Sport
2 November, 2025
Oscar's deep dive (October 29, 2025)
The most iconic trophies in world sport.
Every sport has its own special trophy, the one every player dreams of lifting high after a huge win. Some are massive and shiny, some are tiny and full of history, and some are worth more than a house in Sydney just the value of the metals.
Here’s my take on the biggest, oldest, most valuable and most famous trophies in world sport including one that’s being decided right now.
The Baseball World Series Trophy
Right now, the World Series is being played in the United States (and Canada with the Toronto Blue Jays playing the LA Dodgers) to decide who will be the champions of Major League Baseball. The winning team gets the Commissioner’s Trophy, which has 30 gold-plated flags one for every MLB team. It’s about 60 centimetres high and weighs 14 kilograms. It’s one of the few trophies that’s made new every year, so every champion team gets to keep their own. That’s a nice souvenir!
The Ashes - the smallest trophy of them all
If the World Series trophy is one of the biggest, then the Ashes urn is definitely the smallest and maybe the most famous of all.
Standing just 11 centimetres tall, the little brown urn was first played for in 1882 between Australia and England after a newspaper joked that English cricket had “died” and its ashes were being sent to Australia.
The real urn stays in London but the teams play for a replica and also another crystal trophy
The oldest trophy, The America’s Cup
The America’s Cup is the oldest active trophy in world sport. It dates all the way back to 1851 and was first raced around the Isle of Wight in England.
Australia made sporting history in 1983 when we finally beat the Americans after they’d held it for 132 years straight. The silver trophy stands about 70 centimetres tall and is one of the hardest to win
The most valuable trophy, FIFA World Cup
The FIFA World Cup trophy is made from 18-carat gold and is worth around 20 million Australian dollars. It’s 36 centimetres tall and weighs just over six kilograms, but its real value isn’t in the gold it’s in the glory.
The Stanley Cup trophy, the king of the ice
Now this one really is the biggest of the lot.
The Stanley Cup, awarded to the NHL ice hockey champions, stands nearly 90 centimetres tall and weighs about 15 kilograms.
It’s made of silver and nickel, and instead of being replaced each year, it’s reused with every winning team’s player’s names engraved on it. That means the Stanley Cup is full of history, covered in thousands of names from over 130 years of champions. They add rings to the base, so it just keeps growing over the years
The strangest trophy, The Egg Bowl Trophy (USA College Football)
One of the weirdest must be the Egg Bowl Trophy from American college football.
It’s literally shaped like a giant egg on a trophy, The trophy came from a misunderstanding, early fans thought the football looked like an egg, and the name stuck.
Every year, two Mississippi universities battle it out to see who takes home the “Golden Egg.”
Trophies might be big or small, shiny or simple, but what makes them special isn’t the gold or silver it’s the stories they tell.
Whether it’s the massive Stanley Cup or the tiny Ashes urn, each one represents years of effort, teamwork and a dream come true.
