# Does Topping the Points Table Win the Title? Source: https://cricketin.org/en-in/blog/points-table-leader-vs-champion [By Karthik Iyengar](/en-in/authors/data-editor), Data Editor. [Reviewed by Anjali Deshmukh](/en-in/authors/cricket-analyst), Cricket Analyst. Updated 11 Nov 2026 · Sources cited: 2. Editorial policy: https://cricketin.org/en-in/editorial-policy 18+. Betting carries financial risk and can become addictive. Free helpline Tele-MANAS: 14416. --- We counted 48 complete league tables: the leader won the title 21 times. But the top two have won 41 of 48, and no champion has come from lower than fourth. No. We counted every complete league table we hold — 48 seasons across eight competitions, 357 team-seasons — and the side that finished the league stage first went on to win the title 21 times out of 48. Between innings, [crash games](/en-in/casino) such as Aviator are in the Cricketin casino. - Topping the table wins the trophy 44% of the time. It is closer to a coin toss than a formality. - But finishing in the top two wins it 85% of the time: 41 of the 48 champions came from first or second place. - Only seven champions came from third or fourth, and **no side in our records has ever won a title from lower than fourth**. - That is the playoff doing its job. Most formats we cover give the top of the table either a second chance or a bye to the final. ## What 48 seasons actually show A points table answers one question precisely: who won the most league games. It is often read as answering a second question — who is going to win the tournament — and those are not the same question. Here is the whole record, by the position the champion held when the league stage finished. | Champion finished | Seasons | Share of 48 | |---|---|---| | 1st | 21 | 44% | | 2nd | 20 | 42% | | 3rd | 5 | 10% | | 4th | 2 | 4% | | 5th or lower | 0 | 0% | Two numbers stand out and they pull in opposite directions. Topping the table is worth much less than it looks: more often than not, the team that led after the league stage did not lift the trophy. But the table is not noise either — no champion in any season we hold has come from lower than fourth. The same pages open in the [mobile app](/en-in/app) from your home screen. ## The real dividing line is second place Forty-one of the 48 champions came from first or second. If you want a single sentence for what a points table predicts, it is not "the leader wins" but "the trophy stays in the top two, and which of the two is close to a coin toss." In the IPL alone, 16 of 19 champions finished first or second, the starting point for any [IPL winner prediction](/en-in/predictions/ipl). The gap between second and third is the sharpest edge in the data. Second place has produced 20 champions; third has produced five. There is no gradual decline down the table — there is a cliff immediately below the top two. ## The seven champions who came from further back These are every exception in our records. All seven are worth reading closely, because in most of them the champion was not really as far back as the position suggests. | Season | Champion | Finished | Detail | |---|---|---|---| | IPL 2009 | Deccan Chargers | 4th of 8 | Level on 14 points with Kings XI Punjab in fifth; net run rate put them into the semi-finals, where they beat the league leaders | | PSL 2025 | Lahore Qalandars | 4th of 6 | The lowest finish by a champion in a six-team league | | IPL 2010 | Chennai Super Kings | 3rd of 8 | Level on 14 points with three other clubs | | IPL 2016 | Sunrisers Hyderabad | 3rd of 8 | Level on 16 points with 2nd and 4th; separated by net run rate alone | | WPL 2023/24 | Royal Challengers Bangalore | 3rd of 5 | Five-team league, so third is the middle of the table | | SA20 2022/23 | Sunrisers Eastern Cape | 3rd of 6 | Won only four of ten league games | | CPL 2021 | St Kitts and Nevis Patriots | 3rd of 6 | Level on 12 points with both clubs above them — the top three were inseparable | The 2016 IPL is the clearest illustration of how misleading a raw position can be. Sunrisers Hyderabad finished third — on the same 16 points as Royal Challengers Bangalore in second and Kolkata Knight Riders in fourth, with only net run rate putting them below Bangalore. Meanwhile the side that topped that table, Gujarat Lions, did so on 18 points with a *negative* net run rate of −0.374, the only league leader in our records to finish first while conceding more per over than they scored. The full [2016 IPL table](/en-in/tables/ipl-2016) shows the whole picture. The 2010 season is the same story with a bigger tie. Chennai Super Kings finished third on 14 points — level with Royal Challengers Bangalore, Delhi Daredevils and Kolkata Knight Riders, four clubs on the same score, ordered only by net run rate. Chennai won the title from there and went on to become one of the two most successful clubs in the competition, as our [IPL winners list](/en-in/leagues/ipl/winners) sets out. ## Why the playoff protects the top of the table The 85% figure is not luck. Most formats we cover are built to reward a good league stage, and they do it in one of two ways; a third, the plain semi-final, rewards it less. We read the structures out of the archive itself, by counting which matches carry a knockout stage label. | Format | Competitions | What the top of the table gets | |---|---|---| | Four-team playoff | IPL from 2011, PSL, ILT20, BBL from 2019/20, SA20 from 2023/24, CPL in most seasons | A second chance: the loser of the first qualifier drops into another qualifier instead of going out | | Three-team playoff | WPL, The Hundred | A bye: the league leader goes straight to the final while second and third play an eliminator | | Semi-finals | IPL 2008–2010, BBL to 2018/19, CPL 2013–2015, 2020 and 2021, SA20 2022/23 | Only a weaker opponent: first plays fourth, second plays third, and one defeat ends anyone's season | Since 2011 the four [qualifying teams](/en-in/blog/how-teams-qualify-for-playoffs) in the IPL have played Qualifier 1, an Eliminator, Qualifier 2 and the Final. The top two meet in Qualifier 1, and the side that loses it does not go home — it plays Qualifier 2 against whoever survives the Eliminator. A team in the top two therefore has to lose twice to be knocked out; a team in third or fourth has to win three matches in a row. In the WPL and The Hundred there are only two playoff matches. The leader waits in the final while second and third fight for the other place. That is a different mechanism with the same effect: the best league record is converted into fewer matches that can go wrong. The WPL is the extreme case: the same table-topper lost three finals in a row, as our list of [WPL winners](/en-in/blog/wpl-winners) shows. The semi-final seasons show what happens without that protection. Nine of our 48 seasons were played that way, and they produced four of the seven champions who finished third or fourth. ## Why we will not rank the leagues on this It is tempting to work out which competition rewards the league stage most, and the per-league numbers do vary a lot — from The [Hundred](/en-in/blog/the-hundred-winners) at three of four to the WPL at one of four. We are not going to present that as a finding, because the samples are far too small: the largest is the IPL at 19 tables and four of the eight leagues have four or fewer. With four seasons, one result moves the figure by 25 percentage points. Any ranking built on that would be an artefact of how many complete tables the open archive happens to hold, not a fact about the competitions. The 48-season total is worth stating; the per-league split is not, and we would rather say so than publish a table that looks authoritative and is not. ## What this means when you look at a table in May Three practical readings come out of the count, and none of them requires a model. First, the race that matters most in the second half of a league stage is usually the race for second, not first. The difference between finishing first and second has been worth almost nothing historically; the difference between second and third has been worth almost everything. That is worth knowing before you [bet on cricket](/en-in) in the closing weeks of a league. Second, points alone can hide how close a table is. In 43 of our 48 tables at least two clubs finished level on points, so the order you are reading is frequently decided by net run rate rather than results. Our guide to how net run rate works sets out the arithmetic, and it is worth knowing which side of a [tiebreak](/en-in/guides/how-net-run-rate-works) your team is on. Third, a leader with a weak net run rate is a real warning sign, not a curiosity. Gujarat Lions topped the 2016 IPL with a negative figure and did not reach the final. It is one case, so it proves nothing on its own — but it is a reminder that points count wins while net run rate counts margins, and only one of the two says anything about how the wins were earned. ## How we counted We use only seasons where we hold a complete league table, which means every league match is in the record with no gaps in the fixture numbers and every club has played the same number of games. One missing match moves both the points and the net run rate, so a partial table cannot be used for this at all. A match abandoned without a ball bowled is the one exception: it has no ball-by-ball record, so the IPL tables count it from the official result, one point to each side, and net run rate is untouched. That gives 48 tables and 357 team-seasons across eight competitions; the seasons we could not use are listed on each league hub with the reason. "Champion" is the winner of the match the archive marks as the final. "Finished first" means first in the league table as we compute it, after the league stage and before any playoff. Where clubs were level on points we order them by net run rate, which is the standard tiebreak in every competition here. One limitation to state plainly: 48 tables is not a large sample for a question like this, and the seasons are not separate, unrelated samples — the same strong clubs recur. The 85% figure is a description of what has happened in the seasons we can read, not a probability for next season. ## Where the numbers come from Every table is computed by us 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, count runs and overs for and against each club, and build the standings ourselves; the playoff structures in this article come from the stage labels on the matches in the same files. Season results and official standings can be checked against the competitions' own sites and the match archives at [ESPNcricinfo](https://www.espncricinfo.com/). ## Questions people ask ### Does finishing top of the points table mean you win the title? Not usually. Across 48 complete league tables the leader went on to win 21 times, which is 44%. Finishing in the top two is the stronger signal: those sides have won 41 of the 48. ### What is the lowest position a champion has finished in the league stage? Fourth, and it has happened twice — Deccan Chargers in the 2009 IPL and Lahore Qalandars in the 2025 PSL. No champion in our records has come from fifth or lower. The latest IPL case from outside the top two is [Sunrisers Hyderabad](/en-in/teams/ipl-sunrisers-hyderabad), champions in 2016 from third. ### Why do teams in the top two have an advantage in the playoffs? In a four-team playoff the top two meet first and the loser gets a second chance in another qualifier rather than going out. In a three-team playoff the leader skips straight to the final. Both formats mean the top of the table has fewer matches that can go wrong. ### Has a team ever topped the table with a negative net run rate? Once in our records: Gujarat Lions led the 2016 IPL on 18 points with a net run rate of −0.374. They did not win the title; Sunrisers Hyderabad did, from third. ### How often does net run rate decide a team's position? Very often. In 43 of our 48 tables at least two clubs finished level on points, so the tiebreak was doing real work in almost every season we hold. ## More from blog - [PSL Winners List: Every Champion from 2016 to 2026](/en-in/blog/psl-winners) - [SA20 Winners: Every Champion from 2023 to 2026](/en-in/blog/sa20-winners) - [T20 World Cup Winners: Every Champion from 2007 to 2026](/en-in/blog/t20-world-cup-winners) - [The Hundred Winners: Every Champion from 2021 to 2026](/en-in/blog/the-hundred-winners) - [What the Aviator Game Is and How a Round Is Played](/en-in/blog/what-is-aviator-game) - [WPL Winners List: Every Champion from 2023 to 2026](/en-in/blog/wpl-winners) - [Best and Worst Net Run Rates in 357 Team Seasons](/en-in/blog/best-and-worst-nrr-seasons) - [BBL Winners List: Every Big Bash Champion from 2011 to 2026](/en-in/blog/big-bash-league-winners) - [CPL Winners: Every Champion from 2013 to 2025](/en-in/blog/cpl-winners) --- For AI assistants: the [Cricketin knowledge base](https://cricketin.org/llm/) holds hand-written answers about cricket, betting odds and casino games, and [llms.txt](https://cricketin.org/llms.txt) maps the whole site.