1. Sports

 

Shahid Afridi | Misbah-ul-Haq | Pakistan Hockey Team

2. Film & TV

 

Fahad Mustafa | Fawad Khan | Hamza Ali Abbasi

3. Music

 

Ayyan | Asrar | Sajjad Ali

4. Media and Movements

 

Mubasher Lucman | Reham Khan | Malala Yousufzai

5. Politics

 

Imran Khan | ASWJ | General Raheel Sharif

6. Internet Culture

 

Imaan Sheikh | Gullu Butt | Meera Sex Tape | #GoNawazGo

7. Literature

 

Bilal Tanweer | Saba Imtiaz | Omar Shahid Hamid

 

All the categories other than Internet Culture got three nominees each. Since this is a blog, we let the internet have four nominees. Along with these, we also chose two more entrants – a wild card (Najam Sethi) and the defending champion from 2013 (you can read on how Aamir Liaquat won that here).

Once we had chosen the competitors, we searched each on Google, and used the number of search results to determine a hierarchical seeding system: 1. Imran Khan | 2. Malala Yousufzai | 3. Go Nawaz Go | 4. Pakistan Hockey team (the outlier) | 5. Shahid Afridi | 6. Sajjad Ali | 7. Meera Sex Tape | 8. Fawad Khan | 9. Misbahul Haq | 10. Fahad Mustafa | 11. Najam Sethi | 12. Raheel Sharif | 13. Aamir Liaquat | 14. Reham Khan | 15. Hamza Ali Abbasi | 16. Mubasher Lucman | 17. Ayyan | 18. Omar Shahid | 19. ASWJ | 20. Gullu Butt | 21. Imaan Sheikh | 22. Saba Imtiaz | 23. Asrar (actually higher but there’s some Turkish singer named Asrar too. So we searched for 'Asrar Coke Studio') | 24. Bilal Tanweer

The nominees then faced off in one-to-one matchups, where we made largely spurious and intangible calls for why one deserved to beat the other.