Jahangir Khan
Nour El Sherbini
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jahangir Khan leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jahangir Khan at #1 and Nour El Sherbini at #8.
The case for Jahangir Khan
The holder of the longest winning streak in professional sport: 555 consecutive matches unbeaten over five years and eight months, from a British Open final loss to Geoff Hunt in November 1981 until Ross Norman beat him in the 1986 World Open final in Toulouse. He had already won the world amateur title at 15 and the World Open at 17 in 1981, still the youngest men's world champion. He finished with six World Opens and ten consecutive British Opens from 1982 to 1991, sixteen majors in all, built on a length game so accurate and a fitness base so deep that opponents described facing him as an interrogation rather than a match. His 1983 win over Gamal Awad lasted 2 hours 46 minutes, the longest recorded competitive squash match. Son of the great Roshan Khan and nephew of Hashim, he later served as president of the World Squash Federation. No one else in squash combines that peak with that duration.
The case for Nour El Sherbini
The defining player of the Egyptian age and the youngest women's world champion in history, winning her first World Championship in 2016 at 20 after reaching the final at just 16 in 2012 — the youngest finalist ever. By the 2024-25 season she had assembled seven world titles, behind only Nicol David's record eight, plus multiple British Opens and long spells at world number one that have traded back and forth with her compatriots Raneem El Welily, Nouran Gohar and Hania El Hammamy. Her squash is the clearest statement of the modern Egyptian template: elite movement combined with holds, disguised drops and an ability to attack from positions where earlier generations would have played safe. She won world junior titles before she was 16 and has stayed at the top for more than a decade, an unusual longevity in a system that burns through prodigies, and she is the athlete most likely to carry Egypt's flag into the 2028 Olympic tournament.