Shubman Gill 13th, Messi 27th: What Sportspro's 100-Point Marketability Index Measures — And What It Doesn't

That Tuesday afternoon on a Chennai sports desk, two things sat in front of me: a spreadsheet and a headline. In the spreadsheet I had hand-copied the rows of the Sportspro and NorthStar Solutions Group "50 Most Marketable Athletes 2026" list. Row thirteen: Shubman Gill. Fourteen: Cristiano Ronaldo. Nineteen: Kylian Mbappe. Twenty-seven: Lionel Messi. And then, further down, eighty-three: M.S. Dhoni. Eighty-five: Virat Kohli. Ninety: Rohit Sharma.

The headline was saying something else. It was saying that an Indian cricketer's commercial appeal is bigger than Messi's and Ronaldo's. I read the rows again, then a third time. I wrote all fifty names out by hand, and the pattern showed up in a column the list never printed — the points column. The document everyone was shouting about had not released its own scores.

This report is about that empty column.

Context: what the list is, and which window it covers

Sportspro produces the ranking with NorthStar Solutions Group. This is the seventeenth annual edition, which means the exercise has run since 2026 and has been repeated seventeen times. The assessment window is stated plainly: 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2026. The "2026" label comes from that forward window, not from a retrospective of a completed season.

The scale of the process is disclosed too. 1,202 athletes across 70 sports were screened, 247 were shortlisted, and 50 made the final cut. Twenty-seven indicators and several hundred data points were applied per athlete, drawing on deal data from more than 3,000 brands. The inputs listed include social followers, viewership, search trends, sentiment and partnerships.

One name sets the benchmark. Aryna Sabalenka is ranked first, with USD 30 million in 2026 earnings and deals across Nike, Wilson, Gucci, Emirates, Audemars Piguet, Hup and Stella Artois.

For India, the substantive fact is five Indian athletes inside the top 50. Gill is the highest-placed cricketer among them, described in the list as India's Test and ODI captain.

Core: the forty-point momentum pillar is the room where this result was built

The arithmetic is open. A hundred points in total: 45 for Brand Equity, 40 for Momentum, 15 for Commercial Trajectory.

This is where the story turns. An index that assigns forty per cent of its weight to rate of growth will systematically place rising stars from large markets above global icons who have already hit their ceiling. Ronaldo and Messi sit close to the top of brand equity worldwide, which leaves them almost no room to grow. Their momentum score cannot be high, because they are already at the top. Gill operates in the largest cricket market on earth, where viewership, search and partnerships compound month on month. His momentum score will be high.

None of that makes the list wrong. It means the list is answering a different question. It asks: whose commercial graph climbed fastest across these twelve months? It does not ask: who is the biggest commercial property in the world? Those two questions have different answers, and the gap between them is the whole argument.

The second point cuts both ways. The list publishes no per-athlete totals. Nobody knows whether the margin between thirteenth and fourteenth is one point or twelve. The process is transparent enough to disclose the 45/40/15 split, and opaque enough to withhold the very margin the headline rests on.

That is familiar ground for me. Writing about injuries, the rule has always been the same — count the overs, count the spells, count the days between matches, and still hold the verdict. The scorebook does not explain the injury; it only tells you where to start looking. This list is the same object. It tells you which way the commercial gravity of Indian cricket is flowing. It does not tell you that Gill is a bigger name than Messi.

The third point drew less attention. Across the entire document there is not one batting number for Gill. No average, no strike rate, no home-away split, no record against pace. That is unsurprising — the list is not measuring cricket. But it carries a consequence worth stating plainly: this document cannot support a single sentence about how Gill bats, and anyone turning it into a sporting argument is reading the wrong file.

The fourth point is the structural story of the whole list. Five Indians in the top 50, and three more Indian names still inside the top 100 beneath them. One of those names has retired from international cricket and still sits at eighty-three. That is not merely popularity. That is market depth — India's cricket economy is large enough that its legacy brands erode slowly rather than disappear.

Which means the index is running two opposing forces against each other. The 40 momentum points pull the new star upward. The 45 brand-equity points stop the old names from falling. Gill's thirteenth place is a balance struck between those forces, not evidence of a permanent crown.

The fifth point is the most misread. This is not an earnings table. The cleanest proof is that the entire list contains exactly one earnings figure — Sabalenka's USD 30 million at the top. If it were a money ranking, the money would appear in every row. When it appears once, the list is measuring something else.

Contrarian: the striking number is 83, not 13

The world is arguing about the gap between thirteen and fourteen. To my eye, the strangest row in that table is the eighty-third.

A player who no longer plays international cricket, whose active momentum should have faded, remains among the hundred most marketable athletes on the planet. That tells you the decay rate of a legacy Indian cricket brand is extremely slow. And if decay is slow, the headroom for a rising star is narrower than it looks — he has to pass names that are still holding position after they stopped playing.

One more thing follows, and it has barely been said in this debate. The list-makers recorded their own caveat: popularity and commercial appeal may not be the same thing. That sentence sits buried under the headline. When the most sensible line in a report is not its loudest line, the cost lands on the reader, not the writer.

The second contrarian point is about risk. Forty points belong to growth rate, and growth rates never travel in straight lines. If Gill's growth normalises over the next twelve months — no bad season required, only a normal one — his position can fall sharply. The list will not be showing weakness. It will be showing deceleration.

What to watch next

Three things in the next edition. First, whether the list publishes its per-athlete scores; if it does not, the distance between thirteen and fourteen stays a guess. Second, whether Gill holds his position or slips the moment momentum flattens. Third, whether Dhoni is still inside the hundred.

The real question is not whether Gill is bigger than Messi. It is whether any index that pays forty points for growth can ever answer that question at all.