Riyan Parag has been appointed as the Rajasthan Royals captain for the upcoming IPL 2026 season. His promotion comes after Sanju Samson’s trade to Chennai Super Kings, which exchanged Ravindra Jadeja and Sam Curran.

Riyan Parag has led Rajasthan Royals in the previous edition after Sanju Samson missed eight games with injuries.

Despite managing only a couple of victories, his batting has been proven to be brilliant, which included a 95-run knock against the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Making in IPL debut in the 2019 season, Riyan Parag has played all seven seasons for Rajasthan. The 2024 edition brought out the best in him, where he scored 573 runs at an average of 52.09 at a strike rate of 149.21.

Parag was one of the front-runners whom head coach Kumar Sangakkara had interviews with, before finalising him as captain.

This means RR will have a new captain and a new head coach after Rahul Dravid parted ways with the franchise after the 2025 season, as they finished in second bottom of the IPL 2025 points table with only two wins out of 14 games.

“The night before the (T20 World Cup) warm-up game, I played against USA I got a call from Manoj (Badale) and Sanga (Sangakkara) that said, ‘congratulations you are the captain.’

“A lot of emotions and then straight to the matter, like next season, what do we need to change or do better so that we finish in a better place,” said Riyan Parag in a video uploaded by Rajasthan Royals’ social handles.

“The question that came to me was, how do you get 25 different individuals on the same page. The nature of the IPL is that not everyone plays, and if someone doesn’t play, it is natural for someone to drift away mid-season or the latter half of the season.”

“That stuck with me, and I started (thinking) immediately, like how do I get 25 people on the same page this year.”

Meanwhile, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Dhruv Jurel are other captaincy candidates in the Rajasthan setup.

“The first thing Jaiswal said was, ‘congrats brother, let’s win it this time’. That’s all I want from Jaiswal and Dhruv. Dhruv is on the calmer side, so he would not express it as much.”

“He’s been at RR for a long time and understands our approach and philosophy,” RR owner Badale said. “He’s always been an incredibly ambitious young man. He’s going to be in and around the Indian T20 team for a long time, so he is learning from the very, very best.”

“For someone so young, he has incredible self-awareness. He has had very tough times at the IPL. He came in as a very young player, and there was a lot expected of him.”

“And he’d be the first to say that he has had a couple of very average seasons, and fans fell out of love with him for a period of time. He’s also of an age where he has grown up living with social media every single day, and that’s taken its toll on him.”

“The one thing I have absolute 100% conviction of is that we ran the best possible process. Whether we made the nest possible pick, only time will tell,” he concluded.