🇮🇳 Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was born on 27 March 2011 in Tajpur, in Bihar's Samastipur district, into a family where cricket was already an unfulfilled ambition — his father Sanjiv had wanted to play seriously and did not get the chance. The son's progress through Indian cricket's age-group structure was less a climb than a series of doors blown off their hinges.

In January 2024, aged twelve years and 284 days, he made his first-class debut for Bihar against Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy — the youngest Indian first-class debutant of the modern era, comfortably younger than Yuvraj Singh had been. That October, in an Under-19 Test against Australia, he scored a hundred off 58 balls, the fastest century by an Indian in Under-19 Tests. A month later he became the youngest Twenty20 debutant in history at thirteen years and 241 days.

Two days after that debut, the Rajasthan Royals bought him at the IPL auction for ₹1.1 crore — roughly 110,000 US dollars — making him the youngest player ever to sign an IPL contract. He was thirteen.

His IPL debut came on 19 April 2025, aged fourteen years and 23 days, the youngest debutant in the league's history and the first player in it born after the tournament was founded. Facing Shardul Thakur, he hit his first ball for six and made 34 from 20. Nine days later, against Gujarat Titans, he scored 101 from 38 balls, reaching his century off 35 — the youngest centurion in IPL history at fourteen, the youngest player ever to make a Twenty20 hundred, and the fastest IPL century by an Indian, beating Yusuf Pathan's 37-ball record. His fifty had come off 17 balls. His eleven sixes equalled the Indian record for an IPL innings.

What happened afterwards says something about him. 'There were more than 500 missed calls but I switched off the phone,' he told Rahul Dravid in an interview released by the Royals. 'A lot of people approached me after the century. I kept my phone switched off for two to four days as I don't like having too many people around. Just my family and a few friends, that's enough.'

Through 2025 and into 2026 the records kept arriving: 144 from 42 balls for India A against the UAE; a 36-ball century in the Vijay Hazare Trophy that made him the youngest List A centurion in the world and broke AB de Villiers' record for the fastest List A 150; 175 from 80 balls against England in the Under-19 World Cup final in February 2026, where he was named Player of the Tournament; and an eleven-ball fifty in a Sri Lanka tri-series final — the fastest in the history of List A cricket.

The 2026 IPL was the season that made further argument impossible. Sooryavanshi finished with 776 runs at a strike rate of 237.30, taking the Orange Cap as the tournament's leading scorer. His seventy-two sixes broke Chris Gayle's fourteen-year-old record of fifty-nine — one every 4.31 balls he faced. He scored 521 of his runs inside the powerplay, the most any player has managed in the first six overs of a season, and became the fastest player ever to 1,000 IPL runs, taking 440 balls. He collected the Orange Cap, Most Valuable Player, Emerging Player, Super Striker and Super Sixes awards — the first player ever to take MVP and Emerging Player in the same season.

Kumar Sangakkara, the Royals' head coach, has described the first time he saw him bat. 'In a small side net, Jofra Archer and Sandeep Sharma were bowling with the new ball. No one wanted to bat there,' Sangakkara told Sky Sports. 'Vaibhav walked in and said, I'll bat. The sound of his bat was like a gunshot. At one point, Archer just stopped and laughed because this 14-year-old was treating him with utter disdain.'

The senior India call came in June 2026 and the debut in July, in a Twenty20 international against England — at fifteen years and ninety-nine days, the youngest player ever to represent India, ahead of Tendulkar's sixteen. He made 14 from 10 balls with two sixes, one off Jofra Archer, before being stumped. India lost. His captain Shreyas Iyer was unbothered: 'He has that unflinching attitude where he's fearless. The way he approaches his game, it's sensational to watch. The way he bats in the nets, I think we can learn from him.'

One caveat belongs in any honest account. Sooryavanshi's age has been publicly questioned, after a 2023 interview in which he appeared to give a birth year around eighteen months earlier than his registered date. His father has maintained that the official date is correct and points to bone-density testing conducted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India since he was eight and a half. The BCCI's age-verification process has cleared him throughout. It is a live discussion in Indian cricket, and it does not alter what has been visible on the field: a teenager hitting international bowling further and more often than anyone his age ever has.

In 2025 he received the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar, India's highest civilian honour for children. In July 2026 he was named vice-captain of East Zone for the Duleep Trophy. He is fifteen.