Because there's no context, and because I'm not a native speaker, please let me know whether the sense is 'Who do you want to be the winner?' or 'Who is the one to be won by you?'

CK seems to be off for a while therefore any other native speaker will do, thank you.

@CK:
Who -> Why ?
Who -> Whom ?

I am not native English speaker, but this sentence seems to me rather strange. Is it correct?

"Who do you want to win?" is a natural sounding English sentence. It's equivalent to "Who is the one you want to be the winner?"

Some context to when this sentence would be used. There is a ballot to pick the school captain. Tom says to Mary "Who do you want to win?" Or there are two football teams playing, the same question could be asked. It could be asked of someone before a political election for President etc.

"Why do you want to win?" has a completely different meaning to "Who...". It would be asked of someone who was competing in a sport or standing for election etc, to find out the reason the person had for wanting to win the competition, election etc.

You could not use "Whom..." in this context as it is the accusative of "Who" and could not, therefore, be the subject of the verb "to win".

I hope this is of some help.

> You could not use "Whom..." in this context as it is the accusative of "Who" and could not, therefore, be the subject of the verb "to win".

This is interesting. Couldn't 'whom' be the direct object of the verb "to want"? It's not so obvious for me. (I want h i m to win.)

But this is "want smb to win" rather than just "want smb", and voila the grammar is different now - isn't English lovely? :D

Yeah, it can do a lot of amazing (dirty?) tricks, compared to German.

@patgfisher: Thank you for the help! Now I understand the sentence and correctis my Esperanto translation.