IPL Purple Cap Winners List: Every Season’s Leading Wicket-Taker

Every IPL season produces its batting hero, but the Purple Cap tells the other half of the story. It goes to the bowler who claims the most wickets across the tournament, and like the Orange Cap, it travels from player to player during the season until the final delivery decides who keeps it. Eighteen campaigns have produced eighteen names on the winners’ roll, and the list is a fascinating mix: mystery spinners, death-over specialists, a debutant who stunned the league in its first year, and a trio of bowlers good enough to win it more than once.

Bowling in T20 is the harder half of the game. Batters swing freely, fields are spread, and one wayward over can undo four good ones. That is what makes the Purple Cap winners worth studying: each of them found a way to take wickets consistently in the least forgiving format for bowlers.

Every Purple Cap winner, season by season

The full list spans from the league’s inaugural campaign to the present day. Some totals look modest by modern standards, and some look outright untouchable — the difference usually says more about the era than the bowler.

Season	Winner	Team	Wickets	Matches
2008	Sohail Tanvir	Rajasthan Royals	22	11
2009	RP Singh	Deccan Chargers	23	16
2010	Pragyan Ojha	Deccan Chargers	21	16
2011	Lasith Malinga	Mumbai Indians	28	16
2012	Morne Morkel	Kolkata Knight Riders	25	16
2013	Dwayne Bravo	Chennai Super Kings	32	18
2014	Mohit Sharma	Chennai Super Kings	23	16
2015	Dwayne Bravo	Chennai Super Kings	26	16
2016	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	Sunrisers Hyderabad	23	17
2017	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	Sunrisers Hyderabad	26	14
2018	Andrew Tye	Kings XI Punjab	24	14
2019	Imran Tahir	Chennai Super Kings	26	17
2020	Kagiso Rabada	Delhi Capitals	30	17
2021	Harshal Patel	Royal Challengers Bangalore	32	15
2022	Yuzvendra Chahal	Rajasthan Royals	27	17
2023	Mohammed Shami	Gujarat Titans	28	17
2024	Harshal Patel	Punjab Kings	24	16
2025	Prasidh Krishna	Gujarat Titans	25	15

Two names in this list carry the greatest weight. Dwayne Bravo’s 32 wickets in 2013 set a benchmark that stood untouched for eight years, and his six-seventeen economy that season remains one of the most complete death-bowling displays the league has seen. Harshal Patel matched that 32-wicket mark in 2021, equalling the record in fewer matches, and his slower-ball deception that year produced a run of player-of-the-match awards that turned an unsung medium pacer into a household name. At the other end of the spectrum, Sohail Tanvir’s 22 wickets in 2008 came from just eleven appearances — a strike rate of a wicket roughly every two overs that no subsequent winner has ever matched.

The repeat winners: three names, five caps

Winning the Purple Cap demands a full season of fitness, form and favourable match situations, which is why back-to-back or multiple wins are so rare. Across eighteen seasons, only three bowlers have lifted the cap more than once, and each achieved it in a distinctly different way.

1. Dwayne Bravo — 2 caps (2013, 2015) — the only bowler to win the award twice for the same franchise in its golden era, mixing slower balls, yorkers and wickets in clusters that regularly changed matches on their own.
2. Bhuvneshwar Kumar — 2 caps (2016, 2017) — back-to-back awards built on swing with the new ball and a knuckle ball with the old, a rare combination that made him lethal in both the powerplay and the final overs.
3. Harshal Patel — 2 caps (2021, 2024) — the most surprising name in the club, winning eight years apart for two different teams after rebuilding his game around deceptive changes of pace.

Everyone else on the list won once and only once, including legendary names like Malinga, Rabada and Shami. That scarcity is the clearest measure of how hard sustained wicket-taking is in a format designed to protect batters.

What it takes to top the wicket charts

Unlike run-scoring, where volume alone can carry a batter up the list, the Purple Cap race rewards a specific set of conditions that few bowlers enjoy. The winners tend to share several advantages that are worth spelling out.

• Bowl the death overs — more than half of all Purple Cap winners bowled regularly in overs 18 to 20, where batters take risks and wickets fall in bunches.
• Stay fit for the whole campaign — nearly every winner played at least fourteen matches; missed games almost always end a challenge before it begins.
• Bowl for a team that reaches the playoffs — extra matches mean extra chances, which is why seven of the eighteen winners played in that season’s final.
• Take wickets in clusters — three-fors and four-fors do the heavy lifting; a steady one-wicket-per-game pace rarely wins the race.
• Have a signature dismissal — Tanvir’s unorthodox action, Malinga’s yorker, Bravo’s slower ball, Tahir’s googly: each winner had one delivery batters kept falling to.

These ingredients explain why the same faces keep appearing in the race year after year, and why a surprise winner usually emerges from a team nobody expected to go deep.

The most dominant single seasons

A few campaigns in this list stand above the rest, either for sheer numbers or for the manner in which the wickets came. They deserve their own spotlight, because each one reshaped what a great bowling season looked like.

1. 32 wickets — Dwayne Bravo (2013) — the record that defined an era, set in a title-winning season and unbeaten for eight years.
2. 32 wickets — Harshal Patel (2021) — matching Bravo’s mark in two fewer matches, with five four-wicket hauls and a five-for against Mumbai.
3. 30 wickets — Kagiso Rabada (2020) — the fastest sustained strike rate of any winner, delivered while Delhi reached their first final in twelve years.
4. 28 wickets — Lasith Malinga (2011) — the slinging yorker at its absolute peak, including a spell that turned the final in Mumbai’s favour.
5. 28 wickets — Mohammed Shami (2023) — new-ball mastery on a title-winning team, proving that conventional swing bowling still wins races.

Notice the pattern across these performances: four of the five came from bowlers whose teams reached the final. Wicket-taking at the very top of the charts and team success are far more intertwined in bowling than they are in batting, where individual tallies often flourish on struggling sides.

Fast bowlers, spinners and the balance of power

The list tells a clear story about how the IPL’s bowling landscape has shifted. The first three winners were all different types — a left-arm seamer, a medium pacer and a left-arm spinner — reflecting an era when teams were still learning what worked in T20. From 2011 to 2020, fast bowlers dominated the award, taking eight of ten caps, as death-over skills became the league’s most valuable currency. Spin fought back in the 2020s: Chahal won in 2022 with legspin, and Tahir had already broken the pacer monopoly in 2019 with an onslaught of googlies at age 39.

The 2025 season added another twist, with Prasidh Krishna’s height and hard lengths proving that bounce can be as potent as swing or spin. Whatever the method, the lesson from eighteen seasons is consistent: there is no single blueprint for a Purple Cap, only bowlers who keep asking batters questions they cannot answer.

Records and quirks around the award

Beyond the roll call of winners, the Purple Cap’s history is full of details that fans enjoy replaying long after the season ends.

• The award has never been shared — in eighteen seasons, no tie has ever needed to be broken, a testament to how finely the race usually resolves.
• Overseas bowlers won early, Indians caught up — the first three caps went to overseas players, but the modern era has seen Indian seamers and spinners win just as often.
• Chennai’s bowling factory — CSK players have won the cap four times, more than any other franchise, and three of those winners were in their thirties.
• The Purple Cap and the trophy rarely align — only a handful of seasons, such as 2009 with RP Singh and 2023 with Shami, ended with the cap holder’s team lifting the title.
• Age is no barrier — Tahir won at 39, Bravo at 32 and 37, showing that craft and variations can outrun raw pace in this competition.

Taken together, these details show why the award carries its own identity separate from any batting prize: it honours the harder, less glamorous half of the sport with numbers that are genuinely difficult to repeat.

Who could join the list next

The next wave of challengers is already forming. Prasidh Krishna’s combination of bounce and control should keep him in the race for years, while Mohammed Siraj’s new-ball threat, Arshdeep Singh’s death-over nerve and Varun Chakravarthy’s mystery spin all point toward future contention. Among overseas names, Matheesha Pathirana’s slingy pace and the ever-improving Gerald Coetzee represent the kind of young weapons that previous winners like Malinga and Rabada once were.

If recent history proves anything, though, it is that the next Purple Cap winner may not be anyone’s favourite at the start of the season. Sixteen of the eighteen awards went to first-time winners, several of them to players nobody saw coming. The 2026 race will write its own chapter, and somewhere in the middle order of that chapter, a new name is waiting to be called.