Three cricketers from Madhya Pradesh, a cricketing outlier for much of its existence, could produce the star turn in the 2025 Indian Premier League playoffs that begin on Thursday.

Rajat Patidar, the Royal Challengers Bengaluru captain, has a shot at landing the franchise's maiden title. Shashank Singh, the swashbuckling Punjab Kings lower-middle-order lynchpin, could feature prominently in his team's quest for its first piece of silverware. Left-arm seamer Arshad Khan, in his maiden IPL season with the Gujarat Titans, could provide the impetus for the team's second trophy pursuit.

Once irrelevant on India's cricketing map, Madhya Pradesh has transformed into a thriving nursery of IPL talents. Eleven cricketers from the state have appeared in this edition, placing them joint-fifth with Uttar Pradesh in terms of supplying players. The four states above them - Karnataka (16), Mumbai and Delhi (both 14) and Punjab (12) - have been traditional cradles of the game for decades, consistently churning out stars for Team India.

Survey metrics

In a survey of the 249 cricketers who feature across the 10 teams in IPL 2025 - 163 of those Indians - The Indian Express takes a look at the geographical distribution of the domestic sides the homegrown players play for. For the purpose of the survey, players who were drafted in as replacements during the course of the season have also been considered. And where players have featured for more than one domestic team, the side they made their debut for first was counted.

While there is no surprise in seeing Karnataka, Mumbai (plus Maharashtra) and Delhi dominate the list, Punjab's recent rise as a T20 powerhouse is also evident, along with Madhya Pradesh's rise. And, with head coach Ricky Ponting using extensive video scouting, Punjab Kings has also invested heavily in uncapped domestic talent, using overseas players tactically to complement the Indians, and not vice versa. Another evident pattern was the variety of players being scouted from domestic leagues, even without first-class or senior white-ball experience.

 Karnataka (16), Mumbai and Delhi (both 14) and Punjab (12) - have been traditional cradles of the game for decades, consistently churning out stars for Team India. Madhya Pradesh follows suit at 11 along with Uttar Pradesh. Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan round the teams that have at least 10 representatives in the league.

Why focus on MP

The size of Madhya Pradesh, the second-largest state in the country in terms of area after Chhattisgarh was carved out of it, has not corresponded in its output of quality cricketers. In the post-independence era after the merger of scattered princely states at the heart of India, only four from the state have featured in Tests; five have played limited-overs international cricket.

At the heart of their emergence was systematic planning and a visionary administrator in Sanjay Jagdale, a former first-class player and ex-secretary of the Indian cricket board.

"At the start of the century, we chalked out a blueprint to make the state a powerhouse in India. We had the history, culture, talent and resources. All we wanted was a place where we could mix all these and produce quality cricketers. So we set up an academy in Indore, where we handpicked the best young cricketers from the state, and provided them with high-class coaching," he tells The Indian Express.

If the institute nurtures them, the rigorous year-long grind in local tournaments toughen them. More academies have sprung across the state. The Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association itself has sub-academies in Gwalior, Sagar, Bhopal, Hoshangabad, Rewa and Jabalpur. Private ones too have mushroomed.
Unifying the scattered talent is the Madhya Pradesh Cricket League, started in 2024, which, from this year, has a franchise from the Chambal region as well as a three-team league for women too.

"It has been a great platform to give opportunities and exposure to young cricketers. It's highly competitive and if you do well, IPL scouts will notice. More cricketers could emerge from the state," says former cricketer Ishwar Pandey, who coaches at the Faith Club in Bhopal.

Domestic T20 leagues

"I guarantee he's going to make a serious mark on this IPL." This was former Australian captain and new Punjab Kings head coach Ricky Ponting's assertion at the The Indian Express' Idea Exchange at the start of the season.

Ponting wasn't giddy about a seasoned Indian player or a star from overseas. He was referring to Priyansh Arya, a left-handed batter from Delhi who had played a handful of List A and domestic T20 matches before being picked up by the franchise at the auction.

"We had many spots to fill, building from the ground up with the best experienced Indian players," Ponting explained. "I watched many videos of young players. What I look for is ball-striking talent, like Priyansh Arya. He's an out-and-out clean ball striker. Our scouts did a terrific job finding these guys and sending videos to me."

One of those videos is likely to have been Arya smashing six sixes in an over for South Delhi Superstarz in the Delhi Premier League (DPL). This has been one of the trends of the IPL season, as players like Arya, Digvesh Rathi and Aniket Verma have made their mark on the league, after exploits in domestic T20 leagues.

In IPL 2025, as many as 29 Indian cricketers have been picked up for the first time. Nine of them didn't make their first-class or List A debuts before being picked up by an IPL franchise. Manvanth Kumar came through the Maharaja T20 Trophy in Karnataka, the MP T20 league provided Madhav Tiwari, Shivam Shukla and Aniket Verma. In Tiwari (Delhi Capitals), Vignesh Puthur (Mumbai Indians) and Abhinandan Singh (Royal Challengers Bengaluru), three players were picked in the auction without having made their debuts in any of the three premier domestic tournaments.

A majority of the 29 have had some level of success in T20 leagues around the country. Arya and Rathi were teammates in the DPL, with the latter emerging as one of the few positives for Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) in an otherwise subpar season. Other talents to have come up through the DPL include Vansh Bedi (Chennai Super Kings) and Prince Yadav (LSG). Ashwani Kumar is another instance of MI's scouts unearthing a talent, as he was noticed for his death bowling in the Sher-e-Punjab T20.
Vipraj Nigam and Zeeshan Ansari, leg-spinners who have impressed for DC and Sunrisers Hyderabad respectively, came through the UP T20 league, with the latter a unique story as he hadn't managed to make a breakthrough despite being part of the same under-19 batch as Rishabh Pant and Ishan Kishan.

"Arya was given a platform, and so was Rathi. No one had heard of Puthur when he took three wickets against CSK on IPL debut," former India cricketer Abhinav Mukund wrote for ESPNCricinfo. "If it weren't for these leagues, it's likely these players would not have made it to the IPL. Add to them cricketers who were lost in the domestic structure, like Karun Nair and Zeeshan Ansari, who got a new lease of life thanks to these tournaments," Mukund, who has been part of the Tamil Nadu Premier League in the early stages (another league that has contributed players to IPL in numbers), said.

But he stressed on the need to ensure solid finances of these leagues so that they don't end up collapsing in a heap.

Home players

 Only 7 of the 10 teams have home players in IPL 2025.

Fans of European football clubs take a lot of pride in players coming through the clubs' academies and representing their home teams. A La Masia graduate playing for Barcelona. Hale End products shining for Arsenal. But for a league like IPL that is run on mega auctions every three years, and the talent pool being open to all, it is not always easy to have a strong home representation. Only 7 out of the 10 teams have players from the state they represent, with PBKS, CSK, MI and RCB topping this list. PBKS have built a good core of local talent, led by Arshdeep Singh. MI have always had a strong local connection in terms of star power (given they had Sachin Tendulkar at the start and Rohit Sharma ever since).