Captain: Rishabh Pant
Coach: Ricky Ponting
Home ground: Arun Jaitley Stadium, New Delhi
IPL titles: 0
Owners: GMR Sports Pvt Ltd, JSW Sports Pvt Ltd

Delhi Capitals (earlier Daredevils) stumbled in the semi-finals in the first two seasons, and in the playoffs in 2012 and 2019. They made the title round for the first time in 2020, where they lost to Mumbai Indians. They made it almost as far in 2021 too, topping the table in the league stage, but then lost both their playoffs to crash out.

Delhi Capitals squad

(OP) Overseas Players

Delhi Capitals history

Capitals have been underachievers in the IPL, though they started strongly. They also made the playoffs and finished third after topping the table at the end of the group stage in 2012, but finished last in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2018.

In December 2018 the franchise was rebranded as Delhi Capitals, and the change of name seemed to bring a change of fortune too - they made the playoffs in 2019, and in 2020, got to the final for the first time with a largely young team. In 2021 they made the playoffs again after finishing top of the league table.

Though they seem a side that has found stability in recent years, with a focus on youth, in hindsight, some of the choices they made when building their squads might have hurt them. In 2008, they didn't pursue Virat Kohli strongly, the logic being that they had Virender Sehwag, Shikhar Dhawan, Gautam Gambhir, Tillakaratne Dilshan and AB de Villiers in their ranks. Then, after three years with the team, which included lots of runs and competent leadership in the 2010 season, Gambhir was released. Kohli, of course, has never won the IPL with Royal Challengers Bangalore, but he has been one of top performers in the competition over the years, while Gambhir led Kolkata Knight Riders to two IPL titles. The list of players Delhi have let go over the years includes de Villiers, Andre Russell, Trent Boult, and more recently, Shreyas Iyer, Kagiso Rabada and Avesh Khan.

Delhi Capitals highs

Delhi had good years in 2008 and 2009, when they made the semi-finals, and though they got to the final in 2020, their best seasons were arguably 2012, when they won 11 of their 16 league matches, and 2021, when they won ten out of 14. In 2012, Sehwag, Mahela Jayawardene and Kevin Pietersen made over 300 runs each (Sehwag made 495); and Morne Morkel and Umesh Yadav took 44 wickets between them. In 2021, young Avesh Khan finished second on the list of wicket-takers for the tournament, with 24.

Delhi Capitals lows

Delhi hit a trough from 2013 to 2018. Nothing they tried seemed to work, or even make sense. And when they didn't finish at the bottom, they still failed to rise above No. 6 on the table. In 2023 they crashed and burned again, finishing near the bottom of the table.

Delhi Capitals season by season

2023 - ninth
M14 W5 Win% 35.7
Capitals' worst finish in a decade. They missed Pant, out injured after a car crash the previous December, and Kuldeep Yadav took half as many wickets as he did the previous year. Warner, the captain, made 516 runs, but no one else in the side came close. They never really recovered after losing their first five matches on the trot.

2022 - fifth
M14 W7 Win% 50
Who knows what might have been had Pant reviewed a caught-behind against Tim David of Mumbai Indians, on zero at the time, in their last league game. David went on to win the match, knocking Capitals out. There was some good work up top through the season by Warner (back with the franchise), Shaw and Mitchell Marsh, and a new-look bowling attack, of whom Kuldeep Yadav took 21 wickets from 14 games.

2021 - third
M16 W10 Win% 62.5
Fast bowler Avesh was the big success story of the year, taking 24 wickets at an economy of 7.37. Dhawan had another fantastic season, though he tailed off a bit at the end, finishing with 587 runs. Shaw and Pant were the two other big scorers, with 479 and 419 runs respectively. Still, Delhi were light on batting and they came unstuck in the playoffs.

2020 - runners-up
M17 W9 Win% 52.9
Dhawan and Iyer excelled with the bat, scoring 618 and 519 runs respectively; Rabada and Anrich Nortje picked up 52 wickets between them; and Axar Patel and Marcus Stoinis put in excellent all-round performances. Capitals won eight of their 14 matches in the league to make the final after getting past SRH, before then coming unstuck in the title game.

2019 - third
M16 W10 Win% 62.5
Dhawan returned to his home team, and between them, Pant, Iyer, Shaw and he made close to 1500 runs. Kagiso Rabada led the bowling, with 25 wickets. This time Delhi won nine games to finish at No. 3 on the table. They beat Sunrisers Hyderabad in the eliminator - their first win in the knockouts ever - but were then knocked out themselves by CSK.

2018 - eighth
M14 W5 Win% 35.7
Pant slammed 684 runs in 14 innings at a strike rate of 173.60, Iyer chipped in with 411 runs, and there were handy contributions from Vijay Shankar, Prithvi Shaw and Trent Boult (18 wickets), but Delhi still lost nine games and won only five. That meant a bottom-place finish for them for the fourth time.

2017 - seventh
M14 W6 Win% 42.8
Delhi hit a plateau with another sixth-place finish, though with six wins and eight losses this time. Still, with Sanju Samson, Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer all scoring over 300 runs for the season, there was reason to believe that the core of a strong team was coming together.

2016 - sixth
M14 W7 Win% 50
Delhi's fortunes saw a small uptick: after having languished at the bottom, they moved one step up the ladder, with seven wins and seven defeats. Quinton de Kock starred with 445 runs; legspinner Amit Mishra and another South African import, Chris Morris, took 26 wickets between them.

2015 - seventh
M14 W5 Win% 35.7
Around this time, nothing Delhi did really worked. Their performance was marginally better than in 2014, but five wins and eight losses only allowed them to finish above Kings XI Punjab, another team that had made a name for finishing in the bottom half of the table.

2014 - eighth
M14 W2 Win% 14.2
Another season, another woeful performance. If they won three and lost 13 the previous year, this time, with the tournament back to eight teams, they won two and lost 12, the two wins coming in their first five games, in the UAE. Delhi ended the tournament with a string of nine straight losses.

2013 - ninth
M16 W3 Win% 18.7
Delhi fell into perhaps their worst slump, with three wins and 13 losses. Their first win came in their seventh game, against Mumbai Indians, and then, after two wins, there was another run of six straight defeats to end their campaign.

2012 - third
M18 W11 Win% 61.1
The big-ticket stars - Sehwag, Pietersen, Jayawardene, Morkel, Warner - all came good, and Delhi ticked like a well-oiled machine, finishing top of the table at the end of the league stage. But it would be so near yet so far again for them: losses to KKR and CSK knocked them out.

2011 - tenth
M14 W4 Win% 28.5
When it all went wrong for the first time. Pune Warriors India and Kochi Tuskers Kerala joined the IPL, making it a ten-team affair, and the two new sides and Delhi made up the bottom three, with Delhi last.

2010 - fifth
M14 W7 Win% 50
Delhi might have expected to build on the momentum of their first two seasons, but after winning their first two games, they only won five more, to finish tied on points with three other teams behind Mumbai Indians and Deccan Chargers. Their net run rate worked against them, and Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore went through.

2009 - third
M15 W10 Win% 66.6
Delhi were the form team in the group phase of the competition, played in South Africa. They won ten of their first 14 games, and topped the table going into the knockouts, where they lost to eventual champions Deccan Chargers in the semi-final.

2008 - fourth
M14 W7 Win% 50
Delhi started well, with two wins on the trot, and managed to win enough games - seven out of 14 - to finish fourth on the points table. But Rajasthan Royals, who Delhi had beaten in their first game, were on a roll, and beat Delhi in the semi-final on the way to the title.

Delhi Capitals key players

Virender Sehwag
Sehwag, whose last game was in 2013, only slipped from the No. 1 spot for Delhi's top run-getters in 2020, when Iyer went past his 2174 runs. Sehwag captained the side to the top four in both the first two seasons. They next made the playoffs in 2012, and he was key there too, becoming only the second man to hit five consecutive T20 half-centuries in a season.

Amit Mishra
Mishra played for Deccan Chargers, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Lucknow Super Giants too, but it was with Delhi that he achieved IPL greatness, taking 106 wickets in 99 matches. He didn't really get a lot of opportunities in the 2021 season and went unsold in the auction in 2022.

Rishabh Pant
Pant is now the highest scorer in the team's history, with 2838 runs, in front of Iyer, Sehwag and Dhawan. More impressive has been his strike rate of 147.96, and his reputation as one of the most feared middle-order T20 batters around. He failed to make much of an impact in the 2022 season and was out injured in the following one.

Shreyas Iyer
Iyer didn't play for an IPL franchise other than Delhi until 2022, when he was picked up by Kolkata Knight Riders. His numbers tell you why Delhi held on to him: 2375 runs from 87 matches. He was the man they turned to for batting solidity and leadership nous - but for the injury that restricted his participation in 2021 to only the second leg.

David Warner
Warner played for Delhi Daredevils their first five seasons in the league, and then came back in 2022. That year he was the leading run-maker for Capitals, when they finished in the middle of the table. The following season, he made even more runs but was largely a one-man band.