Premier League Top 50: Ranking the best players of the season with a month to go

We’ve reached the point of the Premier League season where things start to look more like a knockout competition. There are only so many games remaining, and things such as systems, cohesion and managerial decisions don’t matter as much as they do over the course of the whole year. From here, individual brilliance — a great save, a perfect pass, a fantastic finish — takes on an outsize role in determining how things will shake out.

That’s true at the top of the table, where the gap might only be three points (and a game in hand) for Manchester City up to Arsenal if Pep Guardiola’s side win their head-to-head this weekend. It’s definitely true in the Champions League race, where eight points separate third from eighth. And it’s clearly true at the bottom, where 18th-place Tottenham trail 17th-place West Ham by two points and 16th-place Nottingham Forest by three.

So, what players will have the biggest say in how things go from now until the end of the season? We’ve got another edition of ESPN’s Premier League Top 50 to answer that exact question.

How we rank, and who isn’t eligible

I say this every time, but ranking players with any degree of confidence is impossible. And if I really just wanted to identify the true talent of every Premier League player, I’d probably defer to the market, which means the majority of the list would be made up of players from all the best teams.

But I’d rather reward a star at Brentford instead of a squad player at Arsenal, so the rankings are intended to be something of a balance between the two: your talent in a vacuum and how much value you’ve actually provided so far this season. The rankings are definitely weighted toward attackers, and attackers are the highest-paid players in the world because they’re the most important players in the world, but I’m using a midfielder who produces like an attacker, or a defender who does things that no one else at his position can do, as they will also grade out highly.

In each edition, anyone who is out with a long-term injury will also be removed from the list. So Hugo Ekitike — who would’ve been pushing toward the top 10 but just ruptured his right Achilles — isn’t on the list. All injuries are awful, but this one was particularly brutal.

All right, enough throat-clearing. Onto the list!

He’s experiencing one of the biggest late-career drop-offs we’ve ever seen from one year to the next. And despite that, among players with at least 1,500 minutes played this season, only Erling Haaland, Hugo Ekitike, Bruno Fernandes and Bukayo Saka are generating more non-penalty expected goals+assists per 90 minutes.

49. Matheus Nunes, fullback, Manchester City

48. Eberechi Eze, attacking midfielder, Arsenal

46. David Raya, goalkeeper, Arsenal

44. Morgan Gibbs-White, attacking midfielder, Nottingham Forest

Goalkeeping performance is a notoriously volatile thing to measure. What Gradient Sports found is that the percentage of mistakes a keeper makes on shots faced is the most stable number from season to season. It measures this through its grading system, and every time a keeper receives a negative grade, it’s considered a mistake.

Verbruggen has only made a mistake on 1.5% of the shots he has faced this season — the second-best mark in the Premier League.

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34. Casemiro, midfielder, Manchester United

33. Bernardo Silva, midfielder, Manchester City

31. Igor Thiago, forward, Brentford

Donnarumma has faced 93 shots this season and made a total of one mistake, according to Gradient. That’s the best mistake-less rate in the league.

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29. Anthony Gordon, winger, Newcastle United

26. Ezri Konsa, center back, Aston Villa

25. Marcos Senesi, center back, Bournemouth

You know how there are certain positions under certain managers or clubs that just seem to produce? Strikers at Eintracht Frankfurt, attacking midfielders under Gian Piero Gasperini, every attacker who has ever played for Hansi Flick and now, maybe center backs for Andoni Iraola?

Last year, Dean Huijsen and Illia Zabarnyi played well enough to secure moves to Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, respectively, and now Senesi is having a kind of season I’m not sure I’ve really seen before. He’s one of the best attacking passers in the Premier League despite playing as a center back.

Now, ball-playing center backs have always been a thing, and they tend to be cornerstones of all the best teams in the world. But Senesi isn’t just playing line-breaking passes into the feet of his midfielders. No, he is creating opportunities like he is an attacking midfielder. And I don’t mean this hyperbolically.

If we look at the expected possession value created from open-play passes this season — in other words, how much your passes have increased your team’s chances of scoring a goal — then there are seven players who have generated at least five goals worth of value: Jérémy Doku, Adam Wharton, Cody Gakpo, Morgan Rogers, Pedro Neto and Senesi. Five attackers, one incredibly aggressive midfielder and one central defender.

Senesi’s contract expires after the season. It’ll be fascinating to see if someone recognizes this special skill set and figures out a way to use it.

24. Rodri, midfielder, Manchester City

23. Morgan Rogers, attacking midfielder, Aston Villa

22. Florian Wirtz, attacking midfielder, Liverpool

Rogers and Wirtz don’t look that similar in how they move across the field or even stand still. But I think these two are quite similar players.

Below is a plot of what I’m calling “good passes” and “good receptions.” These are passes made or received that increased the team’s expected possession value by somewhere between 1% and 9%. Increasing xPV by 10% or more with a single action is rare, so we can think about what we’re seeing here as players who consistently add marginal value to possessions.

Rogers and Wirtz are alone at the top of both metrics. It’s funny because even though we’re quantifying it, I’d call this a kind of version of hidden value. It’s not goals and assists or even expected goals and assists, but neither player is an under-the-radar prospect. Wirtz is the second-most-expensive player in the history of the Premier League, and Rogers burst into the wider consciousness this season with all the goals he was scoring.

The promise for each player, then — as they’re both still in their pre-prime years — is that they keep doing all these little things and they start to create and score more goals.

21. Marc Guéhi, center back, Manchester City

19. Reece James, fullback/midfielder, Chelsea

18. Nico O’Reilly, fullback/midfielder, Manchester City

16. Elliot Anderson, midfielder, Nottingham Forest

15. Adam Wharton, midfielder, Crystal Palace

Adam Wharton is the Marcos Senesi of midfielders. I know if you throw enough chimpanzees behind a typewriter, you’ll get “War and Peace” or whatever, but I’m pretty sure I’m the first person to say those eight words together.

I mean, look at this!

Crystal Palace play a chaotic style that encourages Wharton to play aggressive passes all game, but those grades wouldn’t be so high if he wasn’t constantly making the big plays. His security under pressure and his defensive ability are the big question marks for whomever signs him, but he’s so good with the ball at his feet — in pretty much any situation — that it might even be worth it for the biggest clubs in the world to build their midfields around his passing and do whatever else they need to do to cover up his deficiencies.

If João Pedro played a different sport with the same name as the one he’s currently paid millions of dollars to play, then we would hear commentators saying the same thing every Sunday: This João Pedro guy? He’s just a FOOTBALL player.

What the heck are they talking about? NFL commentators, yes, will frequently refer to a football player as “a football player” as a means of describing what type of football player that football player is. They are not just citing biographical details, and their brains are not short-circuiting. What they mean — as I’ve gleaned from hearing the phrase hundreds of times now — is that these “football players” don’t necessarily have any flashy attributes to their games, but that they tend to do all of the little things right. Their innate understanding and technical skill sets make it seem like they were almost born to play football.

I feel the same way about João Pedro, who doesn’t stand out in any particular way. He’s not a goal-scoring striker. He’s not a creative midfielder. He’s not a dribbling winger. But he can score goals, he can press, he can defend one-on-one, he can receive passes under pressure, he can make the necessary passes, and he can win headers. He is, quite simply, a football player.

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12. Bryan Mbeumo, forward, Manchester United

10. Gabriel, center back, Arsenal

Earlier this week I wrote about how Tottenham’s obsession with acquiring athletic players created a massive blind spot in their team-building approach. The immediate result: a team where no one can pass. The longer-term result: a team that’s incredibly expensive and would be relegated if the season ended today.

Part of the issue, and something I didn’t touch on much in the piece, is that being fast and being good at passing have something of a negative relationship. Perhaps when you’re younger and fast, you don’t need to worry about being a good passer since you’re always running by everyone. And maybe great passers at a young age never really need to develop speed because, well, the ball moves faster than the man. Or maybe the power needed for high-speed running actively works against the subtle movements needed to place a pass.

Anyway, all this is to say that players such as Dominik Szoboszlai are incredibly rare. He’s the only player in the Premier League who ranks in the top 30 both for the maximum speed he has reached in a match this season and for his passing grade.

7. Jérémy Doku, attacking midfielder, Manchester City

6. Rayan Cherki, attacking midfielder, Manchester City

Here’s how everyone in the Premier League stacks up, according to open-play expected assists. In other words, who is creating the greatest combined quantity and quality of shots for their teammates:

The main piece of context you need to better understand this chart is that eight of these 10 players have played at least 2,000 minutes in the Premier League this season. The other two haven’t even reached the 1,400-minute mark, and those two players play for the same time: Manchester City’s Rayan Cherki and Jérémy Doku.

5. Bukayo Saka, winger, Arsenal

You could probably say this is the first season of stagnation or regression in a career that has pretty much been on an upward trajectory from the moment Unai Emery started playing Bukayo Saka at left back. He made a leap two seasons ago up into the star level of goal creation, averaging around 0.7 non-penalty expected goals+assists per 90 minutes across 2023-24 and 2025-26.

This season, he has dropped back down 0.54, though some of that can be attributed to the league-wide trend where almost all individual attacking performance is down. And some of it is because of the issues with how Arsenal were built: There’s very little creative passing to get him the ball, especially when Martin Ødegaard is injured, and then their new starting striker, Viktor Gyökeres, just isn’t very good.

There was a world where Saka developed into the kind of attacker who would thrive despite unfavorable context, but he’s still the best attacker on the team that is still favored to win the Premier League. And even if he’s not scoring and creating, he’s always doing a little bit of everything else, too.

3. Declan Rice, midfielder, Arsenal

Last week, Gradient released what it is calling “overall grades.” It looks at each position, determines what the main requirements for that position are, weighs its various grades for each player across those facets and then puts it all together to come up with a single metric to assess player performance. Obviously, there is no one true number to assess player performance (and it knows this), but it’s still a useful exercise.

If you’ve read this specific column before, you know that I write the same thing about Declan Rice every time. Mainly: He’s good at everything. Well, now I have another number to back up that claim. He’s currently Gradient’s highest-graded player in the Premier League, at an 89.8 out of 100.

Across Europe’s Big Five leagues, only four players have grades of 90 or better: Bayern Munich‘s Harry Kane and Michael Olise, RB Leipzig‘s Yan Diomande and humanity’s version of cheese and/or wine, AC Milan‘s 40-year-old Luka Modric.

2. Erling Haaland, forward, Manchester City

If you want to be bullish on Arsenal holding off City’s looming title challenge, then take a look at this chart:

That’s how it looks when you compare the non-penalty xG for each five-game bucket of his season: Games One to Five, Two to Six and on and on. He has been a below 0.5 xG player for all of 2026. He’s averaging 0.72 xG per game for his City career.

If you want to be bullish on City catching Arsenal, then, well, Manchester City have rounded into form and started to close the gap despite the best per-game goal scorer in Premier League history going through his least-productive stretch since he came to England. This City team simply hasn’t been as good as the other City teams that have caught Arsenal, but if Erling Haaland starts playing like Erling Haaland again, then they could easily win their last seven matches.

1. Bruno Fernandes, attacking midfielder, Manchester United

He might set the assist record. He leads the league in expected assists. He leads the league — by a massive margin — in through balls completed. He’s second behind Haaland in combined non-penalty goals+assists, and among players with at least 20 starts, he’s also second behind Haaland in non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes.

The difference between Haaland and Bruno is twofold: 1) Haaland plays on a better team, and 2) Bruno spent half of the season playing as part of a two-man midfield.

Perhaps you could argue with the idea that he’s the best player in the Premier League, but I don’t think there’s really any argument to this: Bruno Fernandes is the most important player in the Premier League.