How the Greatest Athletes of All Time bracket works
Greatest athlete of all time without dragging anything into rows. You get one matchup at a time — Michael Jordan or Serena Williams? Muhammad Ali or Lionel Messi? — and after 31 picks the bracket has a champion, with everything else placed by how far it got. The awkward pairings are the point: they are the calls a drag-and-drop tier list quietly lets you avoid.
This bracket runs 5 rounds at the default 32-slot size (Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship), with every one of the 32 contenders in the field. Seeding is random, which means a replay is a genuinely different bracket rather than the same path twice. You can also play it at 8 or 16 slots for a shorter or longer run.
31 picks, 5 rounds
- Round of 3216 matchups
- Sweet 168 matchups
- Elite 84 matchups
- Final Four2 matchups
- Championship1 matchup
Roughly 2-4 minutes start to finish.
All 32 entrants
All 32 entrants are listed below, including Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali and Lionel Messi.
Michael Jordan
Basketball
Serena Williams
Tennis
Muhammad Ali
Boxing
Lionel Messi
Soccer
Tom Brady
Football
Usain Bolt
Track & Field
Michael Phelps
Swimming
Wayne Gretzky
Hockey
LeBron James
Basketball
Tiger Woods
Golf
Babe Ruth
Baseball
Pele
Soccer
Simone Biles
Gymnastics
Roger Federer
Tennis
Rafael Nadal
Tennis
Novak Djokovic
Tennis
Cristiano Ronaldo
Soccer
Mike Tyson
Boxing
Bo Jackson
Football / Baseball
Jackie Robinson
Baseball
Shaquille O'Neal
Basketball
Jesse Owens
Track & Field
Jim Brown
Football
Barry Bonds
Baseball
Nadia Comaneci
Gymnastics
Diego Maradona
Soccer
Kobe Bryant
Basketball
Lewis Hamilton
Formula 1
Jack Nicklaus
Golf
Carl Lewis
Track & Field
Stephen Curry
Basketball
Connor McDavid
Hockey
Would rather group them than rank them? Open all 32 in the tier list maker and sort them into S, A, B, C, D and F tiers instead — same entrants, no matchups.
How everyone else ranked them
Aggregated from 11 completed Greatest Athletes of All Time brackets. Win rate is the share of head-to-head matchups each entrant has won across every play.
- 1
Michael Jordan
29W - 10L · won 1 bracket
74%
win rate
- 2
Michael Phelps
24W - 9L · won 2 brackets
73%
win rate
- 3
Tom Brady
23W - 9L · won 2 brackets
72%
win rate
- 4
Muhammad Ali
19W - 10L · won 1 bracket
66%
win rate
- 5
Cristiano Ronaldo
19W - 10L · won 1 bracket
66%
win rate
- 6
Lionel Messi
18W - 10L · won 1 bracket
64%
win rate
- 7
Diego Maradona
18W - 10L · won 1 bracket
64%
win rate
- 8
LeBron James
17W - 11L
61%
win rate
- 9
Pele
17W - 11L
61%
win rate
- 10
Babe Ruth
13W - 10L · won 1 bracket
57%
win rate
Getting a ranking you actually agree with
- 1Decide your criteria before you start — peak, longevity or trophies — and hold to it all the way through.
- 2The default run puts all 32 contenders in the draw. Short on time? Drop to 16 slots — a quicker run over a random 16 of them.
- 3If a matchup genuinely splits you, undo and replay it — a coin-flip pick in round one distorts everything below it.
Greatest Athletes of All Time bracket FAQ
How many contenders are in the Greatest Athletes of All Time bracket?
The pool holds 32 contenders. A default run puts all of them in the draw and takes 31 picks across 5 rounds: Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship. Other field sizes are available too — 8, 16, 32 slots.
Which contenders are included?
Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, Lionel Messi, Tom Brady, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Wayne Gretzky, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth and Pele, plus 20 more. Every entrant is listed further down this page with its artwork.
How long does the greatest athlete of all time take?
About 2-4 minutes — 31 choices at the default size, or 7 if you drop to a 8-slot bracket. No account is needed, and you can abandon a run at any point without losing anything.
Can I turn the result into S/A/B tiers?
Both are here, and the bracket is closer to a tier list than it looks. It ends with a champion, a runner-up and then every other contender grouped by the round it went out in — which is exactly a set of tiers, decided by 31 direct comparisons rather than by your first guess at a layout. What it deliberately does not do is claim a precise gap between two contenders that never met. If you would rather place the contenders into S through F rows yourself, the tier list maker loads all 32 of them at bracketranker.com/tier-list-maker.
Can I compare my order with other people's?
Every completed bracket feeds the Greatest Athletes of All Time community results page, which aggregates win rates across all plays and tracks how often each of the 32 entrants takes the title. It updates continuously, so it moves as more people play.
What if a contender I wanted is missing?
Use the bracket maker: add your own contenders, name it, and share the link so other people play the same field. That is the route to take when this pool of 32 is missing something you would have picked, or when you want a version scoped to one era, label or franchise.