‘Shah Rukh Khan would cry in the bathroom over KKR losses, asked him to change jersey colour,’ says numerologist: ‘Now they have 3 IPL trophies’

The IPL hasn’t entirely been a positive experience for Shah Rukh, especially to begin with. The team was at the bottom of the table in the initial seasons, which the co-owner of the team, Juhi Chawla, chalked up to the black in jersey colour. In the 2014 documentary Living with KKR, she recalled, “After we came back from South Africa with our famous losing streak, Juhi, suddenly, tells me ‘I am superstitious about black as a colour and I think black is unlucky for KKR.” However, Juhi said that both Shah Rukh and her husband Jay dismissed her concerns as nonsense.

However, she claimed she persisted, “I had something about that black. I was like ‘this colour is not contributing to the energy of the team and when things were really bad, I mean, I really came down hard on this. I said ‘no, we have to change the color, not black’.” After this season, the team changed its colour from black to purple.

In the same documentary, Shah Rukh spoke about how he was devastated to see the crowd at a Mumbai stadium boo him after his team lost — the same crowd that had always cheered him on as a movie star.

He said, “I have never wanted to be a part of IPL for personal success. As a matter of fact, I think, maybe, it lends to negatives in my career. I had never been booed in a stadium. I can walk into a crowd of a lakh people, sling a guitar around my neck and people would cheer me on. Sometimes, I go to stadiums here where I am booed and I think is this the same country where I am a big movie star?”

Joy Bhattacharjya, who was a Team Director at KKR during that time, spoke about how KKR losing a match against MI (Mumbai Indians) in 2008 at Wankhede Stadium affected Shah Rukh after he was booed by the crowd. “He wasn’t devastated because we lost, but because of the way the city he had adopted, and been a part of for 20 years, the way they booed him,” he said.

The first match of the Indian Premier League was held in 2008, but it wasn’t until 2012 that KKR won its first title. The team clinched its second win in 2014, and their third title victory was in 2024.