The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has released the list of players eligible for central contract for the 2025-26 season. Fans noticed the A+ category missing from this list, while players like Mohammed Shami and Ishan Kishan are also not included in this year’s central contract. However, there is also discussion about the reduced height of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. Because of this, cricket fans are debating why BCCI demoted star players like Rohit and Kohli.

It is worth noting that in the new BCCI Central Contract, A category has been given the highest grade, which includes Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja. However, BCCI has not included Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli in this category. Instead, both these star players have been placed in the B category, which has a total of 11 players.

Why were Rohit-Virat demoted?

BCCI’s policy has been to include only those players in the top category who play all three formats of cricket (Test, ODI and T20). Since Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli are now active only in ODI format and have retired from Test cricket along with T20, their demotion was considered certain. However, both are still performing very well in ODIs.

Recently, BCCI Secretary Devjit Saikia also told the media that there is no eligible player for the A+ category right now. Therefore, this time no player will be included in this category.

BCCI’s new central contract list

• A Category: Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja.


• B Category: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Suryakumar Yadav, Rishabh Pant, KL Rahul, Hardik Pandya, Washington Sundar, Mohammed Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shreyas Iyer.


• C Category: Akshar Patel, Shivam Dubey, Varun Chakraborty, Abhishek Sharma, Rinku Singh, Tilak Verma, Arshdeep Singh, Sanju Samson, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Prasidh Krishna, Akash Deep, Dhruv Jurel, Harshit Rana, Sai Sudarshan, Ravi Bishnoi and Ruturaj Gaikwad.