IPL's Rs 230 Crore Man Says He Still Feels Like a Fraud at Practice

A report released this week confirmed what everyone suspected but nobody had put an exact number on: Virat Kohli has grossed Rs 230 crore from his association with Royal Challengers Bengaluru across 18 seasons, making him the highest earner in IPL history. Rohit Sharma sits at Rs 227.2 crore. Dhoni at Rs 200 crore. Kohli is, by every financial metric the tournament has ever produced, the IPL's most rewarded man.

Then he walked into the third edition of the RCB Innovation Lab's Indian Sports Summit in Bengaluru, sat in front of an audience, and said something that no earnings report will ever capture: he still feels like he doesn't belong.

This wasn't some rehearsed line for a brand campaign. Kohli went further — into the kind of vulnerability that Indian cricket's hyper-masculine culture almost never allows. He admitted that even now, at 37, walking into the RCB nets makes him self-conscious. Not because the bowlers are tough. Because the youngsters are watching.

Think about that for a second. A man with 542 runs at a strike rate of 164.74 this season — a man who scored a century against KKR after back-to-back ducks, becoming the first player in IPL history to do so — walks into practice worrying that a bad session will make the 22-year-olds question whether he's the real deal. That's not false modesty. That's the psychological tax of excellence. The higher the standard you set, the more terrified you are of falling below it, especially when the standard is one you created.

The most devastating admission wasn't about imposter syndrome. It was about isolation. Kohli revealed that during his years as India captain, nobody asked him the simplest question in the world: how are you doing? Not once. For almost nine years.

Nine years of carrying India's expectations across three formats, managing egos, handling press conferences, dealing with selection controversies, navigating board politics — and not a single person in his professional orbit thought to check in on the human underneath the armband. The pressure, Kohli explained, was never just about scoring runs. It was about maintaining standards, carrying expectations, and driving team culture forward, every single day, with no one to absorb the weight.

He hinted that the emotional fatigue and mental burnout from that period — roughly 2020 to 2022 — were more severe than anyone realised at the time. The lean patch, the captaincy resignation, the century drought that stretched across formats: they weren't just form slumps. They were the symptoms of a man running on fumes while the world debated whether he was finished.

The rescue, when it came, arrived from the most predictable source in Indian cricket: Rahul Dravid. Kohli credited Dravid and batting coach Vikram Rathour — both of whom served during India's coaching stint from 2021 to 2024 — with understanding what he was going through because they had lived it themselves.

Dravid, who captained India through his own period of thankless attrition, didn't just offer tactical advice. He offered recognition. He saw a man drowning in responsibility and responded not with a plan, but with the basic human decency of acknowledgment. Rathour, who had been around Indian cricket long enough to understand the silence that surrounds struggling stars, did the same. Between them, they gave Kohli what nobody else had bothered to: a space where the mask could come off.

The result? Kohli went from century-less since 2019 to scoring a hundred in the 2024 T20 World Cup final. The timeline is not a coincidence. Mental bandwidth is not a soft skill — it is the prerequisite for every other skill.

Here's where the paradox sharpens into something genuinely uncomfortable. The man who has extracted more money from the IPL than any human being alive used his platform at the summit to warn young players that the money might be the thing that destroys them.

Kohli's argument is specific: the IPL's format rewards instant gratification. Score 40 off 20 balls, collect millions, become famous. The hype, the recognition, the social media following — it all arrives before the player has learned how to play a proper forward defence on a seaming pitch. And once the comfort sets in, the drive to grind through the harder, less glamorous work evaporates. Why would you spend months working on your red-ball game when the IPL deposits eight figures into your account for twenty good balls?

He urged the next generation to commit to cricket for 10-15 years, not just the two months that pay the best. To become all-format players, not franchise specialists. To find a drive that exists independent of the money — because the money, in Kohli's experience, stops being enough the moment the runs dry up and the imposter syndrome comes knocking.

What makes all of this credible — and not just another retired-from-Tests legend lecturing from the commentary box — is that Kohli is still out there doing it. At 37, in his 18th IPL season, he's averaging 54 with a strike rate above 164. RCB are the first team into the playoffs this season. He scored 58 off 37 balls against Punjab Kings just three days ago. Whatever the imposter syndrome tells him in practice, the scoreboard doesn't agree.

And that might be the real insight buried in all of this. The imposter syndrome isn't a bug in Kohli's system — it's the feature that keeps the system running. The fear of being exposed, the paranoia about bad net sessions, the constant need to prove himself: it's the fuel. Take it away and you get a comfortable man on Rs 230 crore who has nothing left to prove. Leave it in and you get a 37-year-old who walks in after back-to-back ducks and scores a century because he's too terrified of the alternative.

Kohli told the summit to play for a larger cause. His larger cause, it turns out, has always been the same: proving to himself that he deserves to be here. Eighteen years in, the verdict is still pending. And that's exactly why he's still so dangerous.