were proven match-winners and have done a brilliant job for the franchise. The goal was for them to get back as many players as they could from their title-winning campaign in 2024 but ultimately, they spent nearly half their budget on one single player.

KKR broke the bank as they acquired Venkatesh Iyer for a whopping INR 23.75 crore. He proved to be the third-costliest player in the mega-auction. To have him, the franchise had to let go of some of their key performers from the last season. In the end, they bid hard for Allah Ghazanfar but lost the battle to Mumbai. As they bid extremely heavily for Venkatesh, they missed out on some key players.

They have signed experienced players in Ajinkya Rahane and Manish Pandey but their credibility in modern-day T20 cricket is still a debate. Getting Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Manish Pandey, Anukul Roy and Vaibhav Arora back and signing Quinton de Kock, Anrich Nortje and Spencer Johnson was smart but they lack a solid Indian batter - someone like Shreyas Iyer and Nitish Rana. Other than that, the playing XI looks more or less sorted but there are doubts on backups.

Check full squad below: