Kolkata Knight Riders: Andre Russell, Shreyas Iyer retained; team drops 12 players. Check full list here

Major excitement is seen among the fans as the 10 teams of IPL are announcing the names of players they are retaining or releasing to expand their purses for the auction in December.

The latest team to announce the names of players it is releasing is Kolkata Knight Riders, which has been one of the most successful teams in IPL history.

The auction for IPL 2024 will be conducted on December 19 in Dubai. This is the first time in history that an IPL auction will be held abroad.


Most of the teams are looking forward to releasing players to expand their purses for auction. The budget for each team would be Rs 100 crore, up from Rs 95 crore the year before.

List of players released:

• Shardul Thakur
• Shakib Al Hasan
• Lockie Ferguson
• Umesh Yadav
• Litton Das
• Tim Southee
• Johnson Charles
• David Wiese
• Arya Desai
• N Jagadeesan
• Mandeep Singh
• Kulwant Khejroliya

List of players retained:

• Shreyas Iyer
• Varun Chakravarthy
• Andre Russell
• Rinku Singh
• Nitish Rana
• Rahmanullah Gurbaz
• Sunil Narine
• Jason Roy
• Suyash Sharma
• Venkatesh Iyer
• Harshit Rana
• Vaibhav Arora
• Anukul Roy

A major return for KKR has been former Indian cricketer Gautam Gambhir. He is back in the team as mentor of the franchise and will join hands with head coach Chandrakant Pandit.

Earlier, Gambhir was associated with the Kolkata-based franchise from 2011 to 2017, which is considered the golden period of KKR. During this period, the team won the Indian Premier League (IPL) twice, qualified for the playoffs five times, and reached the finals of the Champions League T20 in 2014.

Gambhir also added that he is not only coming back to the franchise but to the 'City of Joy'.