Cricketer of the year
Cricket’s player of the year since 2006, picked again by the numbers
Harry Kane won the Ballon d’Or in London this week, the first Englishman to take it in 25 years, picked by a panel of journalists who had watched his goals pile up all season.
Cricket has had its own version since 2004, the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy, voted for by an academy of journalists, broadcasters and former players with a fan vote alongside. So we went back through every year since 2006 and named the player the numbers say should have won. Our pick is the player our ratings say added most to his sides across Tests, ODIs and T20Is between the Full Member nations over the same voting year. Set beside the ICC’s winners, the two have named the same man 8 times in the 18 awards since 2006.
The gap comes down to the difference between a highlight reel and a ledger: the voters remember the afternoons that won trophies, and the ledger counts every innings and every spell across twelve months, whether anyone was watching or not.
The years the voters and our ratings agree
The agreements make a fine list in their own right, running from Kumar Sangakkara in 2012 and Michael Clarke in 2013, through Steve Smith in 2015 and Ravichandran Ashwin in 2016, to Virat Kohli in 2017 and 2018, Babar Azam in 2022 and Jasprit Bumrah in 2024.
Kohli is the only player to win the trophy twice and top our ratings twice, and in the same two years. His 2018 was the most one-sided year of the whole run, with Jason Holder a distant second in our ratings.
What those years share is a player who owned the calendar. Kohli’s 2017 took in all three formats, with big runs in Tests and ODIs alike. When the best player in the world also produces the biggest moments, the reel and the ledger tell the same story.
Sri Lanka’s one award and Australia’s seven
Ricky Ponting won the ICC award for 2006 and 2007, and both were great years for him, with heavy runs in Tests and ODIs and hundreds in both formats each time. Our ratings went for Muttiah Muralitharan both times, who bowled sides out in Tests and kept taking wickets in ODIs in both years.
Mitchell Johnson won it for 2009 and 2014, and his 2014 brought 59 Test wickets in only eight Tests. The numbers still prefer Kumar Sangakkara that year, who made runs in all three formats, a Test triple hundred among them.
That makes four years for Sri Lankans at the top of our ratings, Muralitharan twice and Sangakkara twice. The voters gave Sri Lanka one award in the 18, Sangakkara’s in 2012. Their lean ran the other way: Australians won 7 of the 18 awards, where our ratings would have given them 3. On Sri Lanka the numbers and the voters plainly disagree, and the numbers have the better case.
Sehwag against Tendulkar in 2010
The ICC chose Sachin Tendulkar for 2010, the year he made the first double hundred in ODI cricket, 200 not out against South Africa at Gwalior. The voters rewarded an innings that changed what people believed a one-day batter could do, and a story the whole game wanted to tell.
Over the whole voting year he sits third in our ratings, and it was nowhere near close. Virender Sehwag tops the list by the second-widest margin of any year in the run, in a year that included 293 against Sri Lanka at the Brabourne Stadium. In one of the clearest years of all, the voters still went with the story.
Sehwag topped our ratings for 2008 as well, which makes him one of five players to do it twice, along with Muralitharan, Sangakkara, Kohli and Babar. Nobody has done it three times.
Alastair Cook over Jonathan Trott in 2011
The voters’ pick for 2011 was Jonathan Trott, who was busy and productive in both Tests and ODIs, with a double hundred among his Test runs. Our ratings have him 12th. The man they put top is his England team-mate Alastair Cook, whose year included 766 runs in England’s Ashes win in Australia. Trott was rewarded for runs in two formats. Cook played only a handful of ODIs, but his Test runs did more for England across the year, and an Ashes won away from home sat at the heart of them.
Ben Stokes in 2019 and Virat Kohli’s decade
Ben Stokes gave English cricket two of its most famous innings in 2019. In the World Cup final he carried England to the very end with 84 not out. Later that summer his 135 not out won the Ashes Test at Headingley, an innings English cricket will be retelling for decades. The ICC chose him for those two days, and few would argue with the voters for remembering them.
Across the whole year, though, he ranks 48th in our ratings. As with Tendulkar in 2010, the voters went with the story, and over the rest of the twelve months Stokes’s cricket did not keep pace with the leaders. The top spot belongs to Babar Azam, ahead of Virat Kohli and Steve Smith, after a year in which he was prolific in all three formats.
There was no award for 2020. The ICC named Virat Kohli its cricketer of the decade instead, and our ratings very much agree: over those ten years Kohli is top by a distance, ahead of David Warner, Steve Smith, AB de Villiers and Kumar Sangakkara. In a thin year with little cricket, the calendar year 2020 alone would have gone to Stuart Broad, on Test cricket only.
Joe Root in 2021 and Pat Cummins in 2023
In 2021 the voters went for Shaheen Shah Afridi, whose opening burst beat India at the T20 World Cup. He sits well down our list. The man the numbers put top, by a distance, is Joe Root, who piled up Test runs all year.
The widest split of all was in 2023. Pat Cummins captained Australia to the World Test Championship, a retained Ashes and the World Cup, and the voters rewarded a season of trophies. As a player alone he ranks 91st in our ratings for the year, the furthest any ICC winner sits from the man the numbers put top. The trophy should have gone to Mitchell Marsh, who did more for Australia across the whole year.
Shubman Gill, Harry Brook and the race for 2026
The ICC has not yet named its cricketer of the year for 2025. Our ratings already have their man for the calendar year: Shubman Gill, with Harry Brook second, both of them all-format batters.
To 25 October, Brook leads our 2026 ratings, ahead of Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan. He has made runs in every format this year. With his ODI double hundred on 22 October he became only the second man, after Chris Gayle, to have a Test triple hundred, an ODI double hundred and a T20I hundred.
Abhishek Sharma’s challenge comes from a single format, T20Is. He has played in every one of India’s T20Is this year and been sensational, never more so than on 27 October, two days after those standings, when his 113 off 38 balls demolished New Zealand as India won the third T20I. An innings like that closes the gap, and India have five more T20Is this year, but Brook is still the favourite to finish the year top. Nobody has ever topped our ratings for a year on T20Is alone.
Who should the voters listen to?
The voters are right to love the moments, and the winners they chose all had good years. Our ratings care little for the big moments, so they often point somewhere else: Muralitharan over two seasons, Cook in 2011, Babar in 2019, Root in 2021 and Marsh in 2023 each did more for their sides across twelve months than the players who starred in the headline moments.
For 2026, Brook has been the best cricketer across all three formats, and on the year so far he should be the voters’ pick. Abhishek Sharma is close behind, though, and another performance like his 113 against New Zealand would put real pressure on Brook’s lead.
Football crowned an Englishman this week, and in cricket one of his countrymen is leading the way. If Brook holds his lead, Englishmen could hold both the Ballon d’Or and the Sobers Trophy in the same year. Abhishek has two months to write a T20 story big enough to take the second of them away.