Cricket has never lacked for genius. Long before trophies and trending hashtags, the sport produced men whose names alone could fill stadiums and silence dressing rooms. But it was only in 2004 that the International Cricket Council (ICC) formalized a single, sport-wide answer to the question every fan argues about each December: who was the best cricketer of this particular year? The award, known as the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy for the ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year, has been handed out every year since — except, notably, the 2025 edition, which had not yet been announced as of June 2026, the date this piece is being written.
Before 2004, no single “Cricketer of the Year” award existed in the same global, cross-format sense. Instead, the closest equivalents were honors like Wisden’s Cricketer of the Year (which names five players a year, dating back to 1889) and informal consensus among fans, journalists, and historians about who “owned” a given era. So this blog does something slightly different for the pre-2004 decades: rather than forcing a single name onto years where no such single award existed, it identifies the cricketer who, by broad historical consensus, defined that period — the Bradmans, the Sobers, the Tendulkars before the ICC era began rewarding them annually. Then, from 2004 onward, it follows the official ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year winners precisely, year by year, all the way to the most recent confirmed winner: Jasprit Bumrah for 2024.
This is the story of dominance, in chronological order.
The Pre-Award Era: Cricket’s Defining Figures Before 2004
Don Bradman — The Man Who Redefined “Good”
No history of cricket excellence can begin anywhere else. Sir Donald Bradman’s Test batting average of 99.94 remains, nearly a century after he debuted, the most famous statistic in all of sport — not just cricket. Bradman played for Australia from 1928 to 1948, and across that span he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that statisticians still use him as the baseline example of an outlier impossible to replicate in any sport; analysts have noted that no other athlete in any major sport outperforms the next-best player in their field by a margin remotely close to the gap between Bradman’s average and that of the second-best batsman in history. He scored centuries at a rate no one before or since has matched, including a Test triple-century scored in a single day’s play against England, an innings still cited as one of the most ferociously efficient run-scoring displays the format has ever witnessed. When Wisden conducted its global poll in 2000 to name the five greatest cricketers of the twentieth century, Bradman was the only player to receive a unanimous vote, with the panel’s consensus described by contemporaries as so overwhelming that no one even dared to be contrarian about the top spot. He is famous not for one extraordinary year but for an entire career that statistically should not have been possible — he needed only four runs in his final Test innings to finish with a career average of exactly 100, and was famously bowled for a duck instead, a final twist that has become cricket folklore in its own right and somehow only deepened the mythology around him.
Garfield Sobers — The Five-in-One Cricketer
If Bradman represented batting perfected, Sir Garfield Sobers represented the all-rounder perfected. Playing for the West Indies from 1954 to 1974, Sobers did everything: he batted left-handed with murderous power, bowled fast-medium, bowled wrist-spin, bowled orthodox left-arm spin, and fielded brilliantly close to the wicket, often shifting between two or three of these roles within a single match. Bradman himself called him a “five-in-one cricketer,” and that single phrase has followed Sobers through history ever since. He held the world record for the highest individual Test score for 36 years after his unbeaten 365 against Pakistan in 1958, and his 254 against Australia in 1971-72, playing for a World XI side, was, in Bradman’s own words, the best innings he had ever witnessed on Australian soil — a straight drive from that innings reportedly struck the sightscreen at the MCG almost before the bowler, Dennis Lillee, had even completed his follow-through. Sobers was knighted in 1975 at Barbados’s Garrison Racecourse, barely a mile from where he was born, and in the same 2000 Wisden poll that crowned Bradman, he finished second, appearing on ninety of the hundred ballots cast — a level of consensus matched by almost no one else in the history of the sport. It is no accident that the modern ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year trophy bears his name; the ICC could find no better symbol of complete cricketing excellence to attach to its newest, most prestigious individual honor.
Sir Jack Hobbs — The Master
English opening batsman Jack Hobbs, who played first-class cricket from 1905 to 1934, is remembered as one of the most prolific run-scorers the sport has ever produced, finishing with more first-class centuries and more first-class runs than any cricketer in history, a record that remains untouched and, given the modern international calendar’s structure, is widely considered unbreakable. His technique against the rising new ball set a standard that opening batsmen are still measured against today, particularly his judgment of length and his footwork against fast bowling on uncovered, often unpredictable pitches. He remains, alongside Pelham Warner, one of only two players ever named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year on more than one occasion, a rare distinction in an award that, by design, almost never repeats a name.
Sir Viv Richards — The Most Feared Man in Cricket
Through the late 1970s and 1980s, no batsman was more terrifying to bowl at than Sir Vivian Richards. The West Indian captain played without a helmet for almost his entire career, swaggering to the crease with a chewing-gum nonchalance that masked one of the most ferocious eyes for a cricket ball the sport has ever seen. His strike rate in an era of defensive Test batting was extraordinary for the time, built on a willingness to attack even the fastest bowling in the world on the front foot, and he was central to the West Indies side that dominated world cricket for the better part of two decades, going undefeated in Test series for an astonishing stretch of years that remains one of the longest unbeaten runs by any national team in the sport’s history. He, too, was named among Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Century in 2000, the only specialist batsman from the Caribbean to receive the honor.
Shane Warne — The Man Who Resurrected Leg-Spin
Few cricketers have changed how an entire skill is perceived the way Shane Warne changed leg-spin bowling. His delivery to Mike Gatting in the 1993 Ashes — a ball that pitched outside leg stump and somehow clipped off stump, leaving Gatting visibly bewildered as he walked off — was instantly nicknamed the “Ball of the Century” and announced to the cricketing world that wrist-spin was not a dying art but a weapon capable of winning Test matches outright on its own. Warne went on to take more Test wickets than any bowler in history at the time of his retirement, and he did it with a showmanship and competitive cunning, including a relentless and often theatrical battle of psychology with opposing batsmen, that made him box-office even on the dullest of pitches and flattest of decks. He was the only specialist bowler among Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Century, and the only one of the five who was still an active international player at the time of that vote, a fact that made his inclusion all the more remarkable given the achievement was being measured against a full century of completed careers.
Sachin Tendulkar — The Boy Who Carried a Billion Dreams
By the time the ICC’s annual award was created in 2004, Sachin Tendulkar had already spent fifteen years as the most scrutinized batsman alive. He made his Test debut for India at sixteen years old in 1989, taking blows to the helmet from hostile Pakistani pace bowling in only his second series and refusing to retire hurt, an early sign of the temperament that would define his career. Over the following decade and a half he became the standard against which every young Indian batsman would be measured, his compact technique and seemingly limitless hunger for runs making him the face of a nation’s cricketing identity at a time when India’s economy and global profile were also rapidly expanding. His fame in India bordered on religious devotion, with entire towns reportedly going silent during his innings and streets emptying when he walked out to bat. Long before the ICC trophy existed to formally recognize him, Tendulkar was already, by national and global consensus, the face of batting excellence entering the new millennium — a status the ICC era would later confirm directly, in 2010, when he was finally given the sport’s newest and most official seal of approval.
The ICC Era: One Trophy, One Winner, Every Year Since 2004
In 2004, the ICC introduced a structured set of annual awards, selected by an academy of voters that includes current national team captains, members of the elite panel of ICC umpires and referees, and a panel of respected former players and cricket journalists. The headline prize — the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy for ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year — has been cricket’s closest thing to an Oscar for Best Actor ever since. Here is every winner, and why they earned it.
2004 — Rahul Dravid
The inaugural winner was India’s Rahul Dravid, nicknamed “The Wall” for an immovable defensive technique that frustrated bowling attacks across the world. Dravid’s calm, unflashy excellence — built on concentration rather than flair — made him the perfect first laureate for an award meant to recognize consistency at the very top of the sport. His batting in 2004 included long, grinding centuries in difficult overseas conditions, the exact kind of patient match-saving and match-winning innings that had defined his entire career to that point. Dravid was never cricket’s most thrilling watch, but he was, by the testimony of bowlers across the world, the hardest batsman in the world to actually dismiss, and that quality alone made him an obvious and uncontroversial choice to be the very first name etched onto the new trophy. He became the award’s first recipient and the first of what would eventually be five Indian winners over the following two decades.
A Note on the Voting Process
Before continuing through the list, it’s worth understanding how this award is actually decided, since it shapes why certain names appear and others don’t. The Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy is determined by a voting academy of fifty-six individuals, a number expanded from an initial fifty in the award’s first year. That academy includes the ten current captains of Test-playing nations, eighteen members of the ICC’s elite panel of umpires and match referees, and twenty-eight additional voters drawn from respected former players and senior cricket journalists. In the rare event of a tie, as happened in 2005, the trophy is shared between the joint winners rather than decided by any tiebreaker. This structure means the award reflects not just statistical output but the informed judgment of people who have actually played against, officiated, or closely covered the candidates throughout the year — a deliberately broad-based form of peer review rather than a pure numbers exercise.
2005 — Jacques Kallis and Andrew Flintoff (Shared)
The 2005 award was split between two very different kinds of excellence, the only tie in the trophy’s history. South Africa’s Jacques Kallis, one of the greatest all-rounders the format has ever produced, combined a granite defense with the ability to bowl genuine pace, making him a statistical phenomenon across his entire career — a player whose final numbers would eventually place him among the very small handful of cricketers to have scored more than 10,000 Test runs while also taking close to 300 Test wickets. England’s Andrew Flintoff, meanwhile, was the central figure of one of the most celebrated Ashes series in history — 2005 — bowling with hostile pace and reverse swing and batting with brute power as England won back the urn from Australia after nearly two decades of disappointment, with Flintoff finishing his qualifying period for the award having scored 633 runs at an average above 57 and taken 16 wickets, numbers that captured the imagination of an entire cricketing nation that summer. The image of Flintoff consoling a devastated Brett Lee after the legendary Edgbaston Test, win and warmth combined in a single gesture, became one of the defining sporting photographs of the decade.
2006 — Ricky Ponting
Australian captain Ricky Ponting picked up the first of his two Sir Garfield Sobers Trophies in 2006, a reflection of his ferocious form at the crease and his leadership of an Australian side that remained the most feared team in the world. Ponting’s pull shot and cover drive were among the most technically admired strokes of his generation, struck with a compact, almost violent efficiency that bowlers across the world struggled to contain. As captain, he oversaw an Australian team that had inherited the mantle of the great late-1990s and early-2000s side and continued to dominate world cricket with a ruthlessness that bordered on intimidation, and his individual batting form that year, including several match-defining centuries, made him the standout candidate by a wide margin.
2007 — Ricky Ponting
Ponting repeated as winner in 2007, becoming the award’s first multiple recipient and setting a precedent that only Mitchell Johnson and Virat Kohli would later match. His continued dominance with the bat, paired with Australia’s continued success on the field — including a near-flawless 2007 Cricket World Cup campaign in which Australia did not lose a single match — made him the only realistic choice for a second consecutive year. Ponting’s back-to-back wins reflected a period in which Australian cricket simply had no peer, and its captain stood as the most complete batsman-leader in the world.
2008 — Shivnarine Chanderpaul
West Indies batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul, famous for one of the most unorthodox batting stances in the sport’s history — almost facing the bowler head-on rather than side-on, with an open-chested setup that coaching manuals would never recommend — won in 2008 on the back of extraordinary consistency during a difficult period for West Indies cricket, when the team around him was often struggling badly. Chanderpaul’s technique was often mocked by purists who valued classical form, but it produced results that silenced critics, and his win demonstrated that the award rewarded substance over style, a principle that would echo through several later winners as well.
2009 — Mitchell Johnson
Australian fast bowler Mitchell Johnson claimed his first Sobers Trophy in 2009, a year in which his left-arm pace, capable of touching speeds that unsettled even the world’s best batsmen, made him one of the most feared bowlers on the circuit. Johnson’s ability to generate extra bounce and reverse swing at high pace gave Australia a genuine match-winning weapon throughout the year, and his slingy, low-arm action made him notoriously difficult for batsmen to pick early, often resulting in deliveries that arrived several miles per hour faster than the eye initially expected.
2010 — Sachin Tendulkar
In 2010, the cricketing world’s longest-running love affair finally received its ICC validation: Sachin Tendulkar won the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy. It was the year he became the first man in history to score a double-century in a One Day International, an innings of 200 not out against South Africa that redefined what was thought possible in limited-overs batting at a time when even a single century was still considered a match-defining achievement. By this point Tendulkar was already a national icon in India bordering on deity status, and the award simply confirmed what billions of fans had believed for years — that he remained, even past his thirty-seventh birthday, the standard-bearer for batting excellence on the planet, a remarkable feat of longevity for a player already two decades into international cricket.
2011 — Jonathan Trott
England’s Jonathan Trott won in 2011, a reflection of the dependable, high-volume run-scoring that anchored England’s rise to the top of the Test rankings during that period, a rise that included a dominant home Ashes series victory. Trott’s methodical approach at the crease — fidgety, deliberate, almost ritualistic in his guard-marking and preparation before every single ball — became one of the most recognizable sights in the sport, occasionally to the visible irritation of opposing bowlers, and his consistency was central to England’s success in that era as the team built toward its eventual status as the world’s top-ranked Test side.
2012 — Kumar Sangakkara
Sri Lankan batsman Kumar Sangakkara, widely regarded as one of the most elegant wicketkeeper-batsmen the sport has produced, won in 2012. Sangakkara combined technical purity with extraordinary scoring rates across formats, and his ability to switch seamlessly between aggressive stroke-play and patient accumulation made him one of the most complete batsmen of his generation, equally capable of grinding out a defensive double-century or taking apart an attack in a limited-overs chase. He would go on to win the award again the following year, becoming, alongside MS Dhoni, one of the few players to win it more than once outside of the Ponting-Johnson-Kohli trio, a reflection of the sustained excellence he maintained across an unusually long international career.
2013 — Michael Clarke
Australian captain Michael Clarke won the 2013 award on the back of a stellar year with the bat, including a sequence of major innings — among them a Test triple-century against India — that underlined both his class as a batsman and his value as a leader during a transitional period for Australian cricket, as the team rebuilt following the retirements of several senior players from the Ponting era. Clarke’s elegant timing through the off side and his ability to play match-defining innings under pressure made him the standout candidate for that calendar year, even as the team around him experienced a period of relative instability.
2014 — Mitchell Johnson
Johnson collected his second trophy in 2014, riding one of the most destructive fast-bowling spells in modern Ashes history during Australia’s 5-0 series sweep of England. His pace and aggression during that series intimidated England’s batting lineup to a degree rarely seen in the modern game, with several batsmen visibly hurried and unsettled by deliveries arriving at speeds that pushed the upper limits of what fast bowling had produced in the preceding decade, and his reputation as one of the most fearsome bowlers of his generation was cemented by this second win, placing him alongside Ponting as the only multiple winners at that point in the award’s history.
2015 — Steve Smith
Australian batsman Steve Smith, known for one of the most unusual yet ruthlessly effective techniques in the modern game — a pronounced shuffle across the crease before the ball is even bowled, followed by an ability to manufacture scoring options from almost any delivery — won in 2015. Smith’s idiosyncratic method produced staggering volumes of runs across that year, and his rise to the top of the world batting rankings marked the beginning of a period in which he would be considered, alongside Virat Kohli, one of the two best batsmen alive, a rivalry that would come to define Test batting discourse for the remainder of the decade.
2016 — Ravichandran Ashwin
Indian spinner Ravichandran Ashwin became the third Indian to win the award in 2016, a year in which his off-spin bowling, combined with constant tactical innovation and useful lower-order batting that occasionally produced match-saving centuries, made him the most impactful bowler in world cricket. Ashwin’s ability to set up batsmen with subtle variations in pace, angle, and flight — rather than relying purely on raw turn — distinguished him as one of the most cerebral bowlers of his generation, and his dominance on home soil that year was a significant factor in India’s continued rise as the most formidable Test side in the world.
2017 — Virat Kohli
Virat Kohli won his first Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy in 2017, the year his transformation from talented stroke-maker into the most ruthless run-accumulator in the world was fully complete. Kohli’s combination of aggressive intent, supreme fitness, and an almost obsessive hunger for centuries made him India’s most dominant batsman since Tendulkar, and his fierce on-field intensity as captain added a competitive edge that redefined what fans expected from a modern Indian cricket captain. Across formats that year, Kohli posted an extraordinary string of centuries, including a sequence of double-hundreds in Test cricket that underlined both his appetite and his fitness, and he became the first player to be honored as both the overall Cricketer of the Year and the ODI Player of the Year in the same twelve-month period under the award’s modern structure.
2018 — Virat Kohli
Kohli repeated as winner in 2018, becoming only the third player, alongside Ponting and Johnson, to win the award in consecutive years. His batting across formats that year, including standout performances in difficult overseas conditions in England and South Africa, silenced long-standing criticism that Indian batsmen could not perform consistently outside the subcontinent. By the end of 2018, Kohli was unambiguously the best batsman in the world across all three formats simultaneously, and his back-to-back wins placed him in a tier with only Ponting in the trophy’s history — a level of sustained dominance that many felt was simply a continuation of the standard he had already set as the world’s number-one ranked batsman across formats.
2019 — Ben Stokes
England all-rounder Ben Stokes won the 2019 award for a year that will likely be remembered as one of the greatest individual sporting years in cricket history. Stokes played the decisive role in England’s first-ever Cricket World Cup triumph, hitting the winning runs in a Super Over in one of the most dramatic finals ever played, a match that went down to the very last ball not once but twice. Only weeks later, he produced an unbeaten century at Headingley against Australia that is widely considered one of the greatest innings in Ashes history, single-handedly dragging England to an impossible victory from a near-hopeless position after the team had been bowled out cheaply in the first innings. Few individual years in the sport have combined that level of pressure, drama, and delivery, and Stokes’s win felt, to most observers, like one of the most deserved in the award’s history regardless of category.
2020 — No Award Given
No Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy was awarded for 2020. The global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic severely curtailed the international cricket calendar that year, and the ICC did not hand out its full suite of annual awards in the usual format, leaving 2020 as a gap year in the trophy’s history.
2021 — Shaheen Shah Afridi
Pakistani fast bowler Shaheen Shah Afridi won in 2021, a year in which his towering height, generating steep bounce, paired with genuine left-arm pace, made him one of the most dangerous new-ball bowlers in the world. Afridi’s performances, including a spell against India in the T20 World Cup that year in which he dismantled the top of India’s batting order in the tournament’s most high-profile fixture, announced him as a generational talent and the face of Pakistan’s pace-bowling future.
2022 — Babar Azam
Pakistan captain Babar Azam won the 2022 award after a year in which he became the only batsman in the world to cross 2,000 runs across all formats in a single calendar year. Babar’s technique, often compared favorably to Kohli’s for its classical elegance and shot selection, combined with a remarkable conversion rate of fifties into hundreds, made him statistically the most prolific batsman on the planet that year. His captaincy also delivered Pakistan a near-perfect ODI year, losing only a single match across the format.
2023 — Pat Cummins
Australian fast bowler and captain Pat Cummins won in 2023, a year capped by leading Australia to victory in the World Test Championship final and then to the Cricket World Cup title later in the year, defeating host nation India in the final in Ahmedabad in front of more than 100,000 partisan fans. Cummins’s calm, methodical captaincy under extraordinary pressure, combined with his own consistently excellent bowling, made him the standout leader-performer of the cricketing year.
2024 — Jasprit Bumrah
The most recent confirmed winner, announced in January 2025 for performances across the 2024 calendar year, is Indian fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah. Bumrah’s slingy, unorthodox bowling action — generating pace and accuracy from an action that defies conventional fast-bowling technique — made him the most feared bowler in world cricket that year. He finished 2024 as the leading wicket-taker in Test cricket worldwide with 71 wickets at an average under 15, the best bowling average for that volume of wickets in the format’s history, and he was the spearhead of India’s title-winning campaign at the T20 World Cup, finishing as that tournament’s leading wicket-taker. Bumrah also won the ICC Men’s Test Cricketer of the Year award for 2024, making him the fifth Indian to win the sport’s top individual prize, following Dravid, Tendulkar, Ashwin, and Kohli, and becoming the first specialist fast bowler from India ever to receive the honor.
What About 2025 and 2026?
As of June 2026, the ICC has not yet announced its Men’s Cricketer of the Year for the 2025 calendar year. The award is traditionally announced in late January following the year it covers, after a shortlist process that typically runs through late December and early January. Reports circulating in the cricket press during late 2025 speculated on contenders including India’s new all-format captain Shubman Gill, England’s Joe Root — who finished 2025 as the leading run-scorer in Test cricket worldwide — and Pakistan’s Babar Azam, but none of this should be mistaken for an official result. Several fact-checks during this period explicitly debunked viral social media claims about nominations and winners that had not actually been confirmed by the ICC. Until the official announcement is made, no individual can be accurately described as the ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year for 2025, and any list claiming otherwise should be treated with skepticism. The 2026 award, covering the current calendar year, will not be decided until after this year concludes.
The Pattern Behind the Names
Looking across this list — from Bradman’s impossible average to Bumrah’s record-setting bowling average two decades into the next millennium — a few patterns emerge. Batting excellence dominates the early decades of the award and the unofficial pre-2004 era almost entirely, but the more recent years of the official ICC trophy show an increasing willingness to recognize bowlers and all-rounders: Bumrah, Cummins, Afridi, Johnson, and Stokes all won specifically because the sport’s voters recognized that a genuinely transformative bowling or all-round year could be just as decisive as a batting masterclass. India, helped by the sheer depth and visibility of its cricketing infrastructure, has produced more winners of the official ICC award than any other nation, with five champions across two decades. Australia, fueled by a culture that has always demanded ruthless competitive excellence, comes a close second when you include both the official era and the unofficial Bradman-Warne-Ponting lineage that preceded it.
What never changes, across a century and a half of the sport, is the basic shape of greatness that gets rewarded: someone who didn’t merely play well, but who, for one defined stretch of time, made the rest of the world’s best players look like they were playing a slightly different, slower-paced game. Bradman did it for two decades. Sobers did it across five disciplines at once. Stokes did it across six unforgettable weeks in 2019. Bumrah is doing it right now, with a bowling action that statisticians still cannot fully explain and batsmen still cannot consistently read.
Cricket’s history of singular greatness is really a history of moments when one player simply refused to be ordinary for long enough that the entire sport had to stop and notice. That, more than any trophy, is what “Cricketer of the Year” has always actually meant.
A Quick-Reference Timeline
For readers who want the names without the narrative, here is the condensed list of the official ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year (Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy) winners, alongside the unofficial giants who defined the decades before the award existed.
Before 2004, the sport’s defining figures by broad historical consensus included Don Bradman through the 1930s and 1940s, Garfield Sobers through the 1950s, 1960s, and into the early 1970s, Jack Hobbs in the earlier part of the twentieth century, Viv Richards through the late 1970s and 1980s, Shane Warne through the 1990s, and Sachin Tendulkar bridging the 1990s into the 2000s.
From the official award’s creation onward, the winners run as follows: 2004, Rahul Dravid. 2005, shared between Jacques Kallis and Andrew Flintoff. 2006, Ricky Ponting. 2007, Ricky Ponting again. 2008, Shivnarine Chanderpaul. 2009, Mitchell Johnson. 2010, Sachin Tendulkar. 2011, Jonathan Trott. 2012, Kumar Sangakkara. 2013, Michael Clarke. 2014, Mitchell Johnson again. 2015, Steve Smith. 2016, Ravichandran Ashwin. 2017, Virat Kohli. 2018, Virat Kohli again. 2019, Ben Stokes. 2020, no award due to the pandemic-disrupted calendar. 2021, Shaheen Shah Afridi. 2022, Babar Azam. 2023, Pat Cummins. 2024, Jasprit Bumrah. And 2025, as of this writing in June 2026, still pending official announcement.
It is a list that spans wrist-spinners and Test Wall-builders, World Cup heroes and bowling outliers, captains who led from the front and batsmen who simply refused to get out. Each one, in their own year, was — by the closest thing cricket has to an objective global consensus — the best there was. And somewhere in the closing months of 2026, the list will grow by one more name, for a year that, at the time of writing, is still being played.
