India captaincy

Kohli first captained India as a stand-in during a 2013 tour of the West Indies, filling in for an injured Dhoni, and got the job permanently the following year. What followed was the most dominant Test captaincy an Indian has produced by the numbers: 68 matches, 40 wins, 17 losses, 11 draws, a win rate of 58.82% and the most Test wins by any India captain. He never lost a home series in charge. The high point came in 2018-19, when India won a Test series in Australia for the first time in history, and India held the ICC Test mace for five straight years from 2016 to 2021 under him.

None of that came with an ICC trophy attached, because the Test mace isn’t one. India reached the inaugural World Test Championship final in 2021 and lost it to New Zealand, the closest Kohli got to global silverware in the format. He resigned the Test captaincy in January 2022, a day after India lost a series in South Africa, ending a tenure that produced more wins than any Indian Test captain but no ICC title to put next to his name.

ODIs and T20Is

The white-ball numbers follow a similar shape. Kohli won 65 of 95 ODIs as captain and 30 of 50 T20Is, both healthy win rates, and led India to the final of the 2017 Champions Trophy, a match India lost to Pakistan. India also went out in the semi-final of the 2019 ODI World Cup and failed to escape the group stage of the 2021 T20 World Cup, and it was that early T20 exit that set off the endgame: Kohli gave up the T20I captaincy right after the tournament, the BCCI took the ODI job off him that December and handed it to Rohit Sharma, and the Test resignation followed a month later. Across all three formats combined, he led India 213 times for 135 wins, a 63.38% win rate, without ever lifting an ICC title as captain.

IPL captaincy

Royal Challengers Bengaluru, 2013-2021

Kohli took over RCB in 2013 and captained the franchise for nine seasons, playing 143 games and winning 66 of them, a 46.15% win rate that trails his international numbers by a wide margin. The nearest RCB came to a title under him was 2016, a Kohli-inspired season where he scored 973 runs, still an IPL single-season record, and carried the team past Gujarat Lions in the qualifier and into the final. Sunrisers Hyderabad won that final by eight runs at RCB’s own ground in Bengaluru, David Warner and Ben Cutting doing the damage after Kohli and Chris Gayle had put on 114 for the first wicket. He stepped down after the 2021 season, and Faf du Plessis took over in 2022.

After Kohli

RCB’s wait for a maiden IPL title didn’t end with Kohli’s captaincy. It ended in 2025, eighteen years into the franchise’s history and three years after Kohli had handed the armband to Faf du Plessis, when RCB beat Punjab Kings in the final under a different captain. He was still playing for RCB when it finally happened, just not leading the side. Kohli has called it one of the best moments of his career, regardless of whose name was on the team sheet as captain.

Add the international and IPL numbers together and Kohli’s captaincy record splits into two different stories: the most successful Test captain India has had, judged purely on wins, and a white-ball and IPL ledger full of near misses, a Champions Trophy final lost, a World Cup semi-final missed, a T20 World Cup group-stage exit that ended the job, an IPL final lost by eight runs. RCB’s own title arrived three years after he’d stopped being captain.