# SA20 Winners: Every Champion from 2023 to 2026

Source: https://cricketin.org/blog/sa20-winners

[By Anjali Deshmukh](/authors/cricket-analyst), Cricket Analyst. [Reviewed by Rajeev Sathe](/authors/editor-in-chief), Editor-in-Chief. Updated 2 Sep 2026 · Sources cited: 3. Editorial policy: https://cricketin.org/editorial-policy

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Every SA20 champion with the runner-up and margin from all four finals, plus how many of the league's players also appeared in the IPL.

Four SA20 seasons have been played, from 2022/23 to 2025/26, and all four are on this page. The league is young enough that its complete honours list fits in a paragraph.

- Sunrisers Eastern Cape have won three of the four, in 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2025/26.
- MI Cape Town won the other, in 2024/25, beating Sunrisers Eastern Cape by 76 runs.
- All six SA20 clubs are named after IPL franchises, and 27 of the 101 players who appeared in the 2025/26 season also played in the IPL in 2026.
- Two clubs have never reached a final: Joburg Super Kings and Paarl Royals.

## Every SA20 final, 2022/23 to 2025/26

Each row is read from the ball-by-ball record of the match the archive marks as the final.

| Season | Champion | Runner-up | Margin | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022/23 | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | Pretoria Capitals | 4 wickets | The Wanderers, Johannesburg |
| 2023/24 | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | Durban's Super Giants | 89 runs | Newlands, Cape Town |
| 2024/25 | MI Cape Town | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | 76 runs | The Wanderers, Johannesburg |
| 2025/26 | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | Pretoria Capitals | 6 wickets | Newlands, Cape Town |

By club, counting finals lost alongside titles won:

| Club | Titles | Finals lost | Finals played |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunrisers Eastern Cape | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| MI Cape Town | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Pretoria Capitals | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Durban's Super Giants | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Joburg Super Kings | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Paarl Royals | 0 | 0 | 0 |

## Sunrisers Eastern Cape have won three of four

The Sunrisers have played in every SA20 final so far, which no other club has done, and won three of them. Their two most recent titles came either side of the one defeat.

The 2023/24 win is the widest in the competition's short history: 204 for 3 against Durban's Super Giants, who were bowled out for 115, a margin of 89 runs. The defeat a year later was almost its mirror image — MI Cape Town made 181 for 8 and the Sunrisers were bowled out for 105, a 76-run loss. Both of the league's heavy finals involved the same club, once at each end.

Their first title, in 2022/23, was the narrow one: Pretoria Capitals were dismissed for 135 and the Sunrisers chased it with four wickets and three overs to spare. That is the only SA20 season for which we hold a complete league table, and they finished it third before winning the knockout.

## The one season we can show in full

Only the first season has a complete league table in the open archive, and it is worth reading because it argues against the honours list above. Sunrisers Eastern Cape won that title after finishing third, with four wins from ten games:

| # | Team | Pld | Won | Lost | Pts | NRR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pretoria Capitals | 10 | 7 | 3 | 14 | +0.927 |
| 2 | Joburg Super Kings | 10 | 6 | 3 | 13 | −0.111 |
| 3 | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | 10 | 4 | 5 | 9 | +0.316 |
| 4 | Paarl Royals | 10 | 4 | 5 | 9 | −0.293 |
| 5 | Durban's Super Giants | 10 | 4 | 5 | 9 | −0.319 |
| 6 | MI Cape Town | 10 | 3 | 7 | 6 | −0.500 |

Three things stand out. Pretoria Capitals topped the league by a clear point and lost the final to a side that had lost more games than it won. Three teams finished level on nine points and were separated only by net run rate, which is the tiebreak doing the entire job of ordering half the table. And MI Cape Town finished last, six points from the top — two seasons before winning the competition.

None of that is unusual. Across the 40 complete league tables we hold in all competitions, 22 titles went to a side that finished the league stage somewhere other than first. A six-team league with a short knockout makes the gap between the best league record and the trophy wider still.

## Every club is named after an IPL franchise

SA20 is unusual among the leagues we cover: all six of its clubs carry the name of an IPL franchise family. The archive records the same six teams in every season since 2022/23, with no renaming at all.

| SA20 club | IPL franchise family |
|---|---|
| Sunrisers Eastern Cape | Sunrisers Hyderabad |
| MI Cape Town | Mumbai Indians |
| Pretoria Capitals | Delhi Capitals |
| Durban's Super Giants | Lucknow Super Giants |
| Joburg Super Kings | Chennai Super Kings |
| Paarl Royals | Rajasthan Royals |

The naming is what our data shows; the ownership behind it is documented by the league itself, and the [official SA20 site](https://www.sa20.co.za/) is the source to check rather than this page. England's [Hundred](/blog/the-hundred-winners) went part of the same way in 2026, when three of its eight clubs took IPL franchise names, but SA20 was built that way from its first season.

## A quarter of the league also played the IPL

We counted the squads in the ball-by-ball files to see how far the connection goes beyond the badge. In the 2025/26 SA20 season, 101 players appeared in at least one match. Of those, 27 also appeared in the [IPL](/leagues/ipl) in 2026 — just over a quarter of the league's playing pool.

| SA20 club, 2025/26 | Players used | Also played IPL 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| MI Cape Town | 17 | 7 |
| Durban's Super Giants | 16 | 6 |
| Sunrisers Eastern Cape | 14 | 5 |
| Joburg Super Kings | 20 | 3 |
| Paarl Royals | 17 | 3 |
| Pretoria Capitals | 17 | 3 |

The two clubs with the deepest overlap, MI Cape Town and Durban's Super Giants, are also the two whose IPL parents field large overseas contingents. The count is of players who appeared in a match in both competitions, not of contracted squads, so it understates the paper connection and reflects who actually played.

The names make the point better than the count does. Among the twenty-seven are Rashid Khan, Kagiso Rabada, Trent Boult and Nicholas Pooran, all four at MI Cape Town; Heinrich Klaasen, Jos Buttler, Sunil Narine and Aiden Markram at Durban's Super Giants; and Quinton de Kock, Anrich Nortje and Marco Jansen at Sunrisers Eastern Cape. These are not fringe players in either competition.

What that means in practice is that the SA20 and the IPL are not separate talent pools with a shared badge. They are two windows in the same calendar drawing on an overlapping set of players, and the South African window falls in January, outside the IPL season. A reader following the IPL will recognise roughly a quarter of the names on an SA20 team sheet before the tournament starts.

Two caveats on the number. It counts players who actually appeared in a match in both competitions in those two seasons, not players under contract, so a squad member who did not play is not in it. And it is a single pair of seasons: the overlap in earlier years may be larger or smaller, and we have not counted them.

## Four finals, four different players of the match

No player has been named player of the match in two SA20 finals. The four are Roelof van der Merwe in 2022/23, Tom Abell in 2023/24, Trent Boult in 2024/25 and Dewald Brevis in 2025/26 — and Boult's award came in the one final Sunrisers Eastern Cape have lost.

## The final alternates between two grounds

All four finals have been played at one of two grounds: The Wanderers in Johannesburg in 2022/23 and 2024/25, and Newlands in Cape Town in 2023/24 and 2025/26. They have alternated exactly.

One small pattern, offered as a curiosity rather than a finding: the side that won the toss has won all four finals. Four matches is far too few to mean anything — an even-money event coming up four times running happens once in sixteen — and it is worth stating precisely so that it is not mistaken for a trend.

## How we read these results

A champion comes from one match: the archive marks the final, and the outcome field names the winner and the margin. For SA20 that match is present for all four seasons, so this list covers every season the league has played.

Points tables are where SA20 is thin for us. A table is only correct when every league match is counted, because one missing game moves both the points and the net run rate, and only the first season clears that bar. We publish the [2022/23 table](/tables/sa20-2022-23) and nothing else; the league stages of 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 have gaps in the open archive. That is also why SA20 has no league hub on this site while [the other seven leagues do](/leagues) — a hub needs at least two seasons to be worth the page. The arithmetic behind the net run rate column is in our [guide to net run rate](/guides/how-net-run-rate-works).

## Where the numbers come from

All four finals and the squad counts come from the open [Cricsheet](https://cricsheet.org/) archive, published under the Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0. We parse the ball-by-ball files ourselves and count both the totals and the players from the deliveries and team sheets.

Seasons carry two years because the league is played across the South African summer: 2025/26 began in December 2025 and its final was in January 2026. Fixtures, squads and ownership can be checked on the [official SA20 site](https://www.sa20.co.za/), and match archives at [ESPNcricinfo](https://www.espncricinfo.com/).

## Questions people ask

### Who has won the most SA20 titles?

Sunrisers Eastern Cape, with three from four seasons: 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2025/26. MI Cape Town won the other, in 2024/25.

### Are SA20 teams owned by IPL franchises?

All six clubs carry IPL franchise names, and the league documents the ownership on its official site. Our data shows the naming; the ownership detail should be read there.

### How many SA20 players also play in the IPL?

In the 2025/26 season, 27 of the 101 players who appeared in an SA20 match also appeared in the IPL in 2026 — about a quarter.

### What was the biggest win in an SA20 final?

Sunrisers Eastern Cape by 89 runs over Durban's Super Giants in 2023/24, after making 204 for 3.

### Which SA20 teams have never reached a final?

Joburg Super Kings and Paarl Royals, in four seasons.

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