Is Takakeisho a yokozuna-in-waiting? A statistical deep dive

Takakeisho has probably been one of the most "controversial" rikishi in recent years - not in terms of his conduct, but in terms of the debate he inspires as to whether or not he's likely to make yokozuna. There are, to simplify things, two dominant opinions about Takakeisho. One is that he's a viable yokozuna candidate, one who will probably make the jump at some point; the other is that he's a successful ozeki, but doesn't have what it takes to move to the top tier. But which one of those is accurate? Since one of the biggest storylines heading into this basho is his yokozuna run, I thought I’d take an in-depth statistical look at Takakeisho and see how he compares to historical yokozuna and non-yokozuna.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of ozeki: the ones who manage to put enough wins together to hold the rank, but never seem settled there and typically lose it within a year or two (Mitakeumi and Shodai are two recent examples of this category); the ones who enjoy long and successful careers at ozeki, but never put together a successful yokozuna run, and often never even look all that threatening for the rank (Goeido was the most recent one of these); and the ones who ultimately do make the jump to yokozuna. Given that Takakeisho has held ozeki for four years straight, only falling out of the rank once for a single tournament due to injury just after obtaining it, we can safely say he's not in the first category; the question is whether he's in the second or third category. To try and answer that question, let’s have a look at where Takakeisho stands when stacked up against other comparable rikishi.

We’re going to be comparing Takakeisho to other “modern” rikishi, which I’m defining as those who wrestled/got promoted to yokozuna since 1990. This conveniently puts us just past the end of Futahaguro’s career. Futahaguro, being generally seen as the weakest yokozuna since the rank became an award for merit rather than patronage, seems to have caused the JSA and the YDC to tighten up their standards for yokozuna substantially, so setting him as our cutoff means we’re comparing apples to apples. This gives us a comparison pool of 11 eventual yokozuna: Asahifuji, Akebono, Takanohana, Wakanohana, Musashimaru, Asashoryu, Hakuho, Harumafuji, Kakuryu, Kisenosato, and Terunofuji. Note that since the question is whether or not Takakeisho is likely to make yokozuna, I’m only going to be considering those tournaments where the above wrestlers were ozeki – we’re not concerned about pre-ozeki tournaments (because once you get out of sanyaku, the quality of the wrestlers you’re paired against typically goes down) nor with any post-yokozuna promotion tournaments (because the lack of consequence for pulling out due to injury is going to skew the records).

I’m also going to do a follow-up post comparing Takakeisho with other longstanding ozeki (which I’m defining as anyone who has held the rank at least 5 years uninterrupted) from the same era who never made yokozuna: specifically, Asahio, Hokutenyu, Konishiki, Takanonami, Chiyotaikai, Kaio, Tochiazuma, Kotooshu, Kotoshogiku, and Goeido.

So how does Takakeisho measure up? Let’s break out the tables!

(note: this post is long, so the ozeki comparison is going to be in the replies).

WIN/LOSS RECORD

Well, let’s start with the easiest comparable: what’s the win-rate? I’m going to break this down by year, counting only calendar years in which the wrestler spent three or more tournaments at ozeki (years with two or less tournaments run into issues with small sample size, which we’re already straining against with some of the wrestlers who earned their ropes quickly).

*Akebono spent just four tournaments at ozeki, one of which he was kyujo (0-0-15) for. I’m stuffing them all into one year, even though one of them was in the following year. Because of the low number of tournaments at ozeki, that kyujo tournament kind of distorts his record.

**Similar to Akebono, Asashoryu spent just three tournaments at ozeki before his promotion. Fortunately, no kyujo shenanigans this time.

***Terunofuji is the strangest record on this list by far. I honestly don’t know how useful he is as a comparable here, because his circumstances – specifically how his knee injuries and diabetes derailed his career - are so unique. Notably, he’s the only wrestler on this entire list who had multiple stints at ozeki (well… technically Takakeisho did as well, albeit just barely so I’m not really counting it) and his second run shouldn’t even show up on this list because of how short it was (for completeness, I added it in as a phantom “year 5”). His first year is fine, but injury problems see him run off the rails in the next two years. Frankly, it’s amazing he kept ozeki with that disastrous second year (for those who weren’t around, he went kadoban three times that year). Analyzing Terunofuji is tough, because his first ozeki stint was marred by injuries and never had him anywhere near yokozuna, while his second was over so quickly there’s barely anything there to analyze. The results are a yokozuna who, by the spreadsheets, looks like he has absolutely no business being anywhere near his rank, despite being a top-notch wrestler when his knees haven’t blown up. This is going to be a running theme on this list, as you’re going to see Terunofuji’s name pop up a lot with “yes, it looks bad, but technically…” provisos, so get used to it.

Takeaways: A few things pop out here right away. Successful yokozuna candidates spent much of their ozeki days with win percentages north of 0.600 (a mark Takakeisho has only hit once, in his first year as an ozeki), with scores below that mark being quite rare. Aside from Terunofuji's unique circumstances, only Harumafuji, Wakanohana and, surprisingly, Hakuho had years at ozeki with sub-0.600 scores, and only Wakanohana had more than one; Takakeisho is guaranteed to have a sub-0.600 score this year, as even a perfect 15-0 score in November would only boost him up to 0.544, meaning he already has more sub-0.600 ozeki years than any yokozuna in the last 35 years. For yokozuna, scores above 0.700 were also fairly common; Takakeisho has never hit that mark once.

Injury Adjustment

Kyujo are uncommon amongst successful yokozuna candidates. Takakeisho has lost 54 matches to injury thus far, which puts him behind only Wakanohana's 60, and Takakeisho is the only man on this list who has lost matches to injury every single year of his ozeki career. By contrast, six of the 11 post-1990 yokozuna had no kyujo matches during their entire ozeki runs (the exceptions are Akebono, Wakanohana, Hakuho, Harumafuji, and Terunofuji).

So how much does that impact their performance? Let’s remove the kyujo matches and take a look. To be clear, this isn’t a perfect analysis, because an ozeki with kyujo matches was very likely fighting injured beforehand and/or afterward, and also because… well, injuries are injuries and you don’t have a way of just “removing” them from sumo. If a wrestler has chronic injuries or a fighting style that makes them prone to getting hurt, that’s going to negatively impact their chances at making yokozuna (though, as Terunofuji himself proved, if a wrestler can get himself healthy for a long enough stretch to fight at peak performance, that’s sometimes enough to put him over the top).

Here’s how things look with kyujo matches removed. Scores that have been changed are bolded:

Takeaways: This certainly helps Takakeisho’s case, but only to an extent. He’s now consistently hitting that 60% win mark, but he’s still not routinely making that 70% mark most of the rest of the men on this list are hitting and his record remains notably worse than average.

TOURNAMENT OUTCOMES

Taking a step back, let’s have a look at how well each successful yokozuna candidate has done and ask if Takakeisho measures up. To get yokozuna, you typically need two consecutive tournament wins, which means you don’t just need to be consistently good, you need to be hitting high numbers of wins for a decent shot at the cup. For each tournament spent at ozeki, we’ll go over the number of times a future yokozuna finished with a particular score. If the wrestler sat out one or more matches due to injury, we’ll record it as a kyujo tournament, even if they didn’t sit out the whole tournament (as it turns out, every tournament where one of these rikishi lost at least one match to injury wound up being in the “10 wins or less” category anyways).

Takeaways: Again, some warning lights blinking here for Takakeisho. He’s had more kyujo tournaments than any other man on this list; even perpetually injured Wakanohana manages to slip by him, despite having more tournaments at ozeki. Perhaps more concerningly, Takakeisho has one of the worst records on this list. With a combined 16 sub-10 win performances (including kyujo) out of 25 tournaments fought, Takakeisho has spent roughly two-thirds of his career in that “10 wins or less” bracket, a mark only matched by Terunofuji (see aforementioned note on his injury woes), Kakuryu, and Harumafuji.

Interestingly, Takakeisho is also the man on this list with the worst high-end performance by far. He is the only rikishi listed who has zero tournaments to his name with a 14-1 or better record (something that would remain true even if we included pre-ozeki tournaments), and only a single 13-2 performance at ozeki (he had one more as a mid-ranked Maegashira). Every other wrestler listed – even the ones who had very brief stints at ozeki before promotion – got at least two tournaments with 13-2 or better scores, and at least one with 14-1 or better. That seeming inability to notch high win numbers is going to make a yokozuna bid rough for Takakeisho – it’s hard to win tournaments with 12-3 records.

AGE/TIME AT OZEKI

Father time comes for us all. Is it too late for Takakeisho? How does he compare in terms of age/longevity with other yokozuna candidates?

*Wakanohana had a couple of tournaments where he took advantage of the now-abolished Kosho Seido (public injury) system to post back-to-back losing tournaments without losing rank. I’ve simply counted those here as two kadoban tournaments.

Takeaways: Well, finally some good news for Takakeisho. He beat the average age of an ozeki promotion for a future yokozuna (23 years, eight months). He’s past the average age of a yokozuna promotion (26 years, 9 months), but only just, meaning the window is still open. And, interestingly, there are two "clusters" in the data - most men either get their yokozuna at 22-23 years old or at 28-30 years old; there is (surprisingly) no in between. Takakeisho is just heading into that second cluster of data, which looks good for him. However, the clock is ticking – only three men on this list got their rope on the wrong side of 29: Terunofuji (with the usual asterisks), Asahifuji, and Kisenosato. If we’re still having this conversation a year and a half from now, Takakeisho’s chances are going to start looking increasingly remote.

Perhaps more concerning for Takakeisho fans are the other two columns. Takakeisho is now well past the number of tournaments needed for the average yokozuna to secure promotion (16.7). His early ozeki promotion helps give him some extra time here, but he’s only got three men “ahead” of him in this race (Wakanohana, Kisenosato, and Musashimaru) and he’s closing on them fast – if he reaches the end of next November’s tournament with no rope, he will have passed them all. And he’s already racked up more tournaments where he’s had to defend his rank than anyone else – only Wakanohana and Terunofuji even come close. Whether you choose to blame that on the injury bug or just general inconsistency in his wrestling, it’s still not a positive sign for someone hoping to be yokozuna one day.

QUALITY OF COMPETITION

And now the most pain in the ass bit of data I had to collate.

Sumo, being a competitive sport, depends on your competition. Strong competition breeds strong wrestlers, but also makes it pretty tough to secure promotion – you not only have to potentially face them head-to-head, they’re also gunning for the same trophy you are, and only one person gets to take home the yuusho that you need for your promotion bid. I’ve gone through and stacked up how many “high level” wrestlers were fighting in any given tournament. I’m defining a high-level wrestler as being:

1) A yokozuna;

2) An ozeki who will eventually get promoted to yokozuna; or

3) One of the “longstanding” ozeki (i.e. 4+ years at the rank) listed at the start of this post

In all cases, only tournaments where the wrestlers held the rank of ozeki or yokozuna and were actively fighting are counted; any where they are lower ranked on the banzuke, or missed one or more matches due to injury, suspension, or retirement are ignored.

The table below shows how many basho a prospective yokozuna had to fight against each number of other high-level wrestlers.

Takeaways: Well, this is either good news or bad news for Takakeisho, depending on how you slice it. The good news is that he’s had a historically open path to yokozuna, with very little competition standing in his way, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon; the bad news is, he still hasn’t capitalized despite generationally-unique circumstances, which raises the question of if he’s even capable of doing so.

Looking through the data is actually fairly interesting, because there’s a lot of eventual-yokozuna that were stuck in a murderer’s row of active yokozuna/other high-level ozeki and only managed their breakthrough in a tournament or two where a couple of their rivals were out with injuries or retired. Takakeisho hasn’t had to deal with that, though. In fact, the quality of his competition is not even close to what most of the others on this list faced. Of the others on this list, only Akebono and Asashoryu got tournaments where they were not competing against another yokozuna or high-level ozeki, and only one apiece for each of them (granted, neither of them were ozeki for very long); by contrast, Takakeisho has had an eye-popping 10(!!) such tournaments to date, and only once has he had to face more than one yokozuna/high-level ozeki (May of 2018, when both Hakuho and Kakuryu competed and finished the tournament for the only time in Takakeisho’s ozeki career). Beyond that, he’s been up against Hakuho (twice) and ozeki/yokozuna Terunofuji (five times), and the only other competition he’s really had has been a rotating cast of occasional-ozeki, none of whom have managed to hold the rank for long (to date, he’s had five ozeki as competition – Asanoyama, Shodai, Mitakeumi, and, as of last tournament, Kirishima and Hoshoryu – not exactly a rogue’s gallery of fighters). Notably, all four of Takakeisho’s yusho to date have come when there was no yokozuna or high-level ozeki competing.

Fun trivia fact unrelated to Takakeisho: If you want the most stacked tournament(s) on record, by this analysis it’s a tossup between March and November of 2016. In those tournaments, yokozuna Hakuho, Kakuryu, and Harumafuji, future-yokozuna Terunofuji and Kisenosato, and ozeki stalwarts Goeido and Kotoshogiku were all on the banzuke and completed the tournament. Hakuho took the March meet with a 14-1 record, while Kakuryu claimed the November yusho by the same score (don’t ever let anyone tell you Kakuryu couldn’t throw down with the best of them).

Also, no wonder Kisenosato took so long to make yokozuna given what he was up against.

CONCLUSIONS

No matter which metric you’re looking at, Takakeisho doesn’t compare favourably to the yokozuna of the last 35 years. His record, while impressive, is a notable step behind what others in his position have managed.

Injuries seem to have significantly hobbled his bid. Without them, he’s reaching the lower levels of what historical yokozuna have managed which, given that he’s fighting in what is almost unquestionably the weakest era of sumo in the last 35 years, would probably have been enough. With them, however, he’s not generating the consistency of high-level performance needed for promotion.

Of course, this is sumo and a single solid lucky break can make a huge difference. It’s still very much possible he eventually makes the jump (maybe even this tournament!), thanks in no small part to the relatively weak field he’s facing. That said, if he does so he’ll be a strong contender for the weakest rikishi of the modern era to get the nod.