Individual awards in a team sport are always a partial record, but they are also the clearest summary of who shaped a season. The 2025/26 Indian Super League campaign produced honours that were split between the champions and the clubs that finished behind them.
The leading scorer
The season’s Golden Boot went to Youssef Ezzejjari of East Bengal, who finished with eleven goals. In a league phase of thirteen matches per club, a return of eleven is a significant share of a team’s total — East Bengal scored thirty in all.
The best player
Miguel Figueira, also of East Bengal, was named the season’s most valuable player and led the league in assists with five. His combination of goals and creation is the profile that title-winning sides are built around, and it is no coincidence that both major individual awards went to the club that finished first.
The goalkeeper
The standout exception came in goal: Hrithik Tiwari kept five clean sheets, more than any other goalkeeper in the competition, a return that stood out in a season his club spent in the bottom half of the table.
What the awards do not show
Football’s individual prizes tend to reward players in winning teams, and the 2025/26 ISL was no different. The goalkeeper award is the counter-example that proves the rule: keeping clean sheets for a struggling side is a different job from doing it behind a title-winning defence.
Profiles of the players who shaped the season are collected in our players section.
