Ranked: The top 50 players going into the new Premier League season
Get the Sports newsletter
Daily sports — scores, transfers, the storylines from the leagues you actually follow. Free.
- ESPN's Premier League Top 50 abandoned a straight 1-50 ranking in favor of seven tiers, arguing that context and team role matter more than raw output in a league where only about 10 players are good enough to carry a title-winning attack.
- The 2025-26 season will be the first Premier League campaign without Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Jurgen Klopp, or Pep Guardiola on the touchline, with Arsenal's Mikel Arteta the only current manager who has actually won the league.
- Mohamed Salah, winner of three of the past 10 PFA Player of the Year awards, has left Liverpool for Trabzonspor in Turkey — meaning the rest of the league's active player pool now holds the same number of POTY trophies collectively.
- Chelsea's Estêvão, an 18-year-old attacking midfielder coming off a severe hamstring tear, headlines Tier 7 as the league's best prospect after rating a 67 (37th-best in the league) on Futi's chance-creation model across just 900-plus minutes for a 10th-place team.
- Tier 6 is reserved exclusively for the three goalkeepers — Bart Verbruggen (Brighton), David Raya (Arsenal), and Emiliano Martínez (Aston Villa) — a carve-out the article ties to how unpredictably keeper performance swings season-to-season under shot-stopping metrics.
- Notable Tier 5 movers include Sandro Tonali's £92.5 million transfer to Tottenham and Morgan Rogers's £117 million move to Chelsea, transfers the article suggests have yet to be proven at title-contention level.
Why it matters: The tiered structure is an editorial admission that raw counting stats lie in a league where the title-winning player pool is tiny — a framing reinforced by Salah's exit, which strips the last decade's defining star from English football. With only Arteta having won the title and no new Premier League signings making the list, the rankings double as a reset map for a league entering its first post-Ferguson/Wenger/Klopp/Guardiola touchline era.
Ask SkimNews
