Time for the most thankless and impossible of all the tasks: it’s our top 10 players in the Premier League for 2023, picked on criteria that are almost entirely subjective. Read this and get angry about the players we have or more likely haven’t included.
10) Kyle Walker (Manchester City)
Man City’s contract dawdling almost saw the ageless Walker depart for Bayern Munich in the summer, but sense prevailed and a new three-year contract was signed and sealed. It’s a huge commitment to a 33-year-old defender whose game is built largely on recovery pace, but Walker has shown absolutely no signs yet of losing that absurd turn of foot that makes him so vital still for club and country.
Notably exceptional in neutralising the threat of Vinicius Junior in the Champions League semi-final – a significant individual battle on City’s road to ending their wait to land the big prize that had eluded them.
9) Emi Martinez (Aston Villa)
Always want to get a goalkeeper in these and the obvious contenders are there. Alisson remains the benchmark. If this were based only on the current season there would be a strong argument for Guglielmo Vicario and his elastic-limbed highlight-reel efforts. But for scale of impact across the 12 months it’s hard to look past Emi Martinez at Villa.
There are beard-strokey points to be made about the effect on the rest of the squad it had when Martinez returned at the start of the year a World Cup winner, but while he has clearly become a significant leader within this group of players he is also more straightforwardly a superb shot-stopper. Perhaps most importantly for this particular Villa side, though, is the confidence and competence with which he sweeps up behind Emery’s high defensive line.
8) Bukayo Saka (Arsenal)
Enormously highly-rated, obviously, probably still slightly under-rated outside the Emirates. Mikel Arteta is famously reluctant to give his Starboy even the smallest of rests, with Saka’s run of 87 successive top-flight games only coming to an end when injury kept him out of the 1-0 win over Manchester City. It’s a crazy record for any outfield player, but even more remarkable for a player who only turned 22 this season.
He’s already gone past 150 appearances in the Premier League, having become the fifth youngest player to reach the landmark behind Wayne Rooney, Cesc Fabregas, James Milner and Raheem Sterling.
Only Salah, Haaland, Watkins and Son have more goal involvements than Saka’s 25 and none of those can match the evenness of Saka’s contribution with 13 goals and 12 assists. A brilliant all-rounder who is once again at the forefront of another Arsenal title challenge.
7) Son Heung-min (Tottenham)
A disappointing season 2022/23 season for Son personally and Spurs generally ended at least with some positive signs for the player; he managed only 10 Premier League goals for the season but seven of those came after the turn of the year when the team was at its most wretched.
This season has, in every way been a different story. The joy is back for player and team, with Son revelling not just in the freedoms and style of Angeball but in his new-found status as focal point both literal and figurative in the post-Harry Kane environment.
Son wasn’t the only option as captain when Ange Postecoglou took over but it’s now hard to imagine how it could be anyone else. He has already bettered last season’s league goal tally before the new year and is on track to match his Golden Boot winning efforts of 2021/22. Eighteen goals and nine assists in 2023 is a remarkable return given Son’s own form as the year began and the moribund state Spurs were in for the first half of 2023.
6) Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa)
Here is a full list of players with both more goals and more assists than Villa’s striker in the Premier League this season: Mo Salah. List ends. Watkins has been a very good striker for a while now, but he ends 2023 a far more complete player than he began it and while at 27 he can’t really be considered a long-term heir to Harry Kane he most certainly has a powerful case to be considered the most capable of the Bayern man’s assorted understudies. There’s a bit of chicken and egg about Watkins and Villa’s inevitably intertwined improvements across the year. Are Villa title-challengers because Watkins is great or…
Certainly, he’s not the only reason for Villa’s dramatic improvement through the year, but they wouldn’t be as good as they are without him. He’s got nine goals this season, which is rock solid, but it’s the eight assists (if you count winning penalties) that catch the eye. Only Pedro Neto can match that across the whole division.
5) William Saliba (Arsenal)
The best defender in the Premier League over the last 12 months and perhaps second only to Rodri for looking pretty bloody good when he’s playing but only revealing precisely how good when he’s missing. When Saliba made his customary elegantly effective contribution to a facile 3-0 win over Fulham on March 12, the Gunners were five points clear of Manchester City with 11 games remaining. It would be Saliba’s final appearance of the season, and Arsenal would win only five of those remaining 11 as the title challenge evaporated.
The reasons for Arsenal’s late collapse last season were many and varied, but the enforced absence of Saliba with a back injury was probably a more significant one than the discourse acknowledged. It’s not as much fun as going ‘bottler bottling bottle jobs lol’ but there we are. Now back at the heart of Arsenal’s defence where he belongs, and another title challenge has thus materialised.
4) Declan Rice (West Ham/Arsenal)
Yeah, decent year all told. Led West Ham to their first silverware since 1980 in the Europa Conference League before getting the £100m move that had long been on the cards. Arsenal won the battle and you’d have to say Rice chose wisely. Still, though, it was a move that wasn’t guaranteed to see Rice hit the ground running at a club with renewed and enhanced ambitions after a stunning 2022/23 almost took them all the way to the title.
Every chance Arsenal do indeed go one better this time in a wide-open race and if they do it will in large part be down to Rice’s seamless transition. He was West Ham’s best and most important player; he’s already not far off being Arsenal’s.
3) Rodri (Manchester City)
Arguably the most important player in the Premier League given the absurdly stark contrast between City’s results with and without him. City have lost only twice in the Premier League in 2023 with Rodri in the side and not at all since February’s now weirdly traditional loss at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Rodri has played 14 Premier League games this season, which have brought City 10 wins and four draws. He’s missed three games, and City have lost the lot. Given he also sat out the 1-0 defeat at Brentford on the final day of last season, the last four Premier League games Rodri has missed are the last four Premier League games City have lost.
Living as we now do in a world where defensive midfielders can quite routinely change hands for nine-figure sums, it boggles the mind to think what fee City might want for a player relentlessly reliable in every single aspect of his job apart from – and this one’s starting to prove quite important – avoiding collecting an awful lot of cards.
2) Erling Haaland (Manchester City)
The speed with which Haaland’s other-worldly goalscoring genius has been normalised in the Barclays is such that most would contend he’s having a bit of a quiet time this season having only scored two goals more than absolutely anybody else despite being out of action since the first week of December. Across 2023 as a whole, he’s got a five-goal lead over the field with only that injury setback keeping him from reaching 30 goals for the calendar year. Ten assists also place him cosily in the top 10 for the league in 2023 on that metric despite being sometimes unfairly maligned as a one-note battering ram cheat code goalscorer who offers little beyond all those vast numbers of goals upon goals upon goals.
He’s the best striker in the league by a cartoonishly wide margin now Kane’s run away to Germany, and we probably already take his absurd numbers too much for granted. When 14 goals before Christmas feels like an underwhelming return we are truly in a daft place.
Top scorers in 2023: Haaland safe from Kane and Mbappe as Salah enters the top 10
1) Mo Salah (Liverpool)
Only Haaland has more Premier League goals in 2023 than Salah’s 24. Nobody is anywhere close to Salah’s 16 Premier League assists in 2023. Team-mate Trent Alexander-Arnold is next best with 12. Salah’s 40 goal contributions is the best in the Premier League for the year and across Europe’s top five leagues puts him behind only Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe.
Liverpool’s squad has evolved significantly across 2023. It was necessary, but has all happened faster than might have been considered ideal. It’s gone pretty well, with Liverpool ending 2023 very much in the title race. But for all the changes behind and alongside him, the magnificent Salah remains absolutely crucial to it all.
At some point Liverpool are going to have to replace him, and that is going to be a huge task. The longer they can keep him out of Saudi Arabia the better, because he remains absolutely elite. A wide-forward who contributes centre-forward numbers of goals while still possessing the necessary creative craft for the role and a player who has put himself right back in the conversation as the Premier League’s best current footballer.
Top assist providers in 2023: Two Liverpool players in a creative top 10