IIt’s that time of year again, a time of lists and countdowns, of heartbreaking AI brain vomit surrounded by advertisements for miracle dental implants. In the spirit of the season, tech website Feedpost produced its own list on New Year’s Eve of the week Top 100 kids influencers on Instagram and YouTube in 2025and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fine and certainly not strange or creepy [narrator’s voice: it is strange and creepy].
Don’t think about the end times. Don’t think about woodlice, flames licking your feet. I saw a highway of diamonds with no one on it. I saw a 12-year-old influencer who loves fun fashion collaborations. I saw a kitten in a vest smoking crack from a milk jug. Don’t think about that. But I’m going to say it. The Top 100 Kid Influencers on Instagram and YouTube list is nonsense.
Yes, Lil’ Buck McTucker has a HUGE personality and BIGGER dreams, plus unlimited visibility in a hostile adult space. And yes, the world-famous Doodlebug Twins provide an uplifting tableau of early teen empowerment. Everyone knows that. There’s no doubt about that. But these are all still second-rates and also-rans. Because cricket has now entered the chat.
If you consider this list elite, then the number one child influencer for 2025 is in fact Vaibhav Sooryavanshi of the Rajasthan Royals, who is somehow only 14 years old, and who already has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, miles ahead, per capita, of all these golden show calves, and not far shy of the official England team account.
Yes, cricket! Taking back teenage strangeness. Dominates the hyper-intensive space between adults and children. This is our house. Cry more Brock Cheesesteak, 11-year-old reality TV dancing phenomenon. Please don’t do that. But don’t forget to get independent financial advice from someone who isn’t your uncle. And run, Brock, run as fast as you can.
Sooryavanshi, from Bihar in northern India, is in many ways the brightest sporting story of the past year. There are always prodigies in sports, but this kid is really something else. Scroll through the bio and each bullet point is a first, a most, a fastest.
April 2025: Scores youngest ever hundred in Indian Premier League, off 35 balls. December 2025: Becomes youngest male to score a century in 50-over cricket. Also December: 171 off 95 in the Under-19 Asia Cup. Just this week he was awarded India’s highest state honour, normally awarded for achievements in science and culture, but here awarded by Narendra Modi for the preternatural ability to crush long balls to halfway.
As of early 2026, Sooryavanshi has the highest professional T20 strike rate of any male cricketer ever, a list that includes people called things like Tim David and Andre Russell, but also the entire round of leathery 40-year-old South Africans who spend their lives on Latvia’s powerplay against Fiji.
He is currently on his way to Zimbabwe for the Under-19 World Cup, which starts on January 15 with India vs. USA. Then it’s time for the IPL in March, when Sooryavanshi will turn 15 and be eligible to play for India’s senior team, possibly even in the T20I series in England in July. He’s all promise right now, all potential energy, perfectly balanced at the peak of his arc. And honestly, this is the entire story of a sport, maybe even the world beyond, captured here in a moment in time.
The first thing we have to say is that Sooryavanshi is undoubtedly the real deal, a breathtaking, state-of-the-art sporting talent. His method may look surprisingly simple. It’s all basically a variation on one movement, hand, eye, balance, force, whiplash speed, same parabola, same dreamy contact. Wheel him outside and watch him go. This is all light, all talent, all grace.
Should a fourteen-year-old really play adult sports, no matter how talented that child is? The obvious answer is no. Just because we can make money doing something doesn’t mean we should. At what point: May I introduce you to cricket?
But the Sooryavanshi phenomenon is also an explanation. If you want to understand the broken nature of this world, to know why Melbourne was a two-day Test, turn away from the public witchcraft of a groundskeeper, the sad-looking men in chino shorts. And instead look at this other center of power, a place where a 14-year-old has already made his first half-million dollars, where the BCCI is conducting bone testing to fend off an age-doping scandal, and where all the energy and seriousness of this sport ultimately resides.
Why don’t players have the skills to dig in for six hours? Why don’t hitters spend an entire winter working, as Graham Gooch once did, solely on the position of the front pad in the forward defense? Because of what the Vaibhav Sooryavanshi industrial complex tells us. Every moment of preparation, every kidnet, every macro planning is focused on the eyeball harvest of the shortest form, on the imperial power of the IPL during the global summer, on the urge to cram this thing into a six-inch screen, to create substantive moments, platform fodder.
Sooryavanshi was in many ways inevitable. The IPL is not just a star factory but a nation-building machine. The energy and light of India are reflected there. Here we have the boy from the rural northern village, with nothing but talent, will and a father willing to take him 90 miles to Patna in the early morning hours.
It is beautiful yet sad, a Cinderella story that is an outgrowth of the brutality of India’s overclass and underclass life. This is a country that has embraced hyper-capitalism, that reveres its billionaires while bearing the burden of extreme poverty, where sports does its usual job of giving us stories of hope and social mobility that actually prove the truth of the adage that poverty is good for nothing except making sports people.
Still, we have the spectacle. And from here you can’t help but want Sooryavanshi to keep doing this, to give us more and more extreme talent events. Even though there is a fundamental uselessness underlying this.
In another world, a talent this brilliant would be asked to express himself in a game of layers and accelerations, struggle, different tempos and surfaces. Instead, Sooryavanshi’s job is to do the same thing forever, repeat the same moment, hit the same sixes, keep cramming content into the machine, because all colas are the same and all colas are good.
Are you looking forward to 20 years of this? Maybe he can get better at doing the same. Maybe one day Sooryavanshi will hit every ball of an innings six times and cricket will be over, turned into an endless roll, an incessant noise.
Or maybe now is his time. You can only be the first, the youngest and the newest once. The power of the brand will never be so strong, the light so bright. At its heart is still that fundamental human element, a preternaturally talented 14-year-old and the sense of a story moving quickly; a story that, in its own way, is the only story left.
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