Welcome to the Yushodex

About the Yushodex

Introduction

At its core, the Yushodex is an attempt to roughly measure the cumulative accomplishments of a rikishi’s career in a single, easy-to-compare number. In essence, it’s a quick way to quantify all of the different things that make for a successful sumo career, balancing winning ability with longevity and rewarding rikishi for achieving milestones like promotions, special prizes, and kinboshi.

Many pundits older and wiser than I have debated on the different ways one can measure “greatness” in the context of evaluating legends in sport, and at the outset, I want to emphasize that the Yushodex is not intended to identify the “best” rikishi ever. Indeed, there are a number of rikishi that I think are or were probably better than their Yushodex ranking would suggest, just as there are a number whose legacies are likely overstated by their placement here.

Rather, the question I am interested in answering is “if you assign all of the relevant elements of a rikishi’s resume a numerical point value and weight them in an effort to balance longevity with peak ability, which wrestlers amassed the most points across their careers?”

I believe that such a ranking can be valuable for a couple of reasons. First, unlike many other sports, sumo does not have a wealth of statistical metrics by which one can compare wrestlers. There is only one relevant stat recorded in each match (a win or a loss), and the only official accolades rikishi can accumulate are:

Thus, outside of the upper echelons of rikishi who have won multiple yusho, it can be very difficult to compare and evaluate rikishi with less lofty peaks and have a much shorter list of accomplishments.

For example, how do you compare a wrestler who made it to Ozeki, but for only a brief stint and with a disappointing career thereafter, against a longtime san’yaku mainstay who could never quite finish off an Ozeki run. What about two career maegashira wrestlers, one whose streaky runs of form saw them rack up kinboshi and a few electric jun-yusho performances and the other who stuck around on the Makuuchi banzuke for a decade but never seriously vied for the Cup?

The aim of the Yushodex, in broad strokes, is to try to provide a quantifiable starting point for some of these discussions.

Second, although the fact that sumo does have only limited sabermetric potential (especially given the fact that some of the most important “stats” aren’t quantifiable at all, like promotions to the elite ranks) is a constraint on career evaluation, it does offer some promise for a project such as this. Namely, it can be easier to make cross-generational comparisons since these metrics have remained relatively static over the years, especially when compared to other sports that have seen more substantive change such that statistical baselines vary widely in different eras (e.g., the introduction of the 3-point shot in basketball, the Dead Ball Era in baseball, or the shift in offensive philosophy and officiating in American football over time). 

Although the structure of sumo has remained largely unchanged over the last ~70 years, there has undoubtedly been great variation in terms of how stiff the competition was from era to era, which the Yushodex (as currently implemented) is not equipped to distinguish between.  Accordingly, the numbers and rankings here should always be considered within the relevant context of a given rikishi’s era and competition. They are tools to aid in thoughtfully evaluating rikishi, not replacements for those evaluations themselves.

In a nutshell, sumo has a small yet statistically convoluted set of key measures by which we evaluate rikishi, and those metrics have undergone very little shift since the advent of the six-basho schedule in 1958 (the “Modern Era”). The Yushodex seeks to translate the nuances of a rikishi’s career progression into a cumulative score by which they can be compared to their peers, both today and throughout history.

The Formula

Now, with that in the way of background established, what about the actual formula itself? The actual breakdown is quite simple:

Now to explain what all of that means, and why the point values are what they are. The backbone of the formula is simply wins, with each top-division victory worth one point. Everything else can be thought of as bonus points weighted to the relative difficulty of a given achievement.

First, and most prominently, a yusho is worth a whopping 45 bonus points. I played around with a few different values for this, but eventually settled on 45, or the total wins you would achieve if you fought for an entire year in Makuuchi at a .500 level without missing a match (or, put differently, it’s equivalent to three basho’s worth of victories, assuming you were to win every match).

The goal here was to strike a sweet spot between making sure a yusho was valuable enough to provide a meaningful boost (basically gaining a year’s worth of wins for the average rikishi) and real separation for the greatest champions without rendering it the end-all, be-all (i.e., I didn’t want the Yushodex to merely mirror the list of most career yusho). 

Second, we have jun-yusho, which are worth 15 points (⅓ of the value for a yusho) and which are possibly the most annoying of all sumo accomplishments to quantify. Some may (not unjustifiably) object to including jun-yusho at all, given they are not an official statistic and can vary widely in quality (e.g., from a 5-way 10-5 tie to a 14-1 playoff loss).

But I think they’re relevant for at least two distinct reasons:

Next, we have the kachi koshi bonuses. Ordinarily, recording a winning score for a given tournament rewards you with one additional bonus point, effectively giving you an extra win’s worth of points for your troubles. Since the formula is purely cumulative (i.e., it does not punish you for losses), this is a helpful way to provide an additional incentive for getting to the 8-win threshold without overinflating the “accomplishment” of going 8-7. 

Providing a kachi koshi bonus is also a neat way to quantify promotions without blindly rewarding poor performances at the elite ranks. This has been done by adding additional bonus points for each kachi koshi achieved while at a given rank, scaled to match the hierarchy of the san’yaku. So, for example, a 9-6 performance will net 10 points for a Maegashira wrestler (9 wins + 1 KK bonus point), 11 points for a Komusubi (9 wins + 1 KK bonus point + 1 Ko bonus point), all the way up to 14 points for a Yokozuna (9 wins + 1 KK bonus point + 4 Yo bonus points). However, a 6-9 performance at all 3 ranks would be worth an identical 6 points.

This system has a few advantages over trying to reward promotions in a different way. First, it does not treat all promotions as equal: having a blanket n-point bonus for reaching Ozeki would equally reward all who reach that rank, regardless of if they stay there for years or are immediately demoted. To get around that would require implementing some kind of additional point bonus for longevity at the rank, which then has the less ideal effect of awarding points for basho where a rikishi posts a losing record or is absent entirely, merely by virtue of their holding an elite rank.

Explicitly tying scaled bonuses to winning records, however, solves both problems: it allows rikishi to quickly rack up points when they perform well as a member of the san’yaku and to be rewarded for longevity at their rank relative to their peers, but it prevents unnecessarily rewarding frequently kadoban Ozeki, Yokozuna who take extended leaves of absences, or Sekiwake and Komusubi who yo-yo between the lower san’yaku and the rest of the joi.

Finally, we have a few additional small bonuses for the remaining accolades: sansho and kinboshi. Special prizes come with a bonus of 3 points (as they are most certainly more notable accomplishments than merely achieving a kachi koshi), while kinboshi award just a single point as they represent just one match (in effect doubling the points haul for that win). Both of these are marginal ways for lower-ranked rikishi who aren’t regularly in yusho contention to supplement their scores. 

For a quick example of the formula in action, let’s take a look at Aonishiki’s 12-3, yusho-winning performance in the July 2026 basho. His 12 victories earned him 12 points, while achieving a kachi koshi at sekiwake earned him an additional 3 bonus points. He also received 45 points for winning the yusho and 3 additional bonus points for his sansho, producing a total of 63 points.

Limitations

Obviously, this ranking system is far from perfect, and any sumo fan worth their salt likely has their own ideas about how they would go about putting together such a system. That being said, I do want to explicitly flag a few acknowledged limitations/caveats to the results in the Yushodex:

Reading the Yushodex

Finally, eagle-eyed observers will have noticed that there’s a great deal of additional data displayed in the Yushodex that is not included in the formula above. While I’ve thought about integrating some of these numbers into the formula proper at some point, for now, they are there merely to help contextualize the raw numbers. For example, they help the viewer to quickly distinguish how two rikishi with identical scores may have followed vastly different paths to reaching that number. 

Also, given that part of the goal of this project was to give sumo fans a helpful resource to compare data for rikishi’s careers at a glance, I thought it was a neat way to potentially introduce some relatively simple statistics into the lexicon and make them easily accessible to all. 

Here’s a quick rundown of the stats not included in the rankings:

As for the other formatting (highlights indicate highest rank achieved):

-Chiyomomo