Welcome to the “Who Won 2014 in Pakistan” blog, which uses cutting-edge science and advanced sabermetrics to determine which person, event or phenomenon was the winner of the previous year.
The idea for this competition is from the American website Grantland, which does its own version for the USA. The competition begins by identifying nominees across different fields, which were:
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.
