The Premier League Top 25
A guide to England’s most exciting players
Laurence Griffiths
presented by 
This is a list. This list is limited to 25 names, and this list is in order. Doubtless you will have strong feelings about this list. You will likely disagree with those names that have been included, and you will disagree with those that have not. Probably you'll also disagree with the order in which they've been placed.
That's fine. So do we. Long and loud have been the arguments; spiteful and bitter has been the ranking process. Nobody is entirely happy with the way things turned out: he's obviously two places too high, while he's far, far too low. And what on earth is he doing here while he's nowhere to be seen? Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
In the end we looked at the list we had and decided that while we could probably keep tweaking it until the sun swallows the Earth, that would be a waste of everybody's time. So here are 25 players that may or may not be the 25 most exciting in the Premier League, but are certainly in the conversation, and in an order that might not be precisely correct, but is definitely there or thereabouts.
Here, most importantly, are 25 footballers that we like, admire and enjoy, and that we think make watching the Premier League a thing worth doing. Though if you're reading, Adnan, Nemanja, sorry. We tried.
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The Curse of the Eredivisie Striker is one of the Premier League's most potent and powerful stories. Managers get together in secret to swap stories of the strikers that have looked so good over there, and been so cheap to bring over here, and have failed. "Jon Dahl Tomasson," says one. "Mateja Kezman," says another, shivering. "Afonso Alves," says another, his throat cracking with every syllable. Then they shudder and drink heavily. It helps them forget.
So when a striker arrives from the Netherlands and doesn't immediately start playing like he's got his boots on the wrong feet, it's well worth celebrating. And when he scores 26 goals in his first season — at a club disturbed by managerial dismissals and players fighting (but definitely not with bricks) — then we're minded to put it down as one of the more impressive debut seasons in recent memory.
Quick but not electric, strong but not ridiculously so, good in the air and with either foot, Bony is the kind of striker that managers dream about. The striker that can score all types of goal. Chip a cross to the near post or drive one to the far, he'll be there to nod or tap it home. Mopping up loose balls in the penalty area is something of a speciality, as is getting an early jump or a yard of space on defenders. Fundamentally, wherever he picks the ball up, give him a sight of goal and he'll nearly always hit the target. Quite a lot of the time he'll miss the goalkeeper. You can't say fairer than that.
Finally, we should note that his 2014-15 season has begun with a bang. Nothing to do with his goalscoring, but he's collected the outstanding yellow card of the season so far, an eyes-wide screaming barge into Southampton's Maya Yoshida that made absolutely no sense at the time and even less when he got sent off later in the game. Truly marvellous stuff.
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Poor Erik Lamela. Bought by Tottenham Hotspur for a manager who didn't really want him, who wanted somebody more Hulk-shaped, then injured and sidelined for most of the season. Add to that the usual stresses and strains that come from moving country and culture at the tender age of 21, and it's a wonder the poor lad didn't dissolve in a pile of snotty tissues and self-pity.
All of the above made him a "flop," of course, since this is England and this is the English press and that's how they roll. Which is why it's thoroughly pleasing to see that Lamela is finally starting to show Tottenham fans what he can do. Whether it's the new manager or the working legs that's making the difference — most likely a combination of the two — he's slowly but surely forcing the flop word back into his critic's mouths. Which would be fun in itself; fortunately for us, he's also a pleasure to watch.
Like a lot of leggy players, he never looks entirely graceful when moving with the ball; there's something Bambi-ish about his dribbling in tight spaces, forever teetering on the edge of collapse. But appearances are liars: he's quick-footed, phenomenally well-balanced, and at his best seems to just slide between defenders, riding challenges into unseen gaps. Add to that a crisp, clean striking techique and a handy knack for off the ball running and it's easy to see why he scored 15 goals for Roma in 2012/13, and why Tottenham were persuaded to shell out what they did.
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Now that Michu has fled Swansea for the warm embrace of Rafael Benitez and Napoli, the Premier League needs a new poster boy for transfer market value. Enter Seamus Coleman. Bought by Everton from League of Ireland side Sligo Rovers for just two buttons and a used biro — er, £60,000 — Coleman has flourished into a player that Giovanni Trapattoni, then manager of Ireland, once compared to Juventus legend Claudio Gentile. Meanwhile club manager, Roberto Martinez, happily pronounced him "one of the best full-backs in world football".
Everybody else can agree that he's definitely one of the best in the Premier League. The youngest and quickest member of a defence that leans heavily towards the veteran end of things, Coleman's energy, footballing ability and calm head when in possession is crucial to Martinez's high-speed attacking game. In turn, Martinez's carefree approach has set him free to spend less of his time defending, more of it charging down the wing, opening up defences on the overlap, and making opposition left wingers run in the direction they really don't want to go.
It's a virtuous circle, and one that led to Coleman scoring 6 goals last campaign, on the way to being named Everton's player of the season. Okay, there are still questions over his defensive ability, but we're confident that (a) his offensive contributions more than outweigh any faults we might find, and (b) even if they don't, his way of playing football is much more fun than serene, bland competence. Full backs are attackers, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
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Morgan Schneiderlin wasn’t the sexiest name on last season’s Southampton squad, but after a summer of massive change at St. Mary’s you could easily argue that he was the most important. With the likes of Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana and Dejan Lovren leaving for bigger towns and brighter lights, most experts predicted that the Saints would have problems this season.
And perhaps they might have, had they sold Schneiderlin to Tottenham Hotspur. But despite the midfielder wanting out of the club, management stuck to their guns rather than let him depart. What made Ronald Koeman insist that the 24-year-old stayed while his other stars made big-money moves? It’s simple: Schneiderlin is the glue that binds the whole team together. Everyone else was replaceable.
Sometimes erroneously described as a defensive midfielder, Schneiderlin’s skillset makes him perfect for a club like Southampton. He can tackle, hold his position, pass and score goals, and he’s adaptable enough to bring out the best in his teammates.
When Victor Wanyama plays alongside him, Schneiderlin gets more adventurous, safe in the knowledge that the space in front of the defence is covered. When Jack Cork features, Schneiderlin hangs back and protects the back four. His overall level combined with his raw versatility make him a virtual one-man midfield. Small wonder, then, that he was coveted so much this summer.
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Manchester City have a knack for collecting brilliant attacking players who seem permanently on the brink of serious injury, and although Stevan Jovetić has to play second fiddle to Sergio Agüero in the always-injured-but-fantastic role, being behind the most efficient striker in recent memory is hardly a black mark against him.
Although he’s often described as a centre forward, in reality Jovetić is a creative incisive attacking midfielder, happiest playing directly behind the striker or coming in off the wings. That doesn’t stop him scoring, of course, but he’s not the type to keep a defence occupied single-handedly. Nor would he want to be — the Montenegrin seems to take an almost perverse delight in unravelling well-organised back lines with clever one-twos and flicks.
What’s stopping him from joining the ranks of the truly elite is the sad fact that Jovetić can’t be trusted to turn up for every match. His first season at City was marred by injuries, which came as no surprise at all to those who followed his career at Fiorentina. His second … will probably be marred by injuries. That’s just who he is.
But while the constant sidelining is an annoyance to Manchester City and their fans, for the neutrals it adds an air of mystique to the 24-year-old’s play. Jovetić is a rare and fragile creature, to be enjoyed in the moment as intensely as possible. Who knows when you’ll next be able to see him again?
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To the casual observer, there is very little that's glamorous about Branislav Ivanovic. He's not a tricky winger, he's not a delicate playmaker. He doesn't bang in goals by the bushel. Nor does he stroll around at the back like one of those fancy footballing defenders, looking all smug and supercilious, intercepting balls here and playing slide-rule passes there. He looks, instead, like he cuts his own hair and kills his own breakfast.
But appearances can be deceiving. He may not look the part, but over the last few seasons Ivanovic has established himself as perhaps the best right back in the Premier League; this despite it not in theory being his best position. Solid, stoic and committed in defence, it's in attack that he's really impressed. His energy ensures that he is able to support whichever of Chelsea's battery of attacking midfielders is cutting in from the right that day, while still keeping an eye on the space behind him, and though he's never going to be the greatest technician at Stamford Bridge, he's well capable of crossing and passing with an accuracy of which most central defenders could only dream. Add that to his ability to charge through the opposing fullback with the inexorable force of a wrecking ball and the Blues have a major weapon at their disposal.
Ivanovic has developed a happy knack of scoring important goals; mostly towering and/or crashing and/or thumping headers, like that to win the 2013 Europa League, but with the occasional crashing and/or thumping drive mixed in for variety. Ultimately, he's been so consistently excellent at right back that his replacement, Cesar Azpilicueta, who has been playing the position his whole career, had to switch over to the left to get in the team. Which, in turn, condemned Ashley Cole to the bench. Which essentially means that Ivanovic is a better fullback than Ashley Cole has ever been. You can't argue with maths.
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Unloved and unwanted at Chelsea, Roberto Martinez was so enamoured of Romelu Lukaku that he recently claimed he would have paid £100m for the Belgian striker. Luckily for Everton's accountants he only revealed this after the deal had been done and a (relatively) modest fee of £28m agreed, and so the next big thing of European striking was off to Goodison Park.
It can sometimes be hard to remember that Lukaku is still only 21 years old, in footballing terms a child, and as such still in need of time and development. This is partly because he was bought while still a teenager for big money, but also because human beings are terrifically impatient creatures and Lukaku does, at times, look like he's already sorted. Pace and strength allied with everything else: the sense of when and where to run; the ability to find the yard of space; the grasp of what kind of finish the situation needs; the ability to dink or smash or place appropriately ... it's all there. Sometimes.
Other times the ball ends up clanking off his shin while everybody groans. Shortly after arriving at Everton for the first time, Lukaku revealed what Martinez wanted him to work on. "He wants me to be more deadly in front of goal, cleverer with my movements, more decisive and wants my first touch to improve." That sounds in the abstract like a footballer who can barely play at all, whereas in truth, we know it's a terrifying warning. This is a player who has outscored most of the Premier League over the last two seasons, one of them while at West Brom. Imagine how good he's going to be once he's sorted all that out. Somewhere in there lurks the Platonic form of a Premier League striker.
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By the end of 2012, Christian Eriksen’s development seemed to have stalled. The then-Ajax midfielder had always been precocious, one of the outstanding talents of his age, but although he’d been tipped for greatness he simply hadn’t come particularly close to getting there. Twenty-four months later and that seems ridiculous, but it’s that blip which took him to White Hart Lane and Tottenham Hotspur rather than to a Champions League mega-club.
Part of the influx of talent that arrived at White Hart Lane following the sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid, Eriksen is the only undeniable success, settling in quickly and turning himself into the fulcrum of the Spurs attack. An extraordinarily versatile midfielder, he was used in a variety of positions by first Andre Villas-Boas and then noted tactical incompetent Tim Sherwood, but he’s now looking like the long-term answer at #10 in Mauricio Pochettino’s 4-2-3-1.
Able to score on late runs into the box, Eriksen’s most impressive asset is his ability to keep attacks flowing in the right direction. His passing range is excellent, his vision top-notch, and what makes him stand out is that he’s no pure attacking midfielder — he’s disciplined enough and physical enough to track back to support his midfielders when they need the help.
Having blossomed into the player everyone expected in North London, it seems like only a matter of time before Eriksen departs for bigger, better things. Enjoy him while you can, Premier League fans.
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While most of the credit goes to Steven Gerrard, who runs a much better PR campaign, the heart and soul of Liverpool’s midfield is Jordan Henderson. Instrumental in the Reds’ incredible run to second place in the 2013-14 season, Henderson is now some way removed from the criticism that came his way following his 2011 move to Anfield, but in truth he’s not so very different to the player who arrived at the club three years ago — he always had the potential to be a superb box-to-box midfielder, and it’s no surprise that he’s now beginning to unlock it.
Famously dismissed by Sir Alex Ferguson as ‘running from his knees’, a trait which led to him being overlooked for a potential move to Manchester United, Henderson’s best attribute is probably his link play, with his penchant for playing quick, incisive passes key to springing the Liverpool attack now that the one-man wrecking ball of Luis Suarez has bitten his way to Barcelona.
Granted, the Reds are hardly setting the world alight at the moment: they’re not scoring at anything like the rate they’re used to, and the famous defensive problems have failed to subside despite significant investment this summer. But none of their current struggles can really be penned on Henderson, who’s as hard-working and smart as ever. Small wonder he’s become an England regular and that he’s been named Liverpool’s vice-captain.
Henderson’s play has been described as both ‘sealing’ and ‘neighbourly' by a highly-regarded international scout. We’d tell you what that means if we had any idea.
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Radamel Falcao was supposed to be the centerpiece of Monaco’s grand project. Brought in from Atlético Madrid for a reasonably princely sum, Falcao began the 2013-14 season by torching Ligue 1. Then the goals dried up, and to make matters worse a catastrophic injury ruled the iconic centre forward out of a good chunk of the season — and the 2014 World Cup.
But the ACL injury is perhaps the only red flag on Falcao’s resume, and that didn’t stop him from being chased by what seemed like half of the Premier League on deadline day when Monaco decided to get his hefty wages off their books by sending him out on loan. And it was ultimately those wages that made it all but inevitable that he’d ended up as part of Manchester United’s very own grand project. His job? To score. And score and score and score.
Perhaps the purest #9 in the game, Falcao is brilliant at exploiting space. Any space. He’s possessed with what sometimes feels like a supernatural ability to make defenders move of their own accord, and he never moves into position until he’s too late to track. He’s also a monster in the air, too, and that means that the best way of stopping Falcao is to ignore him and focus on his supply lines.
Behind the Colombian this season will be some combination of Juan Mata, Ángel di María, Ander Herrera and Wayne Rooney. Alongside him? Robin van Persie. Good luck with that, defenders.
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France’s thinner, chic-er and undoubtedly lesser answer to Bayern Munich star Manuel Neuer, Hugo Lloris has the misfortune of being a world-class, unorthodox goalkeeper at the exact same time that a better one is floating around the Bundesliga, winning Champions Leagues and World Cups. But don’t let Neuer’s success take anything away from Lloris’ — he’s probably the most exciting goalkeeper in England. Mostly because he plays like a madman.
While he does all the things that you might expect from a goalie: with excellent shot stopping and above average everything else, what sets Lloris apart from his saner colleagues is his ability to play the sweeper role behind the defence. Tottenham Hotspur are far safer playing a high defensive line with Lloris rushing out to cut off passes in behind than they would be with a more traditional player, and a goalkeeper who can play the position at the top level while also having a profound tactical impact on his team is worth his weight in gold.
All of which rather makes up for the fact that Lloris is, objectively, a dangerous lunatic. Every so often he’ll get his mad charges just a little bit wrong, leaving himself stranded, angry and befuddled as the opposition takes advantage by scoring an absurdly easy goal. Sometimes he’ll put himself in physical danger, as happened when Romelu Lukaku put his knee through his face early in the 2013-14 season. But erratic play is the price you pay for a talent like Lloris, and you’d be hard pressed to find a Spurs fan who’d want it any other way.
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First impressions tend to stick, which makes it all the more interesting that David de Gea has managed to shed his. Brought in to replace the retiring Edwin van der Sar, de Gea went from the cozy confines of Atlético Madrid (this is before they were good) to the glitz and glamour of Old Trafford. He promptly fluffed his lines, producing a clanger or two on his debut and looking generally wobbly on crosses for much of a season thereafter.
David de Gea, then, was a dodgy goalkeeper. He couldn’t stop long range shots and he couldn’t deal with an aerial bombardment. Except, of course, until he could. The first problem was sorted out shortly after his first appearance, which turned out to be a tremendous aberration — with Petr Cech confined to the bench at Chelsea de Gea might be the best long-range shot-stopper in the league. The second took longer to deal with, but criticisms of the 23-year-old’s ability to command his area have slowly fizzled out.
What’s left? Perhaps the finest set of reflexes in world football. While others position themselves more intelligently, distribute with more accuracy and are more dominant in the air, de Gea’s place in the ranks of the elite is secure by virtue of his extraordinary ability to pull off saves that should be impossible. His goalkeeping gymnastics are unsurpassed, and his highlight reels reflect that.
And with Manchester United’s sorry excuse for a defence sitting in front of him, he’s surely set to add to those highlights this season.
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Daniel Sturridge’s young career reads like a tour of the country’s elite clubs. Manchester City? Check. Chelsea? Yep. But it’s at Liverpool where England’s premier striker has found his feet. Joining in early 2012 after being deemed surplus to requirements at Stamford Bridge, Sturridge was shifted from an inside forward role to his favored central position, at which point the goals started flowing.
He formed half of the most feared strike partnership in recent Premier League history, scoring 21 times to Luis Suarez’s 31, establishing himself as the long-term answer for Roy Hodgson and the Three Lions in the process. With Suarez shipped off to Barcelona over the summer, the major question for Sturridge looked like it was going to be whether he would be capable of leading the line by himself, but the arrival of Mario Balotelli from Milan means that he’ll once again have a partner in crime.
With a strong left foot, pace and a willingness to shoot from virtually any position, Sturridge poses defenders some serious problems. If they allow him space, even from distance, he’s more than happy to send a curler into the top corner or, on his better days, play a teammate in with a clever pass. And if they close him down, a drop of the shoulder and a skip opens up enough space to get a shot away regardless. Add to that his knack for getting behind the defensive line and the fact that both Chelsea and City let him go seems almost surreal.
Can Sturridge hit last year’s heights without Suarez opening up space for him to operate in? Perhaps not. But he’s got all of the ingredients to be a Liverpool and England centre forward for years to come regardless. The only downside? We’re nowhere near done with seeing his goal celebrations.
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If a small child were to sit down and draw a goalkeeper, they'd doubtless come out with something that looks a lot like Thibaut Courtois: twelve feet tall with arms like Mr. Tickle. Of course, if that young child were then to become some kind of twisted scientific genius, and spend their life harnessing forbidden powers and conducting dark experiments make to that same doodle a reality, to bring life where life should not be, to animate the perfect goalkeeper from recovered corpse parts and alchemised electricity, then the hideous monstrosity that would rise one day from a blood-spattered bench and howl at the injustice of a loveless world would have much the same game as Thibaut Courtois. For the gangly Belgian looks, at the young age of 22, to be more or less perfect.
Look, we're not saying that he's an experiment; we're sure he's a perfectly normal lad who came into this world the same way as the rest of us. It's just, well: astoundingly well-tuned reflexes, gargantuan wingspan, commanding presence, quick distribution, a knack for the impossible save, an equally important knack for avoiding the cock-up, monstrously strong wrists, a cool name … no, we're not saying anything's dodgy here. You might also think it relevant that if anybody has the right combination of limitless cash and highly limited morality necessary to underwrite such experiments, then it's Roman Abramovich. We naturally disagree.
Of course, Courtois being brilliant isn't the only thing that's unfair. While buying a hot young prospect and loaning them out for a year or two is, by now, a well-established technique among European superclubs, such loans are supposed to take place at mid- to low-ranking teams; the Boltons and Wigans and Vitesse Arnhems of this world. Not teams that are equally outstanding. Not league-winning, cup-winning, Champions League final-reaching Atlético Madrid. That Courtois actually helped knock Chelsea out of Europe last season was amusing at the time, but the fact that Chelsea have now got their No. 1 for the next ten years and that he's already got the one thing he shouldn't have yet, proper highest-level experience, is frankly quite galling.
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There is a school of thought that insists that Vincent Kompany is a Good Thing. This centres around his burgeoning reputation as a Sensible Footballer. Compared to most footballers — generally held by popular culture to rank, intellectually, somewhere between popstars and genetically modified foods — Kompany is a breath of fresh, delightfully uncontroversial air. He writes nice things on Facebook. He does the odd spot of reasonable television, airing his reasonable opinions. He apologises for getting sent off.
This is an entirely wrongheaded attitude for everybody, Kompany included. Vincent Kompany is brilliant not because he's sensible; he's brilliant despite that, and his true worth on the field comes from the murky stuff. For while Kompany is pretty good at all the light arts of defending — positioning, anticipation, game-reading and suchlike — he's elevated by the careful and calculated application of the oldest trick in the book: force. Sometimes it's legal — there's not a finer exponent of the tackle-with-impact in the land — and sometimes not, but like all great foulers there's barely a one that doesn't serve some kind of purpose. Whether he's disrupting an opposition break (yellow card accepted with a nod) or reminding an attacker that there'll be none of that fancy nonsense (booking contested with an outraged yelp and some serious pointing), he knows what he's doing, and he's doing it well.
The exception, and perhaps his one weakness, comes when attempting to defend space in behind; he can find himself exposed on the turn, and only an excellent performance from his partner Martin Demichelis saved City's title campaign after the Belgian's dismissal against Hull. But now that Nemanja Vidic has gone and John Terry is creaking, there's nobody better at defending what's in front of them by all means, fair and foul. And no amount of pontificating on Twitter and sage analysis on Match of the Day can take that away from him.
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Raheem Sterling's name has been floating around English football for years, accompanied by the words "the next big thing". Attached to QPR at the age of 11, impressing for the U18s a few years later, then nabbed at the age of 15 by Liverpool for a cool £1m, the consensus has been throughout that here is somebody good. No, somebody better than good. Somebody who could one day be incredible. (Not quite total consensus, of course; apparently Tottenham turned him down.)
It looks like everybody (apart from Tottenham) was right. Though Suarez and Sturridge did most of the heavy lifting during Liverpool's unlikely, this-does-not-slip-oh-dear title challenge, is was Sterling who best typified the team's breezy, free-wheeling attack. Fearless, quick as all hell, and just as lethal when running with the ball as when finishing, Brendan Rodgers' inspired decision to bring him in from the wing and park him behind the forwards paid dividends, as Liverpool racked up goal after goal and Sterling blossomed from promising youngster into serious, here-and-now talent. A trip to the World Cup followed, and Sterling sent the entire country into paroxysms with an early rising drive against Italy that looked for all the world to have beaten the great Gigi Buffon at his near post. It hadn’t.
All of which has naturally provoked a change in attitude, from "get a load of this lad" to "oh dear God don't break him". Rodgers has already made clear his intentions to rest Sterling as much as he can afford to, citing the wear and tear that did for Michael Owen's delicate hamstrings. In some ways this is absolutely the right, responsible thing to be doing; in others, it's a crying shame. For time spent watching Sterling play football is time well invested; those whirring feet and slender shoulders sing of all the joys of being young and being brilliant, and of knowing nothing other than being young and brilliant.
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Arsenal established themselves as serious players in the market for top talents when they snapped up Mesut Özil from Real Madrid in summer 2013. They followed that up by acquiring Chile star Alexis Sánchez from Barcelona in the midst of the 2014 World Cup, and while Sánchez doesn’t have the same sort of name recognition as Özil, his style of play makes him a far better fit in the Premier League than the cerebral German.
Skill, flair, speed and surprising power make Sánchez an inside forward par excellence, a player of both industry and supreme artistry. A product of the Udinese talent factory, the 25-year-old spent three seasons at the Camp Nou before being rendered surplus to requirements thanks to the arrivals of Luis Suarez and Neymar — a sin for which he can probably be forgiven.
The Catalans’ loss is Arsenal’s gain. Sánchez is one of the league’s most dangerous wide players, and now that the Gunners have given up on using him as a striker they’ll be able to make real use of his strengths out wide. Expect goals. Expect assists. And with his sublime one-on-one play, expect fullbacks to end up looking very, very stupid rather more often than they would like.
Also expect to see some rather short shorts on display out there. Don’t worry, you’ll learn to love the legs.
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Everybody involved is trying to pretend that it's normal, that it's not big deal, but that ain't so. It's weird. Cesc Fabregas, not playing for Arsenal, is weird. Cesc Fabregas, playing for Chelsea, is really weird. Cesc Fabregas, playing for (and enjoying playing for) Jose Mourinho, well … that's just perverse.
What isn't weird is that Fabregas is playing well on his return to England. For ages an elite Premier League talent surrounded by Wengerian mediocrity — no, it doesn't win much, but it's very pure — his long-desired return to Barcelona brought him trophies but also frustration. Arriving at the end of a cycle of greatness and without an obvious place in the team, that Catalan misadventure might have been a disappointment for him, but it comprehensively won the war for nurture over nature. It turns out that Barcelona DNA, powerful stuff though it might be, can be corrupted by all that uncouth running around and shooting they have in England.
Still, what better evidence that he should be immediately re-exiled from his homeland to his heartland, that he should return to the Premier League? David Moyes knew it, even if he couldn't get the deal done, and Jose Mourinho knew it too. And it looks to be working: stick him behind Diego Costa, flank him with Eden Hazard and Andre Schurrle, and watch him set up goal after goal. The man's an assist machine, and for Chelsea, whose title bid last season foundered on their inability to dispatch the Premier League's weaker teams, he might just be the solution to any of their problems that Diego Costa can't deal with.
But he doesn't look right in blue. And he shouldn't be hugging John Terry like that. Weird.
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Comeback stories are the best stories. And helpfully for narrative fans, Aaron Ramsey's career falls neatly into the classical form. Setup: a young lad from Cardiff becomes the object of a tug of war between Arsenal and Manchester United, eventually choosing the London club after being left scarred by a meeting with Gary Neville. Confrontation: Ryan Shawcross, antagonist of the piece, jumps into the air and Stokes our young hero's foot clear off his leg, ruling him out of the game for nine months and throwing his whole future into the air.
Then, happily, resolution: our hero becomes one of the best attacking midfielders in the world, and with a swish of his right boot caps a sixteen-goal season with the winner in an FA Cup final. Admittedly, the restrictions of the three-act structure mean we've had to gloss over the long period of time between his comeback and his recent brilliance, when plenty of pundits and Arsenal fans urged Wenger to move him on, but no matter. That stuff won't be in the film.
Perhaps the most ridiculous feature of Ramsey's career is that he's closing in on 200 appearances for Arsenal, he's suffered one potentially career ending injury, and is still only 23. Which in turns leads on to a mildly terrifying thought: this is a player that can already score long-range belters, run all day, and pass as well as anyone in the league, and he's probably (knock on wood and rub on ankle) only going to get better. We don't know exactly what's going to happen in Ramsey II: Ramsey Harder, but Stoke fans are likely to be booing for a good while yet.
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One sunny August afternoon in 2010, Tottenham Hotspur played Manchester City at White Hart Lane, and Tom Huddlestone spent an afternoon welcoming David Silva to English football in the traditional style. An expensive Spanish import had come up against some proper football, and had looked thoroughly baffled by the whole experience. Who are all these people? Why are they all running so fast? And why don't they treat the ball properly? Ouch!
It didn't take long for the bafflement to find its way to the faces of Silva's opponents. He was very quickly very good, and seems to have got better every season since. By 2011, Roberto Mancini was proclaiming him one of the best footballers in the world, and once Manuel Pellegini arrived, preaching a fluid, attacking game built around either one central or two nominally-wide playmakers, Silva hit new heights. To watch City is to watch Silva — Yaya Touré may grab the attention in the middle, and Sergio Agüero dominate the goalscoring, but more often than not it's Silva that the side give the ball to when they're seeking inspiration, Silva who slides past tackles and unlocks defences, and Silva that gives his colleagues the ball back where they're best placed to use it.
The sense remains that he doesn't always get quite the credit he deserves, and presumably his position in this list is angering some people. He, for one, believes that's slowly changing under Pellegrini; asked about his manager at the end of last season, Silva explained "crucial for my game to play his style of football. For that reason, I think people appreciate me more." Ultimately, the Premier League has few more arresting sights than the little Spaniard dancing past two or three flailing defenders, all soft impish feet and sly shifts in balance, before slipping the ball through a crowded penalty area into just the right space. There can perhaps be arguments about whether he's the best player in the country. But he's by some clear distance the most delightful.
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If Sergio Agüero stopped playing football tomorrow, he’d live forever in the Premier League’s memory. Scorer of what is perhaps the competition’s most iconic goal, the last-ditch effort against Queens Park Rangers in May 2012 that turned what would have gone down as a catastrophic collapse into Manchester City’s greatest triumph. That the title came at the expense of Manchester United, City’s hated neighbours, made it all the sweeter.
It’s no accident that Agüero was the one to dash onto Mario Balotelli’s fall-down-cum-pass, skip past a challenge and blast beyond Paddy Kenny to make it 3-2 City in the 94th minute. If there was any player on that team you’d bet on scoring at any point, a fit Agüero is certainly your man — and on a side that contains the likes of Edin Dzeko, Stevan Jovetic and Yaya Touré, that’s high praise indeed.
Agüero’s always been highly regarded. Fernando Torres’ successor at Atlético Madrid, the Argentina international quickly established himself as one of football’s top marksmen before moving to Manchester in summer 2011. Since, he’s barely stopped scoring. His movement is top class, his finishing perhaps the best in the league. At his best, he’s impossible to mark closely, which is a serious problem for defenders against a player who only needs half a yard to rifle off a shot.
How do you stop him? Mostly, you don’t: the only thing that slows Agüero down is his own body, which is all that's keeping him from being regarded as among the most valuable players in the world. Absurdly injury prone, he can’t be relied on for a whole month, let alone a season. Perhaps this is the universe’s way of keeping things fair.
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It really isn't supposed to be this easy. Players coming to the Best League In The World are supposed to feel their way in cautiously, take some time to get used to the pace of the thing, treat all their opponents with a certain measure of respect. Not roll up and score seven goals in four games with almost insulting ease, despite possibly being a bit injured at the same time. That this makes everybody else look bad is, you suspect, not Costa's concern. He might even enjoy it.
Costa's a funny striker; indeed, up until recently he wasn't really a striker at all. Though he'd been with Atlético Madrid since 2006, he'd spent his time operating as a flexible forward, playing wide as much as up front, and chipping in with the occasional goal in between the yellow cards. That changed in 2013/14, when Radamel Falcao's move to Monaco earned him a promotion to line leader. 35 goals in all competitions saw Atléti to an unlikely title and a Champions League final, and earned him his move to Chelsea. There in London, as Jose Mourinho put it, he found a team "waiting for a player of his dimension."
Strong, skilful and quick, Costa's dimension isn't contingent on any of those more general footballing attributes. Instead, he draws deeply on the two apparently mystical powers that great strikers have. One, knowing where the right place is. And two, once in the right place, knowing how to to kick the ball into the net without the keeper being able to stop it. Sounds banal. Even looks banal; he hasn't scored a goal from outside the penalty area for Chelsea, and his Atléti showreel is one of efficiency and economy over thunder and glitz. But then, that's how the game works. A goal is worth a goal. Where's the ball going to be? There. Where's the ball need to go? There. Job done, on to the next one.
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The power is — and must be — the first thing that comes to mind when one considers Manchester City’s Ivorian midfielder, but distilling Yaya Touré’s game to athleticism does him a huge disservice. Capable of playing as a centre back, a pure attacking midfielder and more or less anywhere in between, his size is only only a part of what makes him great.
Touré’s technical skill and vision separate the 31-year-old from rest of the Premier League’s midfield powerhouses, turning him from an excellent athlete into a magnificent all-around footballer. His goalscoring ability from deep is probably unparalleled in current players, and if needed he can flip a switch and nullify the opposing team’s central threats.
Perhaps the tendency towards portraying Touré as a physical specimen and little else have led to him not being valued as he might be amongst pundits, fans. He only managed third place in the FWA Player of the Year voting in 2013-14 despite being the champions’ most important player, a travesty of democracy that we're attributing to a combination of insidious stereotyping and the fact that 'best club wins title by seeing off underdog' isn't a very exciting story.
Although Touré's off to a slow start this season after a bizarre summer — he got very upset with club brass over a lack of cake on his birthday, which probably tells you all you need to know about his off-pitch behavior — it’ll be some time before we expect less than total mastery of the midfield from City’s one-man spine. He is, despite the easy baking jokes, the only Premier League player who can legitimately claim to have it all.
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Winning the Champions League in 2012 was important for Chelsea. Not just because winning the Champions League is always important; not just because it scratched the last of their owner's outstanding itches; not just because it made Bayern Munich look really quite silly indeed. But because it may have been the crucial factor in bringing Eden Hazard to Stamford Bridge ahead of interest from pretty much every major club in Europe, and the two Mancunian behemoths in particular. After all, what kind of world class talent would join a club that didn't have Champions League football to offer? Oh, sorry, Ángel. Didn't see you there.
In demand across Europe ever since he emerged into Lille's first team as a precocious 18-year-old, Hazard showed commendable level-headedness in resisting the bright lights and big money and staying in France for as long as he did. Under Rudi Garcia's management he flourished into nearly the complete attacking wide midfielder: quick, strong, and a brilliant dribbler. Able to beat a defender on either side and finish with either foot, there are moments when he cuts in from the Chelsea left and seems to stroll through defences as though they were figments of somebody else's imagination. As though they were nothing for him to bother with. Oh, and as a bonus, he can occasionally slap the ball into the net from thirty-odd yards. If the mood takes him, like.
At his best, Hazard makes every aspect of the game look insultingly easy; so easy, in fact, that it's always something of a disappointment when he doesn't tear a game to pieces. This is obviously unfair — football is quite difficult even for those that are really, really good at it — but nonetheless: a merely good performance can feel like something of a let down, given what he's capable of producing. Still, there are worse criticisms to wear than 'doesn't looks like a god-given genius all the time'; by extension, he looks that way than than most.
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The most expensive footballer in British history, Ángel di María is set to be the face of Manchester United’s grand rebuilding project. Which is rather a lot of pressure, considering that the Red Devils currently possess the defensive acumen of a (dead) potted plant. If United are to seriously challenge for a top four spot this season, they’ll have to win a lot of high scoring games, and Di María is the key.
The perfect bridge between link and attack and arguably Real Madrid’s best player during last season’s Champions League run, di María excels at surging forward into space on the transition. The rest of his play isn’t bad either — he works hard defensively for such an attack-minded player, and his passing range only seems to have improved since he departed the Bernabéu for England.
Whether he was worth what United paid for him (reportedly close to £60 million, plus superstar wages) is an interesting question but not a particularly relevant one. The Red Devils paid through the nose for one of the world’s elite players, and considering how light they were on top talent it’s difficult to paint that as a wholly bad idea.
Already settling in nicely to English football, di María is going to be the best player on England’s most storied team for years to come. And while United themselves might not be too terrifying, it’s hard to imagine defenders relishing the challenge of dealing with the 26-year-old.
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