thumb|right|[[Don Bradman was retrospectively named as the notional winner ten times between 1930 and 1948.|alt=Don Bradman]]
The Wisden Men's Leading Cricketer in the World is an annual cricket award selected by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. It was established in 2004, to select the best cricketer based upon their performances anywhere in the world in the previous calendar year. A notional list of previous winners, spanning from 1900 to 2002, was published in the 2007 edition of Wisden.
Since 1889, Wisden has published a list of Cricketers of the Year, typically selecting five cricketers that had the greatest impact during the previous English cricket season. However, in the 2000 edition, the editor Matthew Engel recognised that the best players in the world were typically no longer playing English domestic cricket, and opted to select the Cricketers of the Year based on their performances anywhere in the world. This criterion was applied for the following three years, but in 2004 it reverted to being based on the English season, and a Leading Cricketer in the World was also selected. An Australian, Ricky Ponting was chosen as the first winner of the award, for scoring 1,503 runs in international cricket, including eleven centuries during 2003.
In the 2007 edition of Wisden, a list of winners for previous years was published. A sixteen-person panel helped to select the winners, which Engel described as the cricketer that "would have been the first name down in the World XI to play Mars".
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Notional winners
thumb|right|[[Ranjitsinhji was the first historical winner, being recognised for 1900.|alt=Ranjitsinhji]]
thumb|right|[[Jack Hobbs is one of only six players to have won the award more than twice.|alt=Jack Hobbs]]
thumb|right|[[Harold Larwood was the only non-Australian cricketer to be recognised in the 1930s.|alt=Harold Larwood]]
thumb|right|[[Keith Miller reading Wisden Cricketers' Almanack in 1951, his selection year|alt=Keith Miller]]
thumb|right|[[Garfield Sobers was the winner eight times between 1958 and 1970.|alt=Garfield Sobers]]
thumb|right|[[Viv Richards was recognised in 1976, 1978 and 1980|alt=Viv Richards]]
thumb|right|[[Imran Khan was the first Pakistani cricketer to be recognised, for 1982.|alt=Imran Khan]]
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! Year
! Player
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
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!scope="col"| Player
!scope="col"| Awards
!scope="col"| Years
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| 10 || 1930, 1931, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1946, 1948
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| 8 || 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970
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| 3 || 1914, 1922, 1925
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| 3 || 2016, 2017, 2018
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| 3 || 1976, 1978, 1980
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| 3 || 2019, 2020, 2022
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| 3 || 1993, 1997, 2004
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| 2 || 1912, 1913
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| 2 || 1901, 1903
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| 2 || 1949, 1952
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| 2 || 1994, 1995
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| 2 || 1972, 1977
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| 2 || 1921, 1926
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| 2 || 1986, 1988
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| 2 || 2000, 2006
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| 2 || 1967, 1969
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| 2 || 2011, 2014
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| 2 || 2008, 2009
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| 2 || 1998, 2010
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| 2 || 1902, 1911
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Winners by country
Cricketers from eight of the twelve Test playing nations have been recognised for the award by Wisden, with Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan not represented. Players from Australia and England dominate the list, having won more than half of the time, although this is disproportionately the case in the notional list. Prior to World War II, 34 of the 36 winners played for Australia or England. The "actual" award winners are more evenly distributed; Indian players have won seven times, English players five times and Australian players five times, whilst players from Sri Lanka have received the award on three occasions since 2004.