Jansher Khan
Nour El Sherbini
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jansher Khan leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jansher Khan at #3 and Nour El Sherbini at #8.
The case for Jansher Khan
The most successful player in World Championship history on the men's side, with eight titles between 1987 and 1996 — one more than Jahangir managed — plus six consecutive British Opens from 1992 to 1997, for fourteen majors. He also accumulated the highest career total of professional tour titles in the men's game, widely cited at 99. No relation to the Khan dynasty of Nawakille despite the name, he lost his first six meetings with Jahangir and then rebuilt his game around retrieval and patience until he had turned the rivalry around; across 37 career meetings the two finished within a match of each other. His style was the purest expression of squash as attrition: extraordinary court coverage, minimal risk, and a willingness to let rallies run until the opponent broke. Injuries and the demands of that method shortened his peak, but between 1992 and 1996 he was effectively unbeatable and closed out Pakistan's four-decade grip on the sport.
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.