The venue of the IPL 2026 final has been confirmed and Ahmedabad will host the clash once again - the fourth time in five years. Sarah Waris looks at why Indian cricket’s biggest occasions increasingly keep returning to one city, and whether the balance is slowly beginning to feel uneven.
Another IPL final, another trip to Ahmedabad.
The BCCI’s decision to shift the IPL 2026 final from Bengaluru to the Narendra Modi Stadium was, officially, an administrative one. Bengaluru had originally been allotted the title clash, in keeping with the convention of rewarding the defending champions with the following season’s final. But while announcing the playoff venues, the BCCI stated that certain requirements from the local authorities and the Karnataka State Cricket Association fell “beyond the scope of BCCI’s established guidelines and protocols”, prompting the venue change.
With the Chinnaswamy Stadium also remaining under scrutiny following last year’s stampede during RCB’s victory celebrations, the reasoning, in isolation, is difficult to contest. Marquee events should only be staged where administrators are fully assured about operational preparedness and crowd management.
But the shift has once again reinforced a pattern that has become increasingly difficult to ignore in Indian cricket. Whenever there is a major event to host, a final to stage, or a global spectacle to showcase, Ahmedabad almost inevitably enters the picture.
The IPL 2026 final will now make it four title clashes in Ahmedabad across the last five seasons. Since the renovated stadium reopened in 2021, no Indian venue has hosted more IPL playoff matches, with Ahmedabad staging eight, double the number hosted by Chennai’s Chepauk Stadium in the same period. Only two other venues, Eden Gardens and Mullanpur in Chandigarh, have hosted IPL playoff games during these five seasons.
At what point, then, does a venue stop being an important centre and start becoming the default answer to everything?
Last year, Eden Gardens, the home ground of defending champions Kolkata Knight Riders, was originally scheduled to host the IPL final before the tournament was briefly disrupted amid the flaring India-Pakistan tensions. When the league resumed, only a few venues were retained for the remaining matches and playoffs, with Ahmedabad among them, while Kolkata dropped out of the list entirely. Possible weather interruptions were also cited as a factor in not staging the final in the east. Yet the reasoning never entirely held up.
The rain fears ultimately proved unnecessary as Kolkata was dry on the night of the final, and if security following the armed conflict was a concern at all, Ahmedabad is situated around 350 km from the Pakistan border while Kolkata lies more than four times farther.
More importantly, using weather as a reason to move away from a years-long convention of rewarding teams and their supporters felt difficult to justify. Rain is among cricket’s most unpredictable variables, and shifting marquee fixtures on the possibility of disruption sets an inconsistent precedent, especially when the IPL 2023 final in Ahmedabad itself had to be pushed into a reserve day because of persistent showers. That is what makes venue shifts based on hypothetical possibilities feel like uncomfortable territory.
Once Bengaluru was ruled out this year, Kolkata should have emerged as the obvious alternative; rewarding its fans with the final they missed out on last season would also have restored some balance to the process. Instead, the title clash returns to Ahmedabad once more.
None of this is to argue that Ahmedabad is an undeserving venue. The Narendra Modi Stadium is massive, modern and commercially attractive. It can hold over 100,000 spectators, offers strong connectivity, expansive infrastructure, and the kind of visual scale administrators naturally gravitate towards for global events.
But the question is no longer whether Ahmedabad deserves major games. It clearly does. The question is why it increasingly seems to receive almost all of them.
Since February 2021, Ahmedabad has hosted 27 men’s international matches. No other Indian venue has crossed 20 in that period. With two more fixtures already scheduled, including an India-Australia Test in the upcoming Border-Gavaskar Trophy, the gap is only growing wider.
The nature of those matches matters even more.
Ahmedabad hosted the 2023 ODI World Cup final. It hosted the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup final too. The 2023 India-Pakistan World Cup clash was staged there despite reports that the PCB had reservations about Ahmedabad as the venue. India have also played England there twice in recent Test series, while Australia will have featured there twice in two years by the end of February 2027.
By contrast, Eden Gardens, one of the most iconic venues in the country, has not hosted India against Australia in Tests since the famous 2001 match, while England have not played a Test in Kolkata since 2012. In six years since the renovated stadium reopened, Ahmedabad would have hosted four home Tests involving the Big Three by next February, matching Chennai’s tally across an entire decade.
Even beyond cricket, Ahmedabad increasingly feels positioned as India’s emerging showcase city. Last year, the music band Coldplay headed to Ahmedabad after performing at the DY Patil stadium in Navi Mumbai. The two concerts in Ahmedabad became one of their largest in the band's history, atrracting over 220,000 fans across both nights. Major political events have centred around the city too, with the stadium itself inaugurated in 2020 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump.
The venue was later renamed after Modi while he remained a sitting Prime Minister, another reminder that the stadium has come to represent far more than just cricket infrastructure.
Part of this may stem from larger ambitions surrounding Ahmedabad itself. The city has already bagged the 2030 Commonwealth Games, and there has long been discussion around positioning the city as a global sporting hub, with efforts on to bring the 2036 Olympics to the country too. From that perspective, repeatedly hosting major cricket events becomes part of projecting capability, scale and international relevance.
But the contrast between men’s and women’s cricket makes the policy appear uneven.
The Narendra Modi Stadium did not host a single match during the Women’s World Cup despite being projected as India’s premier cricket venue. Explaining the venue selections in an interview with Sportstar, BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia spoke about wanting to take the game to “two-tier” and “three-tier cities” to encourage growth and wider interest in women’s cricket. At the same time, he stressed the need to “showcase the best venues” for major men’s ICC events, citing infrastructure, connectivity and accommodation.
When women’s tournaments arrive, the emphasis shifts toward expansion and outreach. Newer venues are trusted, and the language becomes about development. Yet when the men’s events begin, the biggest occasions repeatedly return to the same few centres, with Ahmedabad increasingly leading that list.
Every cricketing nation has iconic venues. Lord’s hosts the big games in England because of history. The MCG stages Boxing Day Tests and World Cup finals because of scale and tradition. There is nothing unusual about India wanting a flagship stadium.
But India’s cricket identity has historically never revolved around one city alone. The country is unique in the way it has come to be known for the variety of its venues and atmospheres: Kolkata’s passion, Chennai’s knowledge, Mumbai’s intensity, Bengaluru’s chants, Delhi’s chaos. Different grounds have carried different versions of Indian cricket.
Ahmedabad deserves to be part of that conversation. Its rise as a major venue is understandable, and it can be accommodated as one of the premier grounds. What feels less convincing is the idea that Indian cricket increasingly appears unable to imagine its biggest occasions anywhere else.
That may be ambition. It may be branding. It may simply be administrative convenience.
But it is also making the distribution of Indian cricket’s biggest occasions feel increasingly uneven.
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