Modern Sumo Makuuchi Debuts - Some Basic Analysis

A Quick Hitter

One of the most surprising datapoints to me in this year or so that I have been analyzing sumo is just how few men reach the top 2 divisions of Makuuchi and Juryo. I typically use 1988 as the beginning of the “Modern Era” for sumo as there were changes to the way certain things worked, such as Yokozuna criteria, after Futahaguro’s rather ignominious end to his wrestling career in 1987. Using this Modern Era, only about ~320 men have wrestled in the top division in the past ~35 years. I don’t have a way to quantify my feelings, but it does feel low to me.

One way to make sense of this number is to look at the number of debutants by each year. Unlike “how many men wrestled in Makuuchi since 1988”, I do have heuristics and a sense on the question “how many people debut in Makuuchi each year.” It feels like generally each tournament there are 1-3 debutants, so 2 on average times 6 tournaments a year to give 12 Makuuchi debutants a year on average. Luckily I ran the numbers and can offer something better than my heuristic. Here’s the graph of debuts by year

To give explain this data, I have the full Banzukes all the way back to the 50’s. I simply took the names of every wrestler who had wrestled in the Makuuchi at least once since 1988 - so that’s the ~320 men from above. Then I looked for the Makuuchi debut of each of those wrestlers and charted it above. As a note, I actually cut it off at 1988. There were some wrestlers in the dataset who debuted before 1988 but to keep this an apples-to-apples comparison, I did not include them in this data. That gives us 275 wrestlers.

Here are some additional stats on the sumo debuts by year:

Minimum: 2 (2021)
Maximum: 14 (2011)
Average: 7.64
Median: 7.00
Standard Deviation: 2.62

The minimum debutants in a year being 2021 the year after Covid makes a decent amount of sense. On the maximum being in 2011 I don’t have such an easy story. As it turns out, my earlier heuristic about there being 2 debuts per tournament on average seems to be twice as optimistic as it should be and in fact there’s a little over 1 debutant on average per Basho.

Looking at the data I can’t really sense or see any trends.

I am writing this as of October ‘24 and by my count I believe there are 7 men who made their Makuuchi debut this year (Onosato, Shimazuumi, Takerufuji, Oshoma, Tokihayate, Onokatsu and Shirokuma). Furthermore I believe Shishi will be the only debutant in the final Basho of the year in November so if I am correct on those, then very neat that we basically ended up right on average and almost on the median perfectly too.

This is a bit of a shorter piece, but I do expect to have some further analysis related to Makuuchi debuts in the near future. Thanks for reading!