RCB Back-to-Back IPL Champions: How Virat Kohli Won the 2025 and 2026 Titles

RCB's Back-to-Back IPL Titles: Eighteen Years of Hurt, Then Two in a Row

For eighteen seasons, Royal Challengers Bengaluru were the most heartbreaking franchise in the Indian Premier League.

Three finals. Three losses. A fanbase that kept showing up anyway. A franchise built around a player who gave every IPL season he had to a club that could never quite get over the line.

Then, on June 3, 2025, at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Krunal Pandya bowled Shashank Singh with RCB defending 191 against Punjab Kings, and the curse was finally over. Six runs. Maiden title. Eighteen years.

Most franchises, having finally won, go into the next season with a hangover. The weight of expectation becomes a different kind of pressure.

RCB won it again on May 31, 2026.

Back-to-back IPL champions. Only the third franchise in IPL history to defend the title. And at the centre of both victories was the same man who had been at the centre of every RCB season since 2008 — Virat Kohli.

The 2025 Final: 18 Years Ended by Six Runs

RCB 190/9 beat Punjab Kings 184/7 by 6 runs Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad — June 3, 2025

Punjab Kings won the toss and put RCB in. It was the right call on paper — the Ahmedabad pitch was expected to dry up and slow down as the match progressed, and bowling first gave Punjab information the chasing side would not have.

RCB scored 190/9 in their innings, with Virat Kohli top-scoring with 43 runs from 35 balls. It was not Kohli at his most explosive — he began sluggishly and hit just one boundary in the first nine overs — but it was Kohli doing what RCB needed: occupying the crease, holding the innings together, and providing a platform for the batters around him.

Arshdeep Singh closed out brilliantly, removing Shepherd, Krunal Pandya and Bhuvneshwar Kumar in the final over to restrict RCB to 190/9. It was a total that felt slightly short on a flat surface. Plenty of people said so at the time.

They were wrong.

Krunal Pandya finished with figures of 2/17 with the ball and derailed the PBKS chase. Bhuvneshwar Kumar added 2/38. Punjab, chasing 191, kept needing more from every partnership than they were getting. Shashank Singh remained not out on 61 runs — a remarkable innings that nearly hauled them over the line — but RCB held on by six runs.

This win ended an 18-year wait for the franchise, which had previously finished as runners-up in 2009, 2011, and 2016.

The scenes that followed — Kohli on his knees on the outfield, Rajat Patidar lifting the trophy, the Red Army in the stands — were the most emotionally charged images Indian cricket had produced in years.

"It's been 18 long years. I've given this team my youth, my prime, my experience. Every single season, I've walked out with a heart full of hope and a mind obsessed with victory. To finally have this moment... it's beyond belief," Kohli said.

The 2026 Final: Kohli's Fastest Fifty, RCB's Second Title

Gujarat Titans 155/8 lost to RCB 161/5 by 5 wickets Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad — May 31, 2026

The same venue. The same franchise. A completely different kind of match — and a completely different kind of Virat Kohli.

RCB's seam bowlers made superb use of a slightly sticky surface after Rajat Patidar won the toss, restricting Gujarat Titans to 155 for 8 — the exact same score RCB managed in the league match against the same team in the same ground on the same pitch.

Gujarat lost both their openers inside the powerplay. Captain Shubman Gill was caught by Rajat Patidar off Josh Hazlewood's bowling in the third over while Bhuvneshwar Kumar accounted for Sai Sudharsan in the next. The GT top order, which had been the most prolific batting partnership in IPL 2026, was dismantled inside the powerplay.

Washington Sundar finished unbeaten on 50 to drag Gujarat to 155, but Rasikh Salam took 3/27, Bhuvneshwar Kumar 2/29, and Josh Hazlewood 2/37 as RCB's attack justified their billing as the best bowling unit in the tournament.

Then Kohli walked out to bat.

RCB openers Virat Kohli and Venkatesh Iyer got the defending champions off to a brisk start as the duo went after Kagiso Rabada and took the Protea pacer for 37 runs in his first two overs. Venkatesh Iyer fell for 32 off 16 balls, but Kohli kept accelerating.

What followed was one of the great IPL final performances.

Kohli lashed out at Rabada with a ferocity that was only foretold by a season in which he matched some of the younger, more cutting-edge T20 batters. Of the six batters to have scored 600 or more this IPL, only Sooryavanshi and Ishan Kishan had done so quicker than his 675 at 165.84.

The Indian ace brought about his fifty in 25 balls — his fastest half-century ever in IPL. Twenty-five balls. In a final. At 37 years old.

Rashid Khan handed GT a lifeline as he dealt RCB a double blow in the ninth over, sending back Rajat Patidar and Krunal Pandya within a span of four balls to reduce RCB to 91/4. Kohli, however, used his experience well to anchor the chase.

With wickets falling around him and the asking rate creeping back up, he did not panic. He found Tim David. They put on 41 together. When David went, Kohli still had enough overs in hand.

Kohli remained unbeaten on 75 off 42 balls and wrapped up the chase with a six over long-on on the final ball of the 18th over.

Two overs to spare. Back-to-back titles. Player of the Match — by a distance.

The Kohli Thread Running Through Both Titles

The numbers across the two seasons tell one story. The context tells another.

In 2025, Kohli scored 43 in the final — measured, controlled, an anchor innings that gave RCB the platform for 190. His last fifty in an IPL playoff had come back in 2016 in the final — nine years without a half-century in knockout cricket before 2026 changed everything.

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n 2026, he scored 75 not out in the final — his fastest IPL fifty, his highest playoff score, Player of the Match, title sealed with a six. He capped his 19th season with an unbeaten 75 in the IPL 2026 Final, winning Player of the Match as RCB became back-to-back champions.

Kohli has scored 9,336 runs in 284 IPL matches across all 19 seasons — the most by any batter in IPL history, over 1,800 ahead of Rohit Sharma. He has 9 centuries, a record, and 68 fifties.

He is the only player in IPL history to represent a single franchise for the tournament's entire history. Every auction. Every season. One team.

That loyalty, which for 17 years existed without a title to show for it, now has two trophies attached to it. Back-to-back. In consecutive seasons. At an age when most T20 players have already wound down.

What Back-to-Back Means

Only three teams in IPL history have successfully defended the title. The weight of that fact matters. Defending an IPL title is genuinely difficult — squads change at auction, opponents study your patterns, and the psychological burden of arriving as champions is different from arriving as hunters.

RCB won it in 2025 after 18 years of trying. They won it again in 2026 with a performance in the final that was, if anything, more convincing.

The bowling was better. The batting was more complete. And Kohli, in the final, showed the cricket world something nobody had quite seen before — a 37-year-old batter who has been in the IPL since its first season, playing the most explosive innings of his playoff career, in the most important game of the year.

The 2025 title was the one that broke the curse and released eighteen years of emotion.

The 2026 title confirmed that RCB are, for now, the best franchise in the IPL.

The Squad That Won It Back-to-Back

Captain: Rajat Patidar Coach: Andy Flower Home Ground: M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru

Batters

Virat Kohli | India | Opening Batter

Rajat Patidar (c) | India | Top-Order Batter

Devdutt Padikkal | India | Top-Order Batter

Phil Salt | England | Opening Batter / WK

Venkatesh Iyer | India | Opening Batter

Jacob Bethell | England | Middle-Order Batter

Tim David | Singapore | Middle-Order Batter

Jordan Cox | England | WK-Batter

Satvik Deswal | India | WK-Batter

Vihaan Malhotra | India | Batter

All-Rounders

Krunal Pandya | India | Left-Arm Spin All-Rounder

Romario Shepherd | West Indies | Fast-Bowling All-Rounder

Swapnil Singh | India | Left-Arm Spin All-Rounder

Bowlers

Josh Hazlewood | Australia | Right-Arm Fast

Bhuvneshwar Kumar | India | Right-Arm Fast-Medium

Rasikh Salam Dar | India | Right-Arm Fast

Nuwan Thushara | Sri Lanka | Right-Arm Fast

Jacob Duffy | New Zealand | Right-Arm Fast

Yash Dayal | India | Left-Arm Fast

Suyash Sharma | India | Leg-Spin

Vicky Ostwal | India | Left-Arm Spin

Mangesh Yadav | India | Right-Arm Fast

Kanishk Chouhan | India | Right-Arm Fast

How the 2026 Squad Was Built

The IPL 2026 mini-auction on December 16, 2025 saw RCB add Venkatesh Iyer, Jacob Duffy, Satvik Deswal, Mangesh Yadav, Jordan Cox, Vicky Ostwal, Vihaan Malhotra and Kanishk Chouhan to their title-winning core.

RCB signed Venkatesh Iyer for ₹7 crore, Mangesh Yadav for ₹5.20 crore, and Jacob Duffy for ₹2 crore as their headline acquisitions. The strategy was clear — retain the core that won in 2025, add specific depth rather than overhaul.

It worked. The bowling attack — Hazlewood, Bhuvneshwar, Rasikh Salam, with Suyash Sharma as the spin option — was the best attack in the tournament. The batting, built around Kohli and Patidar at the top with Tim David and Romario Shepherd providing the finish, was exactly the unit Andy Flower had built over two seasons.

In their title-winning campaigns in 2025 and 2026, Kohli was their key batter, with over 650 runs each time. The squad around him evolved. The man himself did not change.