Every few years, I can't stop my mind going deep into the history of the English Premier League. It's the most easily digestible, readily available, constant, local, major sporting competition of my lifetime, and, allied with that, I think it is mainly misunderstood. It is irresistible, every now and then, to lose myself in my pet theories and analysis.
There is a place in between the statistical avalanche of modern scientific football analysis and the broad sweep "they want it more" falsehoods of everyday punditry, which, I think, is where the truth about football really lives. I don't think I understand it very well, but I really and truly think most people in Britain don't understand it at all.
It would be genuinely beyond comprehension, if we were a culture that genuinely understood its own game, that there has not been a single successful English football manager in 35 years. Apart, perhaps, from Gareth Southgate, who many "football" people think is a lucky, trite fool. But we are not a culture that understands its own game, of course.
I'll write here about seasons, teams, players and managers, and I'll culminate with my list of the 250 Greatest Premier League Players, which will mean the players that have had the largest positive effect for their team or teams on the outcomes of the Premier League seasons, taking into account the whole 33-season history...
The Premier League began in 1992, and on that first day, it would have been hard to know what would happen over the next season, let alone the next 33 years. There were no clear trends. The last ten titles had been won by Liverpool (5), Everton (2), Arsenal (2), and unlikely last Division 1 champions Leeds United, who had, much to most people's glee, pipped a flagging Manchester Utd in 1991-92, inspired by new signing Eric Cantona. That was a decent Leeds teams - forgotten great keeper John Lukic, Lee Chapman up front, Gary Speed, David Batty, Rod Wallace, Gary McAllister (probably the best player in Britain at the time). The most talked about player apart from Cantona was Gordon Strachan, who got one over on his old boss Alex Ferguson, with whom he'd fallen out.
It was the summer Gary Lineker retired from England duty, then went to Grampus Eight, after England bombed (a little unluckily) at Euro 92. Gascoigne, after a year out with injury, was just about to have his first season at Lazio (his best days, sadly, already behind him). In fact, there was something of a vacuum at the start of the Premier League, with five of the best English players - Lineker in Japan, Gascoigne, Des Walker, Platt and, later, Ince in Italy - absent. Alan Shearer had moved to Blackburn for a record fee. The most talked about young players were Ryan Giggs, who had almost been special enough as a 17/18 year old to propel Utd to their first title in 25 years, and Steve McManaman, of Liverpool.
Liverpool had won the FA Cup, inspiring some hope that they might return to being the dominant force they'd been for 20 years, but I think everyone knew Souness wasn't the manager Dalglish had been.
So, it was all, in the words of Brian Moore, "up for grabs" - Liverpool, Arsenal, Leeds, Aston Villa, Blackburn, Nottingham Forest - they all had a decent chance. Man Utd were probably slight favourites, but they'd bottled it the previous year, and the idea of them actually getting over the line after 25 years seemed as distant as ever to many. As it was, Norwich City led the table for the first half of the season. The country was behind them.
We know the rest. Or some of it.
United would dominate for the next 21 seasons. Don't worry, I'm not going to chronologically go through each one in detail (well, probably not).
Even the extent of that dominance is not always remembered. Counting the 91-92 First Division season, they won 13 of 22 titles. They could/should have won five more. Imagine that - 18 out of 22 years. We might have called the whole thing off. The only years they weren't really close were 2001-02, 2003-04, 2004-05 and 2005-06. 94-95, 97-98, 2009-10 and 2011-12, they are one result, one goal, away from it, each time. 1st 13 times, 2nd 6 times, 3rd three times.
The Ferguson factor, right? Yes, and what else ... Ferguson had been manager for six years at the start of the 1992 season. Only Guardiola has been manager for more than six years, of the current bunch. It's a managerial lifetime.
And he'd not won the title yet. He'd finished 11th, 2th, 11th, 13th, 6th, 2nd.
Maybe it was going to be 11th again in 1992-93? United didn't start the season particularly well. They were short of goals. Summer signing Dion Dublin had broken his leg. They hadn't managed to sign Shearer, Le Tissier, or David Hirst. One of the great little sentences on Ferguson's wikipedia page is "Ferguson felt that his failure to secure the signing of Mick Harford from Luton Town had cost United the 1991-92 league". The mind boggles.
Four things here, all of which are true.
1. Ferguson is the greatest manager.
2. United were a team on the up. They'd won the FA Cup in 1990, the Cup Winners Cup in 1991, the League Cup in 1992. They were becoming practised winners.
3. The signing of Eric Cantona in late November 1992 made a huge difference to their winning the 1992-93 league, and dominating the four seasons after that.
4. Man Utd were title contenders from the exact moment Ryan Giggs became a first team regular at the start of the 91-92 season to the exact moment he stopped being a first team regular, at the start of the 2013-14 season (more on that season later), and not in the 24 years before that, and not in the 12 years after that. That's a striking coincidence.
In restating my long-held, tiresome and unedifying belief that Giggs is, contrary to most modern opinion, by far the main figure in the Premier League, the sine qua non, it is worth saying that his becoming known as a terrible person has certainly affected his status in the game, not just his personal reputation. His name is not mentioned by anyone in any context unless absolutely necessary. He's not on the TV shows, the documentaries and the podcasts, people are not being reminded about his exploits daily. But, it is also true that Giggs was mainly undervalued even when he was the clean-cut, no-scandal guy (all of which was pretty obviously phony).
Also, you can kind-of cancel people in the world of entertainment without losing the story. But you can't, with sport. It doesn't make sense - you lose the narrative. And there are many men in sport who are known to have done terrible things who are still celebrated as family favourites, and even more who have done terrible things not fully known, who are also celebrated without compunction. Giggs may be rotten, but not uniquely so.
Right, that out of the way, let's leave Giggs for now, and talk about some other players.
Alan Shearer. And by extension, Matt Le Tissier, & Harry Kane. Alan Shearer was a great player. In his prime.
There was a weird certainty about Shearer in the summer of 1992. His record over five seasons at Southampton is remarkably meh. 23 goals in 118 league games. Alex Iwobi numbers. Matt Le Tissier had scored 54 goals for the same team in the same five seasons. Big teams, including Man Utd, were in for both. Le Tissier chose to stay at Southampton, Shearer chose Blackburn over Utd.
Imagine if Ferguson had got hold of Le Tissier. "You stupid fuckin' idiot, of course vaccines work" etc .. but, really ... I think Le Tissier at the right big club, i.e. United, would have been immense ... Le Tissier was as good as Cantona, in his strange way.
Back to Shearer. 3.6 million, a British record transfer fee (though a fraction of what AC Milan were playing for Gianluigi Lentini in Italy). The first Match of the Day of the 1992 Premier League. I remember watching it, not knowing the results. Shearer scored two absolute blinders. 3.6 million could have been 10 million right then.
Then, his first big injury - ACL. But he came back, for the 93-94 season, just as good. At Blackburn, Shearer was as good as everyone says he was.
It's a weird little detail that, while scoring a goal a game for Blackburn for three seasons, Shearer couldn't score for England. Ferdinand, Fowler, Sutton, Le Tissier, Wright, Cole all waiting in line, he was potentially that good.
Shearer is still regularly at, or near, the top of Premier League Greatest Player lists, while Harry Kane is not. Let me say, Harry Kane is empirically, altogether, better. Alan Shearer scored, including internationals, 409 goals in 794 games. Harry Kane has, currently, 429 in 668 (as at end of 2024). It's not close. (Kane has scored about 25 more penalties in total, and, of course, penalties should count as half, but still ...)
But Shearer, unlike Kane, is a winner! might run the argument ... but, in truth, neither are winners. Shearer won one single thing - the 1994-95 Premier League, with Blackburn, when he was magnificent. But Blackburn won the Premier League that season because Cantona kicked Matthew Simmonds, and because Andy Cole missed a ton of chances on the last day. Harry Kane also had many magnificent seasons. Blackburn also blew that last day, losing to Liverpool (I remember, at the time, having mixed feelings. Blackburn were seen as financial usurpers, the small-time Chelsea of their day, and I really did feel bad for Andy Cole ...)
Shearer didn't grasp any more big moments than Harry Kane has, in truth. At least Harry Kane was eventually able to seize the moment and go to a bigger club ... (do you think, incidentally, Shearer was still good enough to be signed by Bayern Munich when he was 30...)
Shearer's career would have been vaster if he hadn't had three big injuries. But ... he did. And he eventually became significantly less impactful as a result, over a pretty long period.
Newcastle United were, maybe, the second biggest story of the 90s Premier League. Strange to think they didn't even play the first season, but after instant promotion under Kevin Keegan, they finished a thrilling third in 1993-94. This was the era when Andy Cole was scoring more goals than seemed humanly possible, alongside Peter Beardsley.
Then came the shock transfer of Cole to United, a decent but not great second season, the signings of Ferdinand and Ginola, and the unforgettable "I'd love it we beat them" run-in ... rightly or wrongly, I always felt it was the signing of Faustino Asprilla that undid them. Not that Asprilla didn't have good moments, but I think the focus and seriousness disappeared from that point. They loosened.
Shearer joined at the end of that season. At that point a proven winner, he'd had a sensational Euros. This was the big one - the homecoming hero who was going to get them over the line. It didn't happen, and the fact it didn't happen must be looked on as one of the Premier League's great failures. Manchester United won the title in 1996-97 with just 75 points. Newcastle were a semi-respectable 2nd with 68 points (Keegan resigning to be replaced, ironically, by Dalglish halfway through the season) but that was as good as it would get. There would be some fun times under Bobby Robson (I worked with a guy who swore that Kieron Dyer was better than Beckham and the title was on its way to Tyneside) but never a serious challenge. Shearer scored goals, but not vast amounts of important goals. It was managed decline. It was an arm raised in futility.
People will still say, rightly I suppose, that Shearer is a greater Premier League player than Harry Kane because he scored 260 vs 213 goals and because he has 1 vs 0 titles.
But, against that, Harry Kane scored his goals at 0.66 vs Shearer's 0.59 (in the EPL, not taking into account Shearer's even lower rate in Division 1). Kane would have broken Shearer's record by now if he'd stayed at Spurs. Also against that, Spurs, in 2016-17, managed 86 points, the highest 38-game total by any team not Man Utd or City, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool. In that season, they won 12 of their last 13 games. Not very Spursy.
But, at the same time, it is true what they say about Harry Kane. He has not performed in his biggest games, those semi-finals and finals where he could have finally put his reputation to bed. But he certainly made Spurs better in the league, and that is the measure of a footballer. He made Spurs a consistent Champions League team and kept scoring the goals that kept them in Europe even when the promise of the Pochettino team started to fade. He didn't have a single bad season in the Premier League. Does Spurs's supposed Spursiness prevent any Spurs players being considered Premier League greats?
Yet, what a strangely unstrange Premier League team Spurs have actually been, up to 2024-25. The only team, along with Everton, that have played in every EPL season not to have won the title, they have finished every position between 15th and 2nd (apart from 13th), but have finished in the Top 8 almost every season for the last 20 years. There were only two seasons when the title was even the vaguest possibility - 2015-16 and 2016-17, but they never actually threw away a title lead in the second half of the season.
They have had wonderful players - Klinsmann, Ginola, Sheringham, Berbatov, van de Vaart, Davids, Carrick, Lennon, Robbie Keane, Modric, Bale, (Taarabt!), Eriksen, Dele Alli, Son, and quite often played excellent football. Two of those have won PFA Player of the Year (though not Harry Kane, despite winning the Golden Boot three times) - Gareth Bale (twice) and David Ginola.
While some may say Ryan Giggs winning Player of the Year in 2009 was the silliest award, he was at least a key player in the title-winning team, and had, indeed, if the award was a reward for a long career, starred in the top division for 18 years at that point. David Ginola won the award in 1998-99, his 5th Premier League season, the season when Man Utd won the treble, when Spurs finished 11th and he scored three league goals. Delicious. They were excellent goals, mind, and Spurs did win the League Cup that year, but still ...
Man United won the title with a meagre 79 points in their treble-winning season. Going back to my previous point about the true extent of their dominance, it was one of the very few seasons they themselves won by less than one result. Arsenal were one point behind, and Chelsea third with 75. That was the only time before the Abramovich era that Chelsea were anywhere near the title. For so long, there was a satisfaction to their metropolitan, self-important averageness. They were not even, then, completely unlikeable, or not in the way they were later. The quality of the past-their-peak players they brought in was really something - Gullit, Desailly, Vialli, Brian Laudrup, George flippin Weah, Zola. Well, Zola was not really past his peak. He's the only one of those that can really be considered a Premier League great.
He missed the Abramovich era by a week - maybe he's glad he did. However dominant Man City have appeared to be in the past few seasons, I'd nevertheless say that that there hasn't been the same sense of terminal hopelessness as there was in Mourinho's first two seasons at Chelsea.
We did not yet know how flaky Mourinho was. We did not yet know the full extent of how relentless Alex Ferguson was. It felt, between 2004 and 2006, as though this was a completely new ball game which only Chelsea were allowed to know the rules to.
Chelsea won the title five times between 2005 and 2017 but, surprisingly, they never did establish dominance. The only player who was a part of all five was John Terry, though he only played nine games in 2016-17. It would pain anyone to say it but he was their greatest player and, in terms of influence on the competition, I think he's been the Premier League's greatest defender. I still watch him missing his 2008 Champions League penalty as it's the only thing that makes me truly happy.
Their other champion stalwarts were Petr Cech, who is statistically the league's greatest keeper, with 202 clean sheets in 443 games, Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard, the best goalscoring central midfielder the league has had.
They had other outstanding players who stayed a while like Ricardo Carvalho, Claude Makelele, Eden Hazard, N'Golo Kante, Joe Cole, Ashley Cole, Cesc Fabregas and Michael Essien, and others who passed through, like Arjen Robben, Thibaut Courtois and Michael Ballack.
They had great managers - Mourinho, Guus Hiddink, Ancelotti, Conte. It's funny that their Champions League final managers were Avram Grant, Roberto Di Matteo and Thomas Tuchel. Frank Lampard was their manager twice. Twice! I'd almost forgotten ...
Although there are some contenders, I think no one polluted the surface of the Premier League as much as Mourinho.
Against the odds, Ferguson got the better of him.
2006 might be the most interesting year in Premier League history. It began with Chelsea heading to their second consecutive title, potentially by a record margin. They had a 16 point lead. The Manchester United dynasty was finished. It would be three seasons without a title. They were out of the Champions League. The man many people thought the driving force of the glory years, Roy Keane, had left the club in the most acrimonious circumstances. They were 7th in November 2005. George Best died.
It couldn't get worse. Then Paul Scholes got injured. They lost the Manchester derby in January 2006. No Keane, no Scholes. Ronaldo still just a wasteful hog.
So, in central midfield, out of necessity, Ferguson puts utility defender John O'Shea and 32-year-old winger who has seen better days, Ryan Giggs. United win nine games in a row. Maybe Roy Keane wasn't such a big deal after all. I honestly would describe that run, which never gets talked about, as the key period in the history of the Premier League
Another vital thing happens in January 2006. The club signs two defenders, Patrice Evra and Nemanja Vidic. Both of them will be among the league's best ever defenders.
Another vital thing happens in February 2006. Ferguson realises that the future does not lie with Ruud van Nistelrooy. As far as I know, Ruud had done little wrong. He remained a great goalscorer and is widely said to be a serious, intense, but nice man. I think he did not get on with Ronaldo. Ferguson left him on the bench at the League Cup final, which United won 4-0. He still had a couple more league goals in him, but he was done at the club, transferred to Real Madrid in the summer.
Chelsea were still, at the end of the 2005-06 season, the best team. It threatened to get close, but they beat United convincingly, and won the league by 8 points. Still, momentum had shifted. United had a trophy, could survive without Keane, had a proper goalkeeper again (van der Sar) and two new defenders to go with Rio Ferdinand and (still, just about), Gary Neville.
There was only one significant signing in the summer of 2006 - Michael Carrick. But surely he was no fit for the great Roy Keane ... (you are recognising my themes by now ...)
Steven Gerrard, of 3rd place Liverpool, was Player of the Year. He was such an inspirationally effective and coherent midfielder at that time, of course, that England won the summer's World Cup by playing really, really good, fluent attacking football.
Ronaldo was about to happen. On social media, there are more Ronaldo fans (stans) than there are anything else. They are, of course, the worst. They're the Elon Musk stans of football. They are probably, in fact, the same people. Ronaldo is the oddest case of a great footballer there's ever been, because he has so often, so often, been the butt of the joke, the wrong part of the story.
Ronaldo is one of the greatest footballers who ever lived, and he was also great for a period in the Premier League, but it really does not follow that he is one of the Premier League's greatest players.
He had seven and a half seasons - for the first three, he scored 4, 5 and 9 goals, with 4, 4 and 6 assists. This was the only three-year stretch in 20-odd years Man Utd didn't win the league and didn't look like winning it. He was not a boon for the team. He was replacing David Beckham, one of the most consistent and unselfish right midfielders in football history, and the team suffered as a result. You can't blame Ronaldo - he was a kid, learning his game, but from 2003 to 2005, in terms of what was required of him, he was arguably an actively bad Premier League player.
Then, after improving towards the back end of 2005-06, he was excellent for three seasons. [Many believe he gained his superpowers from getting Wayne Rooney sent off at the 2006 World Cup] He scored /assisted 17/8 in 2006-7, 31/7 in 2007-8, 18/7 in 2008-9. United won the title in each of those years. In 2007-08, Ronaldo was the best player in the world as they won the Champions League. But that's the only EPL season where his stats are the kind of thing he achieved season after season at Madrid and Juventus.
A significant measure of a player, for me, is how a club does after they leave. By that measure, it would appear at first glance that Ronaldo was significant to United. In 2009, they won the title and reached the Champions League final; in 2010, without him, they won nothing but the League Cup. But, you know, United were hardly worse in 2009-10, especially in the league. They actually scored 18 more goals than the previous season, and missed out on the league by a point. In fact, my precise recollection is that they lost out in both the league and the Champions League because of a bad run of form, and some shocking mistakes, from the usually reliable Michael Carrick.
Anyway, the point about Ronaldo is that he was a great player by pursuing his goals above all else. You have to be pretty special to be that kind of player for the betterment of a team, and for a long time he was.
But his re-signing for United in 2021-22, I think, ruined the club's season more than anything before or since. They had, remember, finished a decent 2nd under Solskjaer the previous season - they had an abundance of talented, potentially insecure, attacking players - Pogba, Martial, Bruno Fernandes, Rashford, Greenwood, Cavani - , as well as having just spent 85 million Euros on the most promising attacking midfielder in Europe, Jadon Sancho. They started that season really well, too, then, with embarrassing fanfare, bought the 36-year old who everything had to be about. A couple of managers later, 58 points, 57 goals for and against, a season bad beyond measure. But Ronaldo got 18 goals! What would they have done without him? Scored a lot more goals, and finished a lot higher, of course ...
So, you have to see, with Ronaldo, you have one truly great Premier League season, two excellent ones, one decent, improving one, and three and a half pretty bad ones where he made his team worse.
Some players loosen a team. It's not necessarily their fault. It can't always be foreseen but sometimes it can. Keegan should have seen that Faustino Asprilla was too much of a risk. Maybe he was looking for his Cantona but he looked in the wrong place, and anyone who watched Football Italia could have told you that. United should never have signed Ronaldo in 2021 (maybe, to be fair, Spurs should not have re-signed Bale the season before, much as it was lovely to have him back). But who could have foreseen that Veron wouldn't work at United, and, through little fault of his own, would just unsettle the balance of the club? (Gary Neville, to be fair, has an interesting theory on this, that Veron was Ferguson's first experiment with 4-3-3, with changing United's style of play, that he needed to happen for Ronaldo etc to happen).
One way of looking at Liverpool in the first fifteen years of this century is that they were permanently loosened.
I can't explain Steven Gerrard.
They all, nearly all of them, say he was the best, that he was the complete player, a cut above his peers, the ultimate leader, that he had it all, could do it all.
Then why didn't he?
That's what I ask.
I don't really know. I have a few ideas.
But it doesn't really matter how good Steven Gerrard was because when he was playing for them, Liverpool didn't win the league, and England didn't get to the semi-finals of a major tournament, and neither of those teams played consistently effective or attractive football.
Liverpool have been a pretty strange Premier League team. I'm not a fan, but I think there's a strong case for it being the finest football club in the world, all things considered.
They've won the Premier League once - hopefully, surely, twice after this season.
They won the league 18 times before that.
In the Premier League, they've finished 6th, 8th, 4th, 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 7th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 4th, 5th, 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 2nd, 7th, 6th, 8th, 7th, 2nd, 6th, 8th, 4th, 4th, 2nd, 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 3rd.
It's hard to distinguish the Gerrard era from the numbers, but it's basically the bit in the middle where they often finished 4th sometimes.
It's easy to see why Liverpool didn't start the Premier League well - losing a great manager for a surprisingly poor one. and a whole load of great players moving past their peak all at once - Nicol, Whelan, Rush, Hansen, Lawrenson, McMahon etc. Incidentally, a thought I had last night is "what would have happened if Liverpool had been able to replace Dalglish with Keegan instead of Souness in 1991?" Anyway, they were a pretty fun team in the mid-90s under Roy Evans, with John Barnes still just about John Barnes, McManaman, Fowler, Rob Jones, Collymore etc
On my gap year in the first half of 1997, I watched one Premier League football match. I didn't know what was happening in the title race, and was delighted to find, in April of that year when I sat in a hotel bar in a small town in Uganda which had actual electricity, Liverpool were genuine title contenders, and if they beat Man Utd that day, they might well take it home (it always surprises me, looking back, how much I wanted Utd not to win the title that year). They did not. That was the closest they got in the 90s.
After that, they had that classic cup team in 2001, which really made you think they were going to do it next season, and they did indeed finish second (though never really looked like winning the title).
But, after that, it just didn't happen for them in the league. Something or other happened in some cup or other in 2005 and that was good, but Liverpool had a lot of really mediocre 60 point league seasons. They were close, with Torres, in 2009, and even closer, with Suarez, in 2014, but not close enough.
That was the Gerrard era. 504 league games, 120 goals (inc 29 penalties), 92 assists, 86 badge kisses, 322 purring commentators, eight (8!) Premier League Teams of the Year, no titles.
It's a great record but not enough when you're the guy who insists on doing everything.
Ferguson says Gerrard wasn't a "top, top player". Benitez says he was the best player he coached but in the same sentence says he lacked football intelligence.
He captained a loose ship. How many good players went to Liverpool and didn't find their feet?
What would have happened if Ferguson had signed Gerrard? He'd have scored 17 goals in the first season, won PFA Player of the Year and United would have come third. The next season he'd have score 14, United would have come 4th, and Scholes would have retired. The next season, he'd have score 15, Giggs would have retired, Ferguson would have resigned.
What would have happened if Gerrard had still been Liverpool's main player when Klopp took over? Oh, I don't know. Klopp's a very good manager.
Liverpool were astonishingly good under Klopp to win only one title. 97 points to finish second. 92 points to finish second. Just as United were so close, in their dominance, to five more titles, so City's eight titles since 2012 were one result, in five of those seasons, away from not happening. Those bastards have always given you hope.
What does one say about Man City?
They have eight titles now. It will at least stay at eight for a while. Indeed, perhaps there's more chance that number will go down before it goes up. Here's hoping.
So, there are some things about Man City which make it hard to swallow. Was being bought by a nation state a next level of ruin for the league compared to being bought by an oligarch? Probably, yeah ... is it possible corruption of a sort that has been present in Spanish football for decades is now all through English football? Very possible.
But, ok, let's put all that aside and take it at face value.
There are, since they were bought by Sheikh Mansour/Abu Dhabi in 2008, two stages of Man City - pre-Pep and Pep.
Not to mention, there is Man City in the Premier League era before that - a succession of solid or liquid English managers - double relegation, recovery under Joe Royle and then Kevin Keegan. No one begrudged them that. Everyone loved it when Stuart Pearce put David James up front. That's one of the finest moments in Premier League history.
Under Abu Dhabi, there was Mark Hughes, then Roberto Mancini, then Manuel Pellegrini. They were contenders, then winners, but not dominant.
Who were the key players in those early successes? AguerOOOO, Kompany, David Silva, Yaya Toure. Zabaleta, Clichy and Milner, Fernandinho, Joe Hart (strange to go back and remember Joe Hart was really very good for quite a long time, four-time Golden Glove winner). Kolo Toure and David Silva, particularly, had a few years of being utterly magnificent. Very few of those survived long into the Guardiola era. There is actually no Man City player yet that has seven Premier League titles.
Guardiola joined in 2016, and didn't win the title until 2018, the loser. Funnily enough, in his stuttering first season, I did allow myself the hope that it really wouldn't work for him, and he would be exposed as a fraud.
Well, he's not a fraud. I do think it should count against him that he's never been an alchemist, he's only ever worked with access to the best players and the most money, compared to other managers, but this City side have often shown exceptional mettle when under pressure. Many of his best players have not come to the club as superstars, but he has brought out the best in them.
The best Guardiola players have, obviously, been Kevin de Bruyne and Rodri. Rodri seems to have come from nowhere to being the most effective player in the world in a few seasons. We can see, right now in his absence, what a player is. As for De Bruyne, well, let's look at the statistics.
He has 73 goals and 115 assists in 273 games. Goals are, of course, easy to quantify. Scoring a goal is scoring a goal, and however you do it if you're a striker, that's the currency, rightly or wrongly. Assists are a somewhat more recent measure, and different databases have defined them in different ways. Also, they're by no means a perfect measure of creativity. A midfielder playing in a team with an out-of-form, or average, striker will not have an assists record that does justice to him. Furthermore, one can do pretty much all the work in creating a goal up to the final touch, and not get the official assist.
Still, it's what we have. And what we can see is that assists are harder to come by than goals. There are 10 players in Premier League history with 160+ goals and 10 with 80+ assists. The ratio is pretty similar in the Champions League - the top assist-makers (Giggs and Ronaldo) have 40+, whereas the top scorers, Ronaldo and Messi, have 100+, while there are more assisters with 25+ than strikers with 50+. But, it's fair to say, roughly, that assists are twice as hard to come by as goals.
I get a little piqued (imagine that) by the increasing trend for combining goals and assists for a "goal contributions" figure ... that doesn't do justice to goal creators. De Bruyne has 188 contributions in 273 games, while Robin van Persie has 197 in 280. A great player, van Persie, but no De Bruyne. Double De Bruyne's assists figure to get a measure of how special it is - Imagine if someone had scored 230 goals in 273 games ...
Those two have not been City's only great players, of course - Bernardo Silva, Kyle Walker, Mahrez and Gundogan (I think those two are under-celebrated, they always seemed to crop up with crucial goals at crucial moments), Fernandinho and Ruben Dias (not to mention, intermittently, Stones and Foden).
The forgotten Englishman of the Premier League, still only 30, is Raheem Sterling, who, rather like Wayne Rooney, seems to have given all his best by the age of 27. I'm rarely surprised looking through the stats, but seeing Sterling had 123 Premier League goals definitely reminded me what a major player he was for several years.
They've also had Ederson, who may or may not be the Premier League's best goalkeeper.
It's hard to tell with goalkeepers, isn't it? Harder, I think, than anything else. The best ones play for the best teams so don't have much to do, while the supposedly less good ones have loads to do, so get to make more saves. Someone will be called the best goalkeeper in the league, and then make a couple of howlers, and no one will ever think they're the best keeper in the league ever again.
Anyway, when I think of keepers, the ones who, down the years, I've thought, at different times, had a preternatural, intimidating ability to keep the ball out of the net, have been Seaman (early 90s), Kahn, Buffon, Neuer, Courtois, but, hardly surprisingly, those have all played for teams I was hoping would lose, so that may not be accurate.
Other eye-sight criteria - the keeper I thought was the most composed, most unflappable, most mistake-free, was van der Sar at Utd. That correlates with Utd having a very tight defence, conceding fewer than 30 goals per season for several years in a row - Van der Sar, Ferdinand, Vidic - what a back three that was.
The tightest ever PL defence was Chelsea in 2004-05 - just 15. Petr Cech has the most clean sheets, at a very good ratio, of all Premier League keepers. P Schmeichel is the greatest according to legend. Pepe Reina was considered the best for a while. Right now, you've got Raya and Martinez who are the names to drop, while Alisson's lustre dropped a little after a few howlers in big games.
Goalkeepers are incredibly important, and sometimes there's just a creep of doubt about them they'll never live down. Happened with David James, with Joe Hart, happened with Vicario for Spurs, perhaps with Onana for Man Utd.
That's not very helpful, is it? I think I'd say Ederson, Van der Sar, Schmeichel and Cech are the four best Premier League keepers, but there will probably be an algorithm that proves it was Mart Poom all along.
Man City won the league the year after Alex Ferguson resigned. Until that point, Utd had just about managed to hold off the transfer of power. City have finished above United every season since then. What went so completely wrong at Old Trafford?
Well, let's start with David Moyes. Now, it won't surprise you to know that I think the biggest mistake Moyes made, and why he didn't last the 2013-14 season, is the same mistake almost everyone makes when they think about the Premier League - underestimating the importance of Ryan Giggs. Moyes, no doubt planning for the future, knowing the aging team needed to change, didn't pick Giggs in the league after a couple of games. Giggs only featured in 12 league games that season, often as a sub. In those twelve games, United picked up 24 points. If they'd managed 76 points for the season, or anything above 70, Moyes wouldn't have been fired. I remember he was "unlucky" for a period in the middle of the season. United played pretty well but couldn't close out games. That's what experienced players are for.
I like Moyes, but he overestimated himself, and failed to understand Giggs' place at Old Trafford, 40 years old though he was. According to Patrice Evra, players like Giggs and Ashley Young were no longer training with the first time, because, according to Moyes, they were "not his players".
Giggs played in the Champions League, including the 3-0 turnaround in the Round of 16 which was United's best result of the season. There we go.
OK, that's my Giggs-centric explainer done for now. More of that later.
What else about United from 2013 to 2025? What a tale to tell. United fans blame the Glazers for a lot, which is understandable, I guess. Equally, after the Glazers took over, Utd won five Premier League titles and reached three Champions League finals. It wasn't a precipitous fall from grace. And, post-Ferguson, they signed a panoply of players who had performed, and would later perform, at the highest level with great honour - Di Maria, Mata, Victor Valdes, Falcao, Luke Shaw, Schweinsteiger, Depay, Ibrahimovic, Pogba, Alexis Sanchez, Matic, Lukaku, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Cavani, Van de Beek, Ronaldo, Varane, Sancho, Eriksen, Lisandro Martinez, Casemiro, Mount, Onana, Amrabat - is it really the owners' fault that 80% of those flopped? It's incredible. Compare that to Liverpool, where about 90% of their signings, of less stellar names often, have succeeded. Just a baffling club.
One interesting player, to me, is Pogba, who is generally seen as one of the biggest flops, and everything that was wrong with post-Ferguson Man U. Six seasons, 6th, 2nd, 6th, 3rd, 2nd, 6th - one Europa Cup, another Europa Cup final loss, an FA Cup final loss. Fallow years for a great club, with signs of promise. 154 games, 29 goals, 38 assists.
Steven Gerrard's 17 years at Liverpool saw a few more trophies, of course, not that many proportionally - 504 games, 120 goals, 92 assists. Again, the proportions are not so different. They might even be in Pogba's favour. I'm not suggesting Gerrard wasn't a better Premier League player than Pogba, but the big differences are perception, "passion", what it looks like when they run, what they represent to fans. Funny old game.
Another thing about Pogba. He belongs, somewhat, not wholly, but somewhat, to that marvellous category of world-class footballer ...
... the player who doesn't want to score ...
Gerrard never belonged to that category, Nor Ronaldo. You can bet that the main thing they dreamed about before games was scoring the winner. Nothing wrong with that. Without those players, no one ever wins.
But there are also two different categories of great creative footballer
a) the one whose main thought is not to score - they'll take it, but it's not their main thing e.g Scholes, Giggs, Zidane, Bergkamp, even Zola and Berbatov. Maybe even Rooney
and
b) even better, the football genius who scores apologetically, like they only do it if they really have to.
The ultimate of these is Luka Modric. Andres Iniesta is another. Maybe Pirlo, Seedorf, too. Iniesta, scoring the winner in a World Cup final just cos someone had to do it ...
You need to be pretty special to have that attitude and be a striker. And then, occasionally, there are the defenders who are desperate to score the goals - JT, Ramos ... not many others.
I haven't mentioned Thierry Henry yet, have I?
Thierry Henry is most people's idea of the Greatest Premier League Player, but they mean best, not greatest. He was the best, of course, while he played. He played his prime years in the Premier League - seven full seasons, one injury-hit season and then a couple of games a few years later.
He won Player of the Year twice, the Golden Boot four times, and Arsenal won the league twice when he was playing for them. It's a bit mealy-mouthed to talk down or contextualize Henry's achievements, because he was the best, but he did only win the league twice, Arsenal did win the league and come second by a point in the two seasons before he joined, and they finished third with 83 points the season after he left, having only got 67 or 68 points in his last two seasons. Someone said it was probably good for the club he left, as he used to scream for the ball and be given it, even though he wasn't always in the best position, and the person that said that was Thierry Henry, which is pretty cool of him, and succinctly says everything I've been trying to say about big personality star players for the last god-knows-how-many words...
Maybe the greatest talent a great footballer can have is not screaming for the ball when they're not in the best position ...
Anyway, I'm warning you, I'm going to place De Bruyne above Henry, because his 115 assists is outrageous and unique, and he's won six titles to two, and I'm warning you even further, someone else is going to be above both of them ... can you guess who ...
At the moment, Mo Salah has very similar statistics to Henry ...
Salah will have two titles by the end of the season, as well. I'd still put Henry above Salah, just about. If for no other reason, just because I reckon, next to Bukayo Saka currently, no other footballer has been so universally, unbegrudgingly liked/admired by other fans.
Salah should stick it out at Liverpool, I reckon, get some clearance on his stats. There's no move he could make which would improve his football career. Maybe Spurs, I guess, as a central defender ...
Is Salah still, putatively, a winger? It's funny to think of all these amazing left-footed players coming in from the right these day when, back in the day, there was hardly a decent left foot in all of England.
I think, on a basic level, one of the things that made Giggs one of the final pieces on Ferguson's jigsaw was that he was a proper left-footed left winger and, with the equally quick Kanchelskis on the right, it meant United could make use of the full pitch, access areas other attacks couldn't. It was a perfectly, balanced, fast, potent, simple method. Lee Sharpe was just as quick before he got injured. I do firmly believe that if Giggs had been English, England would have won Euro 96 or the 98 World Cup. It was the Jason Wilcox/Steve Guppy conundrum. He wouldn't have played until 2013, though, that's for sure.
To take something of a ruminative detour, it's mad how much most of that United team cost, even by the standards of the time. They did have the money to spend if needs be - Gary Pallister cost £2.3m from Middlesbrough in 1989 - but, not even counting Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Butt, Nevilles costing nothing, Irwin was £900,000, Bruce was £800,000, Schmeichel was £500,000, Cantona was £1m, Kanchelskis £675,000, Ince £1m, McClair £850,000. Dean Saunders, from Villa to Liverpool, was £2.9 million, by comparison.
Any one of those can be considered the bargain of a lifetime. The Cantona signing is the most renowned. Leeds were glad to get rid of him. The numbers don't really do justice to Cantona at United, although they are good. 64 goals and 56 assists in 143 league games. Three league red cards, one of them particularly notable. Cantona was a big story.
He was also a cool guy. Is a cool guy. A real-deal one-off oddball. If he'd only ever done Looking for Eric, that would mark him as a bit special. That's a beautiful thing. I can't believe I used to prefer Matt Le Tissier.
Actually, something I noticed is that of the footballers I grew up watching, from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, there's really a striking number of them that are interesting men with depth and range to them - Cantona, John Barnes, Ian Wright, Peter Reid, Pat Nevin, Liam Brady, Cascarino, Brian McClair, Tony Adams, Neville Southall, Gullit, Vialli, Paul McGrath, Dion Dublin, Strachan, on a more corporate level, the likes of Niall Quinn and Gary Lineker. Abroad, the likes of Boban and Thuram. There are some interesting, intelligent, likeable modern footballers, but that was a pretty cool bunch to follow. Just as many awful ones, mind.
Apart from the accursed Ronaldo, it's Cantona, Keane, Scholes and Rooney that are the most celebrated Manchester United players, these days.
Well, fair enough. With Cantona, the only things that can be said are that a) while it is is good to kick a hooligan, it is not good to miss a season of football as a result, and b) he left because he didn't think United could succeed in Europe, and they did, very soon after he left. Like most irreplaceables, he was replaceable.
Keane - I have more fondness for Keane than I've had before. He is a genuinely funny man. He is also just about the only man that talks sanely about Roy Keane. On his legendary leadership skills, he says it was mainly "sorting out tickets for players' families" and making sure people were on time. As a player, he says he could run, pass and control it, and that was all he needed to do. He was a very good player, Keane, and no doubt he was a good captain, but again, it's not actually good to be sent off eight times, and United won the league in the season before he joined and five times in the seven seasons after he left. He was the very opposite of irreplaceable.
Keane is the kind of man football people, including team-mates, like to fetishize - the 1997/98 season is a classic example. A recent Man Utd doc made Utd's failure to win the title that year all about the absence of Keane (through self-inflicted injury).But the reality is (as so often) they lost that title that year (as in 2001-02) in a run of games Ryan Giggs was injured. In the 9 games Giggs didn't feature that season, they gained 14 points, 63 from the 29 he did.
Rooney was magnificent, but he really was done before he was 30, and that was a shame.
As for Scholes, the ginger magician, Scholes of Manchester, the man who could hit a needle from 80 yards, he was also a great player, a completely unselfish player. A stat about Scholes is that he only has 55 assists from 500 Premier League games, which obviously doesn't tell you that Scholes wasn't a great passer, but it does tell you that it wasn't his job to make the difficult passes. Scholes is also, like Keane, the only sensible voice on the subject of Paul Scholes. Why did he retire from England? Was it cos of Lampard and Gerrard, cos he was stuck on the left, cos of Eriksson's tactics? No, he just was playing badly for England.
Scholes showed his value to United by steadying the ship, briefly, after retiring (an incident which has itself been a little overromanticized, as United didn't win the title in 2011-12 and he was poor in 2012-13, wished he'd retired again a year earlier). One of the interesting things about post-Keane United was you had a couple of superstars - Ronaldo and Rooney, the great back three - Van der Sar, Ferdinand, Vidic, the two stalwarts - Scholes and Giggs, and a whole load of players who played a lot of games who wouldn't have looked out of place at smaller clubs, but could be relied upon to do a great job - O'Shea, Fletcher, Park, Young, Valencia, Evans, that was a real triumph the performances Ferguson got out of those players.
I haven't mentioned the greatest triumph yet. Leicester City winning the title in 2016 remains as singular and magnificent as ever, however well Nottingham Forest are doing right now.
If you scan the tables, the Premier League has been remarkably boring. A bit more interesting at the start, as it found its feet, with Norwich, Villa, QPR near the top. Blackburn won in 1995, of course, but Blackburn were financially competitive with Man Utd - Shearer, Sutton at 5 million, a very good squad of established players like Hendry, Le Saux, Flowers, Sherwood, not to mention the Premier League's greatest ever striker Paul Warhurst.
Since then - very few interlopers - you'd have periods where Newcastle, Leeds, Everton, Spurs became big clubs and made their way into the top four, and of course, Chelsea and Man City had their even more significant ascensions, but there have been very few real outsiders getting anywhere near the Top 4.
Leicester were smaller at the start of 2015 than they were now. They'd been consistently in and out of the Premier League, they'd never won it, they'd just avoided relegation the year before.
It really was the biggest shock in sport. It's easier to understand now, now we know that by a mixture of luck and good recruitment, they'd happened upon two of the best players in the world, Kante and Mahrez, Vardy was an actual proper great striker, Schmeichel was a proper excellent keeper, and Ranieri is a manager who, to this day, though inconsistent, can build momentum and get teams on a really good run. The rest of the squad were good players who played their best.
Spurs never looked like winning the title that year, but they did only take 1 point from 2 games with Leicester, and 6 points there would have made all the difference.
Vardy's ended up being one of the great smaller-club men, up there, probably above, Matt Le Tissier and Wilfried Zaha. I'd argue that those three should hold a higher place in Premier League history than even a pretty high level of top club star like Alonso, Pires and Hazard.
OK, we're almost there. I've exhausted most of my talking points.
It's actually really hard to narrow it down these days - there have been a lot of great Premier League players. One of my main criteria is just "making your club better" - whether that's a big team or a small team - a player who is closely associated with a a prolonged improvement in a club's fortunes.
And then there's Des Walker. What are you meant to do with Des Walker?
Des Walker played 860 games for club and country, and scored one goal, a screamer like Giggs's against Juventus in 1997. He played for Nottingham Forest in the First Division, and only finished 3rd, 8th or 9th in his 8 seasons there. He only played in the Premier League for Sheffield Wednesday, and has more EPL appearances for Wednesday than anyone else. Notts Forest were relegated in the first season of the Premier League, their first season without Walker. Considered one of the best centre backs in the world, he'd joined Italian champions Sampdoria, where Sven-Goran Eriksson played him at full-back. He lost confidence, and in mid-93, made three uncharacteristic mistakes for England which essentially cost England a place at the 94 World Cup. Having been the fastest player to 50 caps, he never played for England again.
Remember how good Des Walker was? The nonpareil of faultless play for several years, and then, all of a sudden, not. Even though I'm only counting players on Premier League, nothing else, it does seem wrong not to highlight Walker, John Barnes, Stuart Pearce, McCallister, Paul Merson, Chris Waddle, who were all very good Premier League players, but much more if you count their whole careers. But so be it.
I could ramble on forever. You have your list, and then you remember someone being really good for a couple of seasons, and you look at their whole record, and they played more games or scored more goals than you thought.
Theo Walcott, who always seemed to be injured, ended up playing nearly 400 Premier League games, and if you don't think of him as a striker who should have scored loads of goals, which maybe he could never have been, has a pretty good record.
What else? I decided not to include Haaland - I think everyone else has played 4+ seasons in the league, most of them a lot more. Would seem a bit silly.
What else? Generally, I think "winning the Premier League more than once" is usually a sound indicator of being a significant player in the league, so here are the players with the most titles to their name who i didn't include, because it just didn't feel they were that great or significant, and they really were "just there for a bit" ... Anderson, Zinchenko, Lee Sharpe, Paolo Ferreira, Tomas Kusczak, Rafael, Mendy, Grealish.... and then various others with two titles ... bit harsh, maybe, on Zinchenko, Ferreira and Lee Sharpe, but I think ok ...
So, instead of Lee Sharpe, we start with ...
- Ryan Giggs
- Kevin de Bruyne
- Thierry Henry
- John Terry
- Paul Scholes
- Wayne Rooney
- Frank Lampard
- Mo Salah
- Eric Cantona
- Rio Ferdinand
- Alan Shearer
- Peter Schmeichel
- David Silva
- Patrick Vieira
- Sergio Aguero
- Virgil van Dijk
- James Milner
- Denis Irwin
- Riyad Mahrez
- David Beckham
- Dennis Bergkamp
- Nemanja Vidic
- Roy Keane
- N'Golo Kante
- Harry Kane
- Cristiano Ronaldo
- Yaya Toure
- Jamie Vardy
- Rodri
- Cesc Fabregas
- Vincent Kompany
- Michael Carrick
- Eden Hazard
- Steven Gerrard
- Petr Cech
- Bernardo Silva
- Edwin Van der Sar
- Kyle Walker
- Matt Le Tissier
- Ashley Cole
- Ederson
- Raheem Sterling
- Patrice Evra
- Sol Campbell
- Fernandinho
- Gary Neville
- Robert Pires
- Didier Drogba
- Ricardo Carvalho
- Sadio Mane
- Phil Foden
- Gary Pallister
- Andy Cole
- Jordan Henderson
- Tony Adams
- Ilkay Gundogan
- Claude Makelele
- Ashley Young
- Gareth Barry
- Teddy Sheringham
- Gary Speed
- Son Heung-Min
- David Seaman
- Robin Van Persie
- Alisson
- Martin Keown
- Branislav Ivanovic
- John Stones
- Les Ferdinand
- Ruben Dias
- Gareth Bale
- Joe Cole
- Trent Alexander-Arnold
- Robbie Fowler
- Steve Bruce
- Dwight Yorke
- Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
- Andy Robertson
- Gianfranco Zola
- Darren Fletcher
- Ruud van Nistelrooy
- Lee Dixon
- Wilfried Zaha
- Paul Ince
- Robbie Keane
- Emile Heskey
- Cesar Azpilicueta
- Jamie Carragher
- Pablo Zabaleta
- Sami Hyppia
- Carlos Tevez
- John O'Shea
- Steve McManaman
- Ian Wright
- Nicolas Anelka
- Jermain Defoe
- Christian Eriksen
- Roberto Firmino
- Jonny Evans
- Joe Hart
- Fernando Torres
- Antonio Valencia
- Michael Owen
- Peter Crouch
- Jaap Stam
- Michael Essien
- Willian
- James Ward-Prowse
- Gael Clichy
- Nicky Butt
- Xabi Alonso
- Declan Rice
- Leighton Baines
- Romelu Lukaku
- Robert Huth
- Jan Vertonghen
- Mark Hughes
- Gary McAllister
- Dimitar Berbatov
- Graeme Le Saux
- Luis Suarez
- Nigel Winterburn
- David James
- Scott Parker
- Craig Bellamy
- Bruno Fernandes
- Sylvain Distin
- Lee Bowyer
- Brad Friedel
- Nick Barmby
- Juan Mata
- Dion Dublin
- Joao Cancelo
- Bukayo Saka
- Nolberto Solano
- Kevin Nolan
- Rob Lee
- Nigel Martyn
- Gareth Southgate
- David Ginola
- Gary Cahill
- Ole Gunnar Solksjaer
- Mikael Silvestre
- Kolo Toure
- Mark Noble
- William Gallas
- David de Gea
- Tim Cahill
- Pepe Reina
- Aymeric Laporte
- Gabriel Jesus
- Darren Anderton
- Danny Murphy
- Paul Merson
- Phil Neville
- Mark Schwarzer
- Shay Given
- Colin Hendry
- Ray Parlour
- Kevin Davies
- Jussi Jaaskalainen
- James Beattie
- Tim Flowers
- Robbie Savage
- Damien Duff
- Aaron Lennon
- David Batty
- Dele Alli
- Chris Sutton
- Nemanja Matic
- Harry Kewell
- Pedro
- George Boateng
- Richard Dunne
- Kevin Philips
- Aaron Hughes
- Henning Berg
- Marouane Fellaini
- Adam Lallana
- Wes Brown
- Joleon Lescott
- Kevin Campbell
- Darren Bent
- Tim Sherwood
- Paul McGrath
- Seamus Coleman
- Trevor Sinclair
- Stephen Carr
- Jason Wilcox
- Freddie Ljungberg
- Dennis Wise
- Phil Jagielka
- Matt Upson
- Wayne Bridge
- Luke Young
- Glen Johnson
- Mikel Arteta
- Gary Kelly
- Jeff Schlupp
- Luka Modric
- Martin Odegaard
- Kieron Dyer
- Steed Malbranque
- Steve Finnan
- Alan Wright
- Chris Wood
- Ugo Ehiogu
- Stuart Ripley
- Michael Antonio
- Wes Morgan
- Leon Osman
- Hugo Lloris
- Nathan Ake
- Park Ji-Sung
- Theo Walcott
- Matthew Taylor
- Des Walker
- Shaun Wright-Phillips
- John Arne Riise
- Emmanuel Petit
- Brian McClair
- Olivier Giroud
- Tim Howard
- Callum Wilson
- Danny Welbeck
- Pascal Gross
- Mark Viduka
- Lauren
- William Saliba
- Ian Harte
- Ruel Fox
- Edin Dzeko
- Chris Smalling
- Andrei Kanchelskis
- Ben Davies
- Nani
- Bacary Sagna
- Paolo di Canio
- Gustavo Poyet
- Louis Saha
- Emmanuel Adebayor
- Stewart Downing
- Mesut Ozil
- Marc Albrighton
- John Obi Mikel
- Ronnie Johnsen
- Jorginho
- Victor Moses
- Steven Davis
- Ledley King
