Ryan O’HanlonOct 31, 2025, 04:38 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
45. Morgan Rogers, attacking midfielder, Aston Villa
When I ranked the top 50 players before the Premier League season started, the landscape of the league seemed relatively settled. Liverpool and Arsenal would battle it out for the title; Manchester City might do the same if Rodri came back healthy; Chelsea seemed adrift from that top trio, and also everybody else as the surefire fourth-best team in the league.
Those teams were the clear four best teams because they had the clear four-best rosters. So, how do we explain where we find ourselves today?
Nine games into the season, Arsenal are in first, yes, but then they are followed by … Bournemouth, Tottenham, and Sunderland? Did you read that right? Bournemouth, Spurs, and Sunderland really round out the top four? And then Man City are down in fifth, Liverpool in seventh, and Chelsea — the Club World Cup champions! — are sitting in ninth? And they haven’t even played Man City or Arsenal yet?
It has been a season of displacement thus far, but it’s too early to say whether it has also been a season of realignment. Almost everyone on Arsenal’s squad is playing at a high level, and so is City striker Erling Haaland, but after that? It becomes less clear. How do you rank anyone on Liverpool or, for opposite reasons, Bournemouth? Would you rather have, say, Antoine Semenyo or Florian Wirtz?
The rankings are a combination of who I think the best players are (i.e. the ones who would contribute the most to winning if they were to play every minute of every game) and the players who are providing the most value (i.e. the players who are actually playing minutes and helping their teams win). This way we don’t have a list comprising only players from a couple of clubs.
That’s generally my thinking: make adjustments based on the first nine games but also don’t completely overhaul your opinion of a player based on the first nine games.
As always, this is biased toward players who do things that are quantifiable — there is a lot that happens on the field that we still can’t count, but I’m more likely to be wrong by chasing after them too aggressively — but it’s also not a purely data-based list.
And lastly, anyone who is currently injured for a significant amount of time is not eligible for the current edition of the list. OK, now: to the list!
– Why we already know Arsenal will win the league – Who’s your pick: Mappe or Lamal? – Are set pieces ruining the Premier League?
Adams has played 97% of the minutes for the second-placed team in the Premier League. And I don’t think those two ideas are unrelated to each other.
Kayode’s long throw-ins might … be the single-most-dangerous attacking weapon in the Premier League. Per Stats Perform’s expected possession value (xPV) model, which puts a goal-probability value on everything a player does on the ball, he’s lapping the field when the ball is in his hands.
Perhaps the weirdest bit among all the above weirdness: Everton have three players in the top 10. And then Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is 11th. No other team have more than one player in the top 11.
Vicario has give up at least two goals fewer than expected, as measured by Stats Perform’s post-shot xG model, in each of his first two seasons in the Premier League. And he’s already at 3.09 so far this season. As long as he’s healthy, he’s the best shot-stopper in the league at this point.
He also does it the way most great goalkeepers do: with fantastic positioning rather than highlight-reel reaction saves. Per Gradient Sports data, he has made zero positional mistakes when facing a shot so far this season.
Across Doku’s first two seasons in the Premier League, I was convinced that he was making Manchester City worse. He’d rack up truly absurd dribbling numbers, but he never turned it into shots for himself or his teammates. And more than that, his dribbles took forever. Sure, he might beat his defender eventually, but what good is that when the opposition defense has 20 seconds to recover and none of your teammates have any idea how to react to your movements?
Well, it seems as if Happy Gilmore might’ve learned how to putt. Through nine matches, Doku has an 88.2 passing grade from Gradient — that’s on a scale of 100, and it ranks as tied for the eight-best mark in the Premier League. Despite touching the ball 10 times less often per 90 minutes than he did last season, he’s creating significantly more chances and generating way more expected assists.
Take a look at Mateta’s shot map, sized by the xG value of each attempt, from the match against Bournemouth:
He took 10 non-penalty shots from worth 2.88 xG. Since 2008, the only player to generate more was Arsenal’s Alexandre Lacazette, who managed 2.97 non-penalty xG against Manchester United in December 2012.
Five players from the team that are in 10th place? They have the third-best xG differential in the league, behind Arsenal and City, and they’d be favored on a neutral field against any of the non-Arsenal teams in the current top four.
Among full backs, only Newcastle’s Kieran Trippier has completed more progressive passes. Timber’s 14 passes into the penalty area lead the way at his position. He has generated the third-most non-penalty xG of any player on Arsenal. And he’s tied for the league lead with Newcastle midfielder Bruno Guimarães in through balls completed (8).
It has been really fun to watch him develop. If he keeps it up, he’ll be even higher next time we do this rank.
There are two players across Europe’s Big Five leagues this season who have completed more than 70 progressive passes and made more than 30 tackles+interceptions. One of them is AC Milan’s Luka Modric, who has won a Ballon d’Or. And the other one is Anderson, who plays for the team that are 18th in the Premier League.
The 22-year-old has officially made the leap. He has already completed more than half as many progressive passes as he did all of last season. Whether or not Forest manage to avoid relegation, Anderson isn’t long for the City Ground.
Ranking Salah and the two players before him was the hardest part of this exercise. Salah was the obvious No. 1 choice before the season started because he was, obviously, the best player in the Premier League last season. Rodri, meanwhile, was No. 1 before the start of last season, and Isak was No. 5 before this season began.
But Salah is having the worst season of his career, Rodri can’t stay healthy for Man City and Isak has both been unhealthy and ineffective in the limited minutes with his new team Liverpool. If we were just ranking players based on their performances this season, then I don’t think any of them make the top 50. But we also have recent track records of elite performance for all of them.
So, when predicting their future performance, I’ve tried to blend what we’ve seen so far this season with what we’ve seen in past seasons. And given how much these two teams have invested in these three players, I’m not sure any of them would be happy with Salah, Isak, or Rodri playing at a fringe-top-10 level for the rest of the season.
Fernandes continues to be one of the two or three best passers in the Premier League, year after year, but this might be his best one yet. Per Gradient, he’s the highest-graded passer in the Premier League this season (96.1 out of 100). He’s second in the league after Anderson for progressive passes, and he’s completing his passes at a higher clip than ever before.
Oh, and he has attempted more shots than all but one other Man United player, and he has made more tackles+interceptions than all but three of his teammates. He has almost single-handedly kept his club afloat over the past five years.
Like almost all Liverpool players, he hasn’t warranted this ranking with his play so far this season, but he was the best center back in the league last season, so we’re averaging out the two.
That said, he still has been dominant in the air. He has won 46 aerial duels — seven more than anyone else in the league — and he has won 78% of all of his aerial duels — the best mark in the league, by a good margin, among anyone who has contested at least 25.
Before the season, it seemed as if £100 million new arrival Wirtz might replace Szoboszlai as Liverpool’s de facto attacking midfielder. Nine games into the season, Szoboszlai has easily been Liverpool’s best player.
Per Gradient’s data, he has covered 98.44 kilometers of ground this season — fifth most of anyone in the league. But he’s also second in the league for distance covered while sprinting: 3.86 kilometers at a speed of 25 kpm or more. Among the 25 or so players who have covered at least 90 kilometers this year, Szoboszlai has the highest percentage of that distance covered while sprinting. Put simply: he’s in his own class.
But we already knew that. What gets him so high up here is that he has done all of that while not only playing three different positions at a high level (including at right back) but also while becoming an invaluable player for Liverpool in possession. So far this season, only Anderson and Fernandes have completed more progressive passes.
You can think of the opposition defensive lines this way: The attacking line is the easiest to bypass, but it also carries with it the highest penalty for failure. The defensive line is the hardest to break through, but it also comes with the smallest penalty for failure. The midfield line, meanwhile, is the worst of both worlds: harder to break through than the attacking line, and a much higher downside than a failed pass through the defensive line.
Per Gradient’s data, only nine players have completed at least 25 passes that broke the opposition midfield line, and only one of them has completed at least 80% of his attempts at breaking the midfield line. That would be Bruno Guimarães, who also leads the league in both passes attempted (20) and passes completed (9) that break the opposition defensive line.