Delhi Capitals at the WPL 2027 auction: four finals, no trophy, and thin cover behind the stumps

Delhi Capitals have played in every WPL final there has been, and have lost every one of them. Four seasons, four finals, no trophy. They arrive at the 2027 auction on 28 October with a settled core, five places to fill, only one of them overseas, and ₹1.10 crore to do it with.

This piece looks at that record, at who Delhi kept and let go, and at the players CricOptics's forecast thinks they will go after. The first three sections are built from match results and the league's published lists. The last is a simulation and is marked as one.

A short history: the nearly club

Delhi were one of the five franchises sold in the league's 2023 rights auction, owned by the JSW and GMR groups that also run the IPL side. At the first player auction they paid ₹2.2 crore for Jemimah Rodrigues, the top buy of their room, and had Meg Lanning and Shafali Verma at the top of the order. Shafali has scored 1,124 WPL runs for the club and Lanning 952, with Jemimah on 771. In the bowling, Marizanne Kapp leads with 38 wickets, ahead of Jess Jonassen on 33 and Shikha Pandey on 30.

The league tables are as good as anyone's. Delhi won six of their eight games in 2023 and finished top. They won six of eight again in 2024 and topped the table again. In 2025 they were level on five wins with Mumbai and still finished first. In 2026 the form dipped to four wins and four defeats, third place, but they won the eliminator against Gujarat by seven wickets and reached the final again.

The finals are the problem. They lost to Mumbai by seven wickets in 2023, to Royal Challengers Bangalore by eight wickets in 2024, to Mumbai by eight runs in 2025 and to Royal Challengers Bengaluru by six wickets in 2026. Three were lost by six wickets or more, and the fourth by eight runs.

Who they retained

Delhi hold 13 players for ₹13.9 crore, the second-highest bill of the five clubs, with ₹1.10 crore left. Five of the 13 are overseas.

At the top sit four players on ₹2.2 crore each: Annabel Sutherland, Marizanne Kapp, Shafali Verma and Jemimah Rodrigues. Together they are ₹8.8 crore, 63 per cent of the club's retention spend. Below them is the deepest middle of any club, built at the 2026 auction: Chinelle Henry and Shree Charani at ₹1.3 crore each and Laura Wolvaardt at ₹1.1 crore.

The rest are squad players on small contracts: Niki Prasad at ₹50 lakh, Minnu Mani at ₹40 lakh, Nandni Sharma at ₹20 lakh and Deeya Yadav, Lucy Hamilton and Mamatha Madiwala, an uncapped wicketkeeper, at ₹10 lakh each. Retention prices in this league are the player's 2026 contract carried forward, so none of these figures was renegotiated.

The role mix is what matters for the auction. Delhi have three all-rounders (Sutherland, Kapp and Henry), three batters (Shafali, Jemimah and Wolvaardt), three bowlers (Charani, Mani and Hamilton) and one wicketkeeper, the uncapped Madiwala. Cover behind the stumps is thin.

Who they released

Six players were let go. The two with the most history are Taniyaa Bhatia, the wicketkeeper, on ₹30 lakh in 2026, and Sneh Rana, the all-rounder, on ₹50 lakh. Both are back in the pool. So are Pragati Singh and E Srujana. Lizelle Lee, who was also on ₹30 lakh, and the Australian spinner Alana King, whose 2026 price we do not have, were the overseas exits; neither appears in the pool list we hold.

Releasing Bhatia leaves the uncapped Madiwala as the only wicketkeeper on the books, so keeping cover is a gap, though not an empty one.

Who they may target

Delhi's maths is tight. They have five places and ₹1.10 crore, and after keeping ₹10 lakh back for each of the other four empty spots they can spend at most about ₹70 lakh on a single player. Only one of the five places can go to an overseas player.

CricOptics replays the whole auction 400 times, using each club's purse, open places and what it needs by role. Delhi's most frequent interest is a bowler. Devika Vaidya, an Indian bowler with a ₹30 lakh base, is the single player Delhi bid for most often, in about four runs in ten, and the model sells her in nearly eight runs in ten, usually for around ₹35 lakh.

Beyond her, the keepers Nuzhat Parween and Sushma Verma, both on a ₹30 lakh base, come up in the simulation but not often: Delhi bid for Parween in about one run in five. For the overseas place it picks out Samantha Bates, a bowler on a ₹10 lakh base, Charli Knott, an all-rounder on ₹10 lakh whom UP Warriorz released, and Nonkululeko Mlaba, a bowler on ₹30 lakh, each in roughly three runs in ten. Delhi also chase the big overseas all-rounders, Grace Harris and Orla Prendergast, in about half of runs, but almost never win them: UP Warriorz, with ₹3.75 crore, usually do.

The pattern is of a club that fills a bowling spot and a cheap overseas option, not one that wins a bidding war.

What to watch

Delhi do not need a rebuild. Their problem is narrower and probably unfixable in an auction: they have not won the match that matters. What they can do is add depth behind Madiwala and pick the right overseas piece for ₹70 lakh or less.

The forecast has not been backtested, since no earlier WPL auction in our data holds its pool and base prices, and it cannot see which players a club actually wants. It describes a typical outcome and should be read that way.