The Longest Partnership: How Marriage Made Virat and Anushka Bigger, Not Smaller

On 11 December 2017, in a restored hamlet in the Tuscan hills, India's most famous cricketer married India's most famous actress, and almost nobody knew until the photographs appeared that evening.¹ There were no leaked guest lists, no paparazzi at the gate, no television crews outside a Mumbai bungalow. For a country that treats a celebrity wedding as a national holiday, it was almost rude.

It was also, in hindsight, the whole story in miniature. Two people at the very top of their professions decided that the most important day of their lives would be run on their terms, quietly, and that the public would find out afterwards. They have run the nine years since in exactly the same way.

This piece asks a simple question that people in India have argued about since 2017, usually in the comments under a cricket score. Did marriage make Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma better, or did it hold them back? The internet has a loud answer for both halves. When Virat failed, it was the wife. When Anushka went quiet at the box office, it was the husband.

We went looking for the record instead: the scorecards, the company filings, the brand valuations, the release schedules, the handful of things the two of them have actually said in public. What we found is a case for marriage as a growth strategy, with one honest caveat we will come to at the end.

The scoreboard: Virat before and after the wedding

Start with the thing cricket makes easiest to measure. When Virat Kohli flew to Italy in December 2017, he had 52 international centuries: 20 in Tests and 32 in one-day internationals.² He was 29, the captain of India in all three formats, and in the middle of the best year of his life. He would end 2017 as the ICC's cricketer of the year and, the same month as the wedding, as India's most valuable celebrity brand, past Shah Rukh Khan for the first time.³

The fear, said out loud by plenty of former players and said much more rudely online, was that this was the peak. Marriage, the argument went, softens an athlete. The hunger goes. The late nights at the gym become early nights at home.

Here is what actually happened.

Thirty-four centuries in nine years is not a career winding down. For most batters it is a career. In those same years he collected the Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, the ICC's award for the best cricketer of the entire decade from 2011 to 2020, and the two things his trophy cabinet had been missing: a world title, and an IPL title with the team he never left.⁴

The 2023 World Cup at home was the statistical masterpiece. He scored 765 runs in a single tournament, the most anyone has ever made at a World Cup, and was named player of the tournament.⁴ On 15 November 2023, in the semi-final against New Zealand at the Wankhede, he reached his 50th one-day century and passed Sachin Tendulkar's record, with Anushka in the stands.⁵ India lost the final. Seven months later, in Barbados, he scored 76 in the T20 World Cup final against South Africa, was named player of the match, lifted the trophy, and retired from the format that night.⁴

And he is still going. He retired from Test cricket in May 2025 with 9,230 runs and 30 centuries, signing off with the words "#269, signing off".⁶ But in one-day cricket he has kept scoring: hundreds in January 2026 against New Zealand and in September 2026 against the West Indies took him to 55 ODI centuries and 86 in all.² He is 37.

If marriage was supposed to be the end of Virat Kohli the batter, nobody told Virat Kohli the batter.

The slump, the captaincy, and the way back

It would be dishonest to draw a straight line upwards, and the people who lived through 2020 to 2022 as Kohli fans will not let us. So let's look at it properly, because the bad years are where the marriage argument gets interesting.

His last century of the old era came on 22 November 2019, a Test hundred against Bangladesh in Kolkata. His next came on 8 September 2022, a T20 hundred against Afghanistan in Dubai.² That is nearly three years without a hundred in any format, for a man who had been scoring them at a rate nobody had seen before. In between, he gave up the T20 captaincy, was removed as one-day captain, and in January 2022 resigned as Test captain a day after a series defeat in South Africa.⁴ His daughter was born in the middle of all of it, in January 2021, in a locked-down country.

The easy reading, and the one that filled comment sections, was that fatherhood and marriage had taken the edge off. The record argues the opposite.

First, the slump began before his daughter and more than two years after his wedding. Second, it coincided with a pandemic that shut the game down, put players in bio-bubbles for months at a time, and broke the rhythm of every top batter in the world. Third, and this is the part that matters, he came out of it. Plenty of great players have gone into a decline at 32 and never returned. Kohli took a break from the game in 2022, came back in Dubai with that Afghanistan hundred, and then produced the greatest World Cup any batter has had.

What changed? He has, in his own words, given his wife a lot of the credit for how he thinks. In a 2020 conversation with his India teammate Mayank Agarwal, long before the comeback, he said:⁷

So when you see another person and know that your life partner has a different outlook on things. You invariably are challenged to see another point of view. I give her full credit for making me see different sides of things altogether and I am so grateful that she is my life partner.

That is not a man describing a distraction. It is a man describing a second coach.

After the T20 World Cup win in 2024, he wrote to her publicly:⁸

None of this would remotely be possible without you my love. You keep me humble, grounded and you always say it how it is with absolute honesty. I couldn't be more grateful for you. This victory is as much yours as it's mine.

We are careful on this site about what we claim to know of other people's marriages, and we will stay careful here. We do not know what happens at their kitchen table. But we know this: the version of Virat Kohli who gave up three captaincies and stopped scoring could have been the end of the story, and the version who came back and won two world titles is the one married to Anushka Sharma. The least you can say is that the marriage did not stop him. The more interesting thing to say is that, by his own account, it helped him become a player who could lose the captaincy and still want to bat.

There is also the Royal Challengers, the one team he has played for in 18 seasons of the IPL. In 2025 they finally won it. He scored 657 runs that season at an average of nearly 55.⁴ Loyalty is not a statistic. But in a league built on auctions and switching sides, staying put for 18 years and winning at the end of it says something about the kind of person he had become, and the kind of life he had around him.

Anushka: fewer films, more company. Why that is not stagnation

Now the harder half of the argument, because on the surface the numbers go the other way.

In 2018, the year after the wedding, Anushka Sharma had four releases: Pari, which she also produced; Sanju, which made more than 500 crore worldwide; Sui Dhaaga; and Zero.⁹ That is a busier year than most leading actresses manage. Then, as far as cinema halls were concerned, she stopped. Her only acting appearance since has been a cameo in Qala in 2022. Her big comeback, Chakda 'Xpress, a film about the cricketer Jhulan Goswami, was shot, slated for Netflix in October 2023, and has still not been released after Netflix and her production house ended their partnership.¹⁰

If you count only opening weekends, this looks like a career that stalled at 30. We think that is the wrong thing to count, for three reasons.

She chose it, and said so

On her 34th birthday in 2022, with a one-year-old at home, she put it plainly:¹¹

I will always want to be a part of the best scripts that come my way. I feel blessed that I am in a position today to select the type of films that I want to do, which also justifies the time that I will spend away from my child.

Stagnation is when you want to work and cannot. This is the opposite: a woman at the top of her field deciding what her time is worth.

She built something that outlasted her screen time

Clean Slate Filmz, the company she started with her brother Karnesh in 2013, spent the years after the wedding producing some of the most talked-about Indian streaming of the decade: Paatal Lok and Bulbbul in 2020, Mai and Qala in 2022.⁹ Paatal Lok in particular is routinely named among the shows that proved Indian streaming could do serious, dark, adult drama. She did not have to appear in any of it. Her name on the poster as producer was enough to get it made and watched. In 2022 she stepped back from the company and her brother became the sole owner, which is its own kind of growth: she built it, handed it over, and moved on.

Her value as a brand went up while her film count went down

This is the detail that should end the stagnation argument. In the 2017 celebrity brand valuation, published the same month as the wedding, Anushka did not appear in the top 15 at all.³ In Kroll's 2025 report, with no theatrical release in seven years, she is in the top 25, valued at 29.9 million dollars.¹² Brands do not pay for an actress who has disappeared. They pay for a person whose public standing has grown, and whose rare appearances carry more weight because they are rare.

There is also the clothing label, Nush, launched in October 2017, two months before the wedding, and her long record of work on animal welfare that led PETA India to name her Person of the Year in 2017.⁹ Forbes Asia put her on its 30 Under 30 list in 2018. None of this is the record of someone who gave up.

The honest thing to add is that Chakda 'Xpress not coming out is a real loss. She trained for seven months to play a fast bowler after giving birth, and the film has been stuck for reasons that had nothing to do with her performance.¹⁰ Careers in Indian cinema have been undone by less. Hers has not been, and that tells you how much of it she had moved beyond the box office before the box office stopped mattering.

The business of being Virat and Anushka

Celebrity marriages in India have a long history of being good for one career and quietly bad for the other. The couple that married in Tuscany have done something rarer: they built businesses that run alongside each other, and in a few cases together.

Virat's side. The year of the wedding was also the year he signed with Puma, a deal reported at around 110 crore that made him the first Indian athlete with a 100-crore endorsement contract, and launched One8, his athletic lifestyle label, under it.⁴ Since then the list has grown into something closer to a small conglomerate: Wrogn, the menswear brand; One8 Commune, the restaurant and bar chain; Nueva in Delhi; Chisel gyms; stakes in Mobile Premier League, the wellness company Hyperice, and the plant-based meat company Blue Tribe; and in 2025, after ending the Puma relationship, an investment in the sportswear company Agilitas.⁴ He co-owns FC Goa in the Indian Super League.

Anushka's side. Nush, the clothing line. Clean Slate Filmz, until 2022. And investments made with her husband rather than in his shadow: the two of them put 2.5 crore into Digit Insurance together in 2020, and Blue Tribe is a joint bet.⁴

What the market thinks. The clearest outside measure is the annual celebrity brand valuation first published by Duff & Phelps and now by Kroll. It is one firm's estimate, built from endorsement portfolios and social reach, so treat it as a thermometer rather than a bank statement. The readings go like this:

Two things stand out. First, nine years after the wedding, Virat is still worth more as a brand than he was on his wedding day, and at his 2024 peak he was worth 60 per cent more. The Test retirement cost him the top spot, which is what happens when you play less, not when you marry. Second, Anushka entered the list at all. The woman the internet had decided "gave up her career for marriage" is now one of the 25 most valuable celebrity brands in India without having released a film in theatres since 2018.

That is the pattern across every number we could find. Two careers, run on different timetables, both bigger than before.

Vamika, Akaay and the choice to be private

Their daughter, Vamika, was born on 11 January 2021. Their son, Akaay, on 15 February 2024.⁴ If you cannot picture either child's face, that is not an accident. It is the single most consistent decision the two of them have made since the wedding.

In a country where a celebrity child's first airport appearance is a news event, the couple asked photographers not to publish pictures of their children and, for the most part, have been obeyed. When a media group shared a holiday photograph of Vamika in June 2022 without permission, Anushka called them out publicly.⁹ When a fan filmed the couple on a walk in London, Virat told him to stop.¹³ These are small moments, but they add up to a line drawn and held for five years.

Since 2025 the family has spent much of its time in London. Virat's childhood coach, Rajkumar Sharma, confirmed in April 2025 that a move was planned.¹⁴ The couple themselves have said little about why, and we are not going to put words in their mouths; the explanations in circulation come from friends, not from them. What is on the record is simpler. He still plays for India and flies in for every series. She has not announced a film. They can take their children to a park.

Why does this belong in a piece about growth? Because privacy, for people this famous, is not a retreat. It is the hardest thing they have built. Anyone can be seen. Choosing when to be seen, and protecting two small people from a hunger that has followed their parents for 15 years, takes more discipline than any endorsement deal. Virat's own description of his wife, that she keeps him "humble, grounded" and tells him "how it is with absolute honesty", reads like a description of how that household runs.⁸

The wedding itself was the first draft of this. No leaks, no crowd, the news released when they chose. Nine years later the same rule covers two children and a second home, and it has held.

Giving back, together

Both of them came to the marriage with causes. The Virat Kohli Foundation has run since 2013, working with underprivileged children and young athletes; during the second wave of COVID in 2021 its appeal raised more than 11 crore for relief.⁴ Anushka has been vegetarian since 2015 and has been one of the most visible voices for animal welfare in Indian film, which is why PETA India's recognition came the same year as the wedding.⁹

What changed after 2017 is that the causes started to overlap. The foundation partnered on a rehabilitation centre for stray animals in 2021, which is a very Anushka thing for a cricket foundation to do. In 2023 the two of them set up SEVVA, a philanthropic venture, in their daughter's name as well as their own.⁹ Blue Tribe, the plant-based meat company they both back, sits at the junction of his fitness and her animal welfare.

None of this is unusual for wealthy couples. What is a little unusual is the direction of travel: each of them has moved towards the other's causes rather than running two separate charity calendars. That is a small sign of a bigger thing, which is that the two careers have been bending towards each other for nine years rather than away.

What couples planning a wedding can take from them

We are a wedding planning site, so we will be honest about why this story is on our Journal. Not because celebrity weddings are a template. Most of our readers are not flying 300 guests to Tuscany. But a few of the choices this couple made are available to anyone, and the nine years since suggest they were the right ones.

Run the day your way. The Tuscany wedding broke every rule of the big Indian celebrity wedding and nobody remembers it as small. Whatever your budget, the functions that families remember are the ones where the couple clearly chose them, not the ones with the most things in them. Our budget tool lets you split one number across every function so you can spend on what matters to you and go light on the rest.

Decide what is private before the wedding, not after. The couple drew their line about photographs on day one and have held it for nine years. Most families only discover they have a line when someone crosses it. Talk about it: who posts, when, and whether the children, when they come, are part of it.

Expect both careers to change, and not at the same time. The years after a wedding are rarely a straight line for anyone. One of you will have a slump while the other is flying. Virat's worst years and Anushka's busiest production years overlapped almost exactly. A good partnership is one that can carry an uneven load without keeping score.

Credit each other in public. It is a small thing, but every time Virat has won something big he has said, in so many words, that she was part of it. Families notice that. So do children.

Grow towards each other. The investments, the causes, the second home: nothing in their public record suggests one person folding into the other's life. It suggests two people slowly building a third thing that belongs to both.

None of this requires a World Cup. It requires a conversation before the mehndi, and it is the kind of conversation our planning checklist nudges you towards: not just who books the caterer, but what the two of you are agreeing to.

The honest counter-view

An editorial that only argues one side is an advertisement, so here is the best case against our own.

Correlation is not cause. Virat Kohli was already the best batter in the world in December 2017. Thirty-four more centuries may say nothing about his marriage and everything about his talent, his fitness regime and the fact that batters often peak in their early thirties. We cannot run the other version of his life to compare. Nobody can.

Anushka's screen career did stall, whatever the reason. You can admire the choice and still note that one of the most bankable actresses of the 2010s has had no theatrical release in eight years, and that her one finished film is stuck. Choosing to step back and being unable to step forward look similar from the outside, and the second is in there too.

The brand numbers partly measure fame, not growth. A valuation built on endorsements and follower counts rewards being talked about. Marrying the most famous cricketer in the country makes you more talked about. Some of Anushka's rise on that list is simply that.

Privacy is easier with money. Drawing a line around your children is a lot simpler when you can afford a home in London and a team that enforces it. Holding that up as an example to ordinary couples has limits.

All of that is fair. And yet the question we started with was not whether marriage caused their success. It was whether marriage held them back, because that was the accusation, repeated for nine years whenever either of them had a bad month. On that question the record is not close. Neither career went backwards. Both brands grew. The worst stretch of his career ended with the best stretch of his career. Her quietest years at the box office were her loudest as a producer. And the two people at the centre of it keep saying, in public, that the other one is the reason.

The verdict

Did marriage make Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma prosper, or stagnate? Prosper, by every measure we could find, and in a way that is more interesting than the usual celebrity story.

They did not grow in the same direction at the same time. He became more of what he already was: a batter who outlasted his own slump, his captaincy and most of his contemporaries, and who is still scoring hundreds at 37. She became something she had not been before: a producer, an entrepreneur, a brand that no longer depends on a release date, and a parent who has kept two children out of the frame in the most camera-hungry country on earth.

The cricket word for two batters who stay together a long time and keep the score moving is a partnership. Virat Kohli's longest one is not on any scorecard. It started in a hamlet in Tuscany on 11 December 2017, and it is still going. Not out.