Virat Kohli vs Yuvraj Singh Stats: Test, ODI, T20I & IPL

Yuvraj Singh played 402 international matches and made 11,778 runs. Virat Kohli has played about 562 and made more than 28,000. On any career ledger this is a mismatch, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But the two careers were built for different purposes and are remembered for different things, and the interesting comparison is not the totals. Yuvraj won two global tournaments for India almost single-handed — the 2007 T20 World Cup, where he hit six sixes in an over and made the fastest fifty in the format's international history from 12 balls, and the 2011 World Cup, where he made 362 runs and took 15 wickets and was named player of the tournament while unknowingly ill with the cancer that nearly ended his life. Kohli, across five World Cups in two formats, has produced enormous run tallies and, until 2024, no title in which he was the decisive figure.

He also bowled left-arm spin well enough to take 111 ODI wickets and 29 in T20Is. Kohli has eight international wickets. That column, plus the two tournaments, is the whole of Yuvraj's case, and it is a better case than the totals suggest.

The two records

Category	Yuvraj	Kohli
Tests	40 matches, 1,900 runs at 33.92, 3 hundreds	123 matches, 9,230 runs at 46.85, 30 hundreds
ODIs	304 matches, 8,701 runs at 36.55, 14 hundreds	314 matches, 14,941 runs at 58.59, 54 hundreds
T20Is	58 matches, 1,177 runs at 28.02, 8 fifties	125 matches, 4,188 runs at 48.69, 1 hundred
Bowling	111 ODI wickets at 38.68, 29 T20I wickets at 17.82, 10 in Tests	Eight international wickets in total
IPL	132 matches, around 2,750 runs	9,336 runs, nine hundreds, the leading scorer
Highest score	169 (Test), 150 (ODI), 77 not out (T20I)	254 not out (Test), 183 (ODI), 122 not out (T20I)
Global titles	2007 T20 World Cup, 2011 World Cup	2024 T20 World Cup

Yuvraj's figures are final. Kohli's Test and T20I rows are closed and his ODI row was still open in 2026.

ODIs: the format they shared, and the gap in it

Twenty-two runs an innings and 40 hundreds separate them. Kohli's 58.59 across 314 matches is the strongest ODI batting record on record; Yuvraj's 36.55 is a good middle-order number for his era and no better than that.

The framing that matters is position and mandate. Yuvraj batted at four, five or six from 2000 to 2017, mostly in sides where his job was to accelerate between the twentieth and fortieth overs against spin. That is a role which produces strike rates in the high eighties, averages in the mid-thirties, and a low hundred count, because you rarely get 40 overs. He also fielded better than anybody in the side for a decade and bowled ten overs when required.

Kohli batted at three from his second year with a mandate to bat as long as possible, and his method was built entirely for the average. Comparing 36.55 with 58.59 without saying that is comparing an accelerator with an anchor.

What is not explained by role is the difference in reliability. Yuvraj's ODI career has long stretches of poor form and repeated periods out of the side; Kohli's has almost none until the very end. That is a genuine difference in quality, not just in job description.

Tests: the career that never happened

Forty Tests and 1,900 runs at 33.92 is the least satisfying part of Yuvraj's record and the one he talked about most. He made three hundreds, including 169 against Pakistan at Bengaluru in 2007, and could never hold a place. The problem was diagnosed publicly and repeatedly: a technique built for the front foot and for spin, and a vulnerability to the ball angled across him from a tall seamer that Test attacks exploited without much difficulty.

The counterfactual is genuinely open. He was picked and dropped nine or ten times across a decade rather than given a settled run, and India's middle order in that period contained Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly, which left one place for a rotating cast. The page on India's great middle-order batters sets out how crowded that queue was.

Kohli's Test career is the more straightforward comparison: 9,230 runs, 30 hundreds, seven double-hundreds, a peak between 2016 and 2019 in which he was the best in the world, and 40 wins from 68 Tests as captain.

T20 internationals: where the roles invert

Kohli's 4,188 runs at 48.69 is the highest average of any batter with that volume in the format, and it dwarfs Yuvraj's 1,177 at 28.02.

Then there is the over. At Durban in 2007, in the group stage of the first World T20, Yuvraj hit Stuart Broad for six sixes and reached fifty from 12 balls — still the fastest in men's T20 international cricket nearly two decades later. In the same tournament India won the title with a squad of near-unknowns under a first-time captain.

That is the whole difficulty with comparing the two men in this format. Kohli's record is better in every measurable way. Yuvraj produced the twelve balls that changed how India thought about the format, and the fifty-over record he built four years later.

2011, and the case for tournament value

The 2011 World Cup is the strongest single argument anyone makes for Yuvraj over any Indian batter of his generation. He made 362 runs and took 15 wickets across nine matches, won four player-of-the-match awards, and was named player of the tournament — the first player to combine 300 runs and 15 wickets in a single World Cup. He was visibly unwell throughout and was diagnosed with a mediastinal germ-cell tumour within a year.

Kohli's 2011 was a good tournament and not that. He made a hundred against Bangladesh in India's opening match, the first Indian to score a century on World Cup debut, and 35 in the final at the Wankhede in a stand with Gautam Gambhir that steadied a wobbling chase. His own World Cup monument came twelve years later: 765 runs at the 2023 tournament, the most anyone has made in a single edition, in a side that lost the final.

The reading depends on what you count. Runs across five tournaments favour Kohli overwhelmingly. Matches and titles decided favour Yuvraj.

IPL and franchise cricket

Kohli has 9,336 IPL runs, all for Royal Challengers Bengaluru across nineteen seasons, with nine hundreds and a single-season record of 973 in 2016.

Yuvraj played 132 IPL matches for six different franchises and made around 2,750 runs. He was, at two auctions, the most expensive player in the competition's history, and neither contract produced the returns it was bought for. It is the least flattering line in his record and it is worth including precisely because the auction market is a real measure of how the game valued him — and of how badly that market can misprice a player past his peak. The mechanics are covered in the page on how the IPL auction works.

The comeback, which does not fit in a table

Yuvraj was treated for cancer in the United States in 2012, returned to international cricket in September of that year, and played for India for another five years, including a 150 against England at Cuttack in 2017 that was his highest ODI score. Whatever the ledger says, no comparison of the two careers is complete without it, and there is nothing in Kohli's record — or almost anybody's — that corresponds.

Verdict, question by question

• International runs, averages and hundreds in every format: Kohli, comfortably.
• Reliability across a career: Kohli.
• Bowling: Yuvraj, on 140 international wickets to Kohli's eight.
• Fielding at its peak: Yuvraj, in the 2000s, by the standards of the side he played in.
• Single tournament performance: Yuvraj, 2011, and it is the strongest claim on this page.
• Fastest fifty and the six-six over: Yuvraj, records that still stand.
• World Cup runs across a career: Kohli.
• IPL: Kohli, decisively.
• Global titles won: Yuvraj, two to one.

The individual pages for Yuvraj Singh and Virat Kohli carry the full careers, the player directory has their contemporaries, and the cricket in India hub covers the tournaments both won.

Sources and method

Yuvraj's figures are final and taken from ESPNcricinfo career records and the statistical summary on his Wikipedia entry. Kohli's international figures are as of 19 July 2026 and his IPL total to 31 May 2026, from the same sources. Yuvraj's IPL total is given approximately because published figures across six franchises differ slightly between sources.

The 2011 World Cup runs-and-wickets figures, the 12-ball fifty and the six-six over are as listed by ICC tournament records and ESPNcricinfo record pages. The claim that Yuvraj was the first player to make 300 runs and take 15 wickets in a single World Cup is as carried by those records.

The assessment of Yuvraj's Test technique rests on contemporaneous analysis and his dismissal record rather than on any calculation here, and the counterfactual about a settled run in the side is explicitly speculation. The argument about tournament value against career value is a difference in what is counted, not a dispute about the counts, and it is left unresolved above. Figures current as of 27 August 2026.