Ranking the 25 best Premier League wingers of the last 5 years

Ranking the best wingers in the Premier League is a task so onerous that it may seem foolhardy, because even restricting the time span to the last five years doesn’t make the task even easier.

How do you rank, for example, a new breakout star like Anthony Gordon against a fallen superstar like Sadio Mane? Where does a gifted footballer like Riyad Mahrez stand against a former goal-scoring machine like Raheem Sterling?

I tried my best to be fair and account for the unique merits each player brought to the table and avoid any club-based bias. I also decided to discard players who mostly offered value at non-winger positions, specifically Bernardo Silva, mostly to make my own job easier. (Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of nice things to say about Silva in other pieces.)

Finally, I didn’t want to clutter the sub-headings by listing out the names of every club a player suited up for if they were on three teams during the last five years (again, looking at Sterling), so I picked the club for which the player most notably contributed to during these last five years.

And so when do five years start? With the 2019/20 pandemic season, which almost seems appropriate given our recent footballing fandom lives seem to be split into a pre and post-pandemic era.

There are no pictures or graphics. This isn’t kindergarten. If you need silly, useless pictures that give the impression of something important and cannot use your imagination, then join the rest of the attention span depraved world on biased social media dross that will tell you your team’s favorite player is the GOAT and everyone else sucks.

If you want your thoughts to be challenged and the deep recesses of your mind to, dare I say it, be entertained, read on and enjoy the ride. After all, it’s free.

25. Willian, Fulham

Willian always got ragged on by Chelsea fans and Arsenal fans for being genuinely good but never genuinely great, or, at least, that’s the impression I get of the perception of one of the many overhated players to have started games for two of English football’s most mercurial fanbases.

At the same time, the criticisms of Willian always had some validity to them. He had it all in terms of skill and technicality, but he never seemed to bring either to the table when his team needed him the most,

And for clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea, that’s not nearly at the level required for title contention, so, under that lens, you can understand why there was a sense of slowly mounting frustration, which would naturally be higher for a player good enough to actually merit being the recipient of criticism teetering on vitriol.

But all of that belies the fact that Willian was a good footballer, including for Fulham after he made the “step down” to a club with less scrutiny, though, at the very end, even the Cottagers grew impatient with Willian’s increasingly indolent playing style.

24. Harvey Barnes, Leicester City

“Ooooohhh Harvey Barnes!” is the immortal meme that follows one of the Premier League’s most unstated exciting players – a man whose curlers are screamers. Barnes may not start every game for Newcastle, but he has as many goals as starts (three) already in the 2024/25 season.

Before that, Barnes had separate seasons of double-digit goals and double-digits assists for Leicester City while suiting the ethos of a club famous for the counterattacking blitz.

23. Wilfried Zaha, Crystal Palace

There’s a reason why Wilfried Zaha never moved to a bigger club than Crystal Palace despite the seemingly perennial Arsenal transfer link that only the most deluded of Gunners fans even attempted to entertain as a remotely good idea.

Zaha was very obviously gifted and probably the best pure dribbler in the Premier League behind Eden Hazard. And when he was in the mood to, he could score, too, with an impressive – and often overlooked – 25 goals between the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons.

But there was the harsh reality that he wasn’t half as good as the numbers suggested. Yeah, Zaha could occasionally finish in jaw-dropping, silky-smooth fashion in a manner that left you wondering if he was actually going to have his world-class breakout year at the age of 28.

At the same time, he so often held his team back by holding onto the ball, running a little bit here, running a little bit there, and whipping a half-shot, half-cross into il purgatorio.

22. Adama Traore, Wolves

Adama Traore seemed like less of a footballer than a spectacle, but as much as his return to Barcelona was a laughable stint that only a club losing its way could have ever viewed as a good idea, we can’t forget that “peak” Traore at Wolves was arguably the Premier League’s most dangerous weapon.

Think about it. At any given moment after the hour mark, Wolves could unleash the fastest and strongest player on the planet – a guy with numbers closer to an NFL running back than his Premier League contemporaries on the right wing – against a tired opponent.

Traore had three seasons with more than four dribbles completed per game – and he usually made 10 of his appearances off the bench. Even though his finishing was pretty woeful, Traore could turn his running into end product and once had nine assists in a season for Wolves.

On top of all that, unlike Zaha, for example, Traore is still good in the Premier League. He’s come all the way back from a few bad seasons to register three goal contributions and nearly six combined fouls drawn and dribbles completed per game in his first six starts of the 2024/25 season for Fulham.

21. Kaoru Mitoma, Brighton

Kaoru Mitoma should feel like he deserves to rank several spots higher on this list on the strength of his talent alone, but he’s only in his third Premier League season – and the last one was cut short by injury.

As it stands, Mitoma’s one full Premier League campaign was a very good one with seven goals and five assists, but it’s nowhere near enough to rank in the top 20 of the best wingers in the English top flight over the last five years.

So if you think about it that way, it actually speaks very highly of Mitoma’s talent that I am ranking him above Premier League veterans like Traore, Zaha, and Willian – and doing so without a shred of hesitation.

Mitoma’s not exactly a young prospect either at 27, but he is still a new name bursting onto the scene and plays with the fervor of someone trying to make a name for himself at the elite level.

20. Dwight McNeil, Everton

I will die on the hill that if Dwight McNeil played for even a semi-competent side at any point in his first-team career, he’d be widely recognized as one of the most gifted wingers in English football.

It’s not like I’m asking him to play for Liverpool or even Newcastle to achieve that status. Heck, if he went in the Willian or Adama Traore direction and started getting minutes at Fulham, McNeil would get a chance to bang home double-digit goals every season like clockwork.

Remember how we all went head over heels for Mitoma in 2022/23? He scored seven goals for the Premier League’s most electrifying team, Brighton. That year, McNeil scored just as many goals for one of the Premier League’s most pathetic and lifeless attacking sides, Everton.

At Everton, McNeil doesn’t even get to play as an all-out, goal-first inverted attacking winger and is even hopelessly miscast on an Everton team that might as well be coached by two quarreling oranguntans. At least then, they’d have innovation and some semblance of homogenous decision-making. (By the way, I feel like Sean Dyche only gets a pass because he seems likable, whereas if Ronald Koeman made the same decisions, he’s rightfully get slagged off as an insult to football.)

Free the guy. Let this Goal of the Month maestro go to work and accelerate past fools like they are auditioning to be Alvaro Arbeloa’s understudy in the new Netflix show “How I became a traffic cone”. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone who has watched McNeil play could gloss over his obvious talent. He had two key passes per game and six assists last season for an Everton team where every other attacker looked like they had never seen a ball before.

19. Cody Gakpo, Liverpool

OK, now we start getting into the part of the list where we are talking about more serious footballers – no disrespect to Mitoma and McNeil. Cody Gakpo isn’t a traditional winger in any sense, but when you need a goal, it’s hard to pick against an inverted wide playmaker.

Jurgen Klopp knew enough to know that Gakpo was worth buying in winter 2023, but I never got the sense that he knew what to do with Gakpo, where to play him, or how to maximize his technical skill set and almost innate ability to read passing angles into the box.

Gakpo was on a different level in the Euros, and while he has not quite carried over those performances to the Premier League under Arne Slot, all you have to do is watch him whip his right foot across the ball in perfect sync with the striker’s run to understand that there is something special about this young man.

18. Marcus Rashford, Manchester United

It may seem like I am a harsh critic of Marcus Rashford, and if that is the case, then it is only because I think so highly of the 26-year-old. At this point, Rashford may very well be on his last legs at Manchester United, and, in truth, if he was named anyone else and played for any other club, he would have been kicked out this summer.

You wonder if Rashford would be able to fully realize his potential as the best technical talent in English football since Wayne Freaking Rooney if he didn’t have all this pressure to be the well-behaved golden boy at Manchester United.

We’ve seen Rashford score 15 goals in a season, nail knuckleballs, rescue his team in the Champions League, and look like a genuine Premier League superstar. More often, though, we’ve, quite frankly, not seen Rashford at all.

17. Leon Bailey, Aston Villa

It says something that Leon Bailey is now viewed as a better modern Premier League winger than Marcus Rashford, and I don’t mean that as any slight on the Jamaican star, who was a good enough player for Bayer Leverkusen that Bayern Munich once came close to signing him.

Bailey has arguably been even better for Aston Villa, because, simply put, he’s figured out that he’s not actually a superstar-level player but is more of a key cog in the wheel who can help make others better but also step up and play hero-ball when his team needs him to.

Now 27, Bailey is coming off the best season of his career with 10 goals and 9 assists, and it kind of sneaks up on you how good he is.

16. Gabriel Martinelli, Arsenal

If we were talking about Gabriel Martinelli after the 2022/23 season in which he scored 15 goals and registered 5 assists for an Arsenal side fresh off their first kidney-thumping Premier League title race against Manchester City and I told you I wouldn’t even have Martinelli as a top 15 winger ranked against his contemporaries in two years, you’d probably move to have me committed or even mutilated by the Gunnersaurus himself.

The problem with Martinelli isn’t talent. Obviously not. As with so many of the other players on the list, the problem with Martinelli is consistently, as he followed up that 2022/23 campaign with a legitimately poor 2023/24 season.

And outside of the 15 goals in 2022/23, Martinelli, by the way, has never scored more than six Premier League goals in a season. But remember, he’s still only 23 despite having five years of first-team experience. Ridiculously talented, Martinelli’s ranking of 16th is still quite complimentary.

15. Jarrod Bowen, West Ham

Jarrod Bowen deserves a lot more credit for what he offers West Ham, and if you want to argue that any other player on the Hammers is better or more important than Bowen, then you can be my guest because in the country I live in, you are entitled to be extremely wrong.

I remember watching this guy slap around Fiorentina in a Conference League Final as a right winger, then turn around and score 16 goals in the Premier League the next season while masquerading as a center forward.

14. Savinho, Manchester City

Manchester City somehow keep getting more dangerous. This past summer, they went ahead and signed one of the best wingers in LaLiga, Girona’s Savinho, and he’s immediately been such a revelation that on raw talent alone, I’d put him over Gabriel Martinelli and Marcus Rashford when projecting what he’s going to do to the Premier League in the next decade.

Savinho makes the game look easy. He’s out there running 30+ kilometers per hour and changing directions at full speed, breaking ankles and making some of the Premier League’s best defenders, like Riccardo Calafiori, seem as if they glitched themselves into a machine that turned them into carbon copies of Phil Jones.

After scoring 9 goals with 10 assists for Girona last season in LaLiga, Savinho already has two assists in his first four Manchester City starts in league play.

13. Jeremy Doku, Manchester City

Jeremy Doku gets the slight nod over Savinho because his career dribbling statistics before the Premier League are actually even more outrageous, and he has the benefit of proving himself in the Prem over the course of a full season.

Look, Robert Pires is full of it and absolutely should get checked by Arsenal fans for thinking Doku is better than Bukayo Saka, but I’ve seen worse takes than that and there are a few things Doku is better at than Saka.

For starters, he’s a better athlete, a more skillful dribbler, and arguably an even better defender from the wing. Doku was seen as a raw playmaker from Ligue 1, but he’s honestly more refined than Jack Grealish.

12. Raphinha, Leeds

Raphinha is playing the football of his life for Barcelona under an actual elite level coach (no disrespect Xavi, but you have a lot to do to get to that level as an actual manager) in Hansi Flick.

But long before he arrived at Barcelona, Raphinha was already one of the very best left-footed right wingers on the planet, and he was doing it for Leeds United, a club so far below Barcelona that they make Oviedo looks massive in comparison,

Raphinha was so unplayable in the Premiership that he had Arsenal and Chelsea practically begging for his signature before they realized that there are levels to this game and no matter how scandalous the Spotify soul-selling Blaugrana get, they will still always be ten times bigger than any club in England.

He had 29 goal contributions for Leeds in the Premier League in back-to-back seasons, and that stat becomes more impressive when you realize nobody on Leeds had double-digit goal contributions in back-to-back top-flight seasons since iconic striker Mark Viduka in the early 2000s.

11. Solly March, Brighton

I love Solly March. If you don’t love Solly March, then I want to know so I can find you in person, look at you in your face, and ask you why the heck you don’t love Solly March.

He has been with Brighton since their come-up to the Premier League in 2017 and was this veteran journeyman “winger” in the absolute loosest usage of the term, almost taken as a joke because of his lack of remotely impressive statistics at even the Championship level.

But in his second season in the Premier League, March became a regular, 30-game starter for the Seagulls and quietly registered five assists with some pretty nifty underlying numbers, too – 1.4 dribbles completed, 1.2 key passes, and 2.4 combined tackles and interceptions per game.

March slowly evolved into one of the best all-around wingers in the Premier League, peaking in the 2022/23 season when Brighton reached the Europa League as he usurped Kaoru Mitoma’s breakout season with seven goals and seven assists with even better all-around numbers.

You’d bet on March having even better numbers in the 2023/24 season had an injury not cut his campaign in October, and you KNOW Brighton would have finished much higher with a healthy March in the lineup.

10. Jack Grealish, Manchester City

A few very smart people and even more very stupid people will have you think that Jack Grealish has transformed since his days at Aston Villa and become a sniveling, scurrying scrub of a winger who dribbles backwards under the control of a literal Pep Guardiola-mandated shock collar.

Obviously, Grealish has won an actual Premier League title, Champions League title, and overall treble since his Aston Villa days, so while his goals and assists have declined, I highly doubt he cares about what the trophyless contingent of Aesthetic FC dweebs thinks.

Grealish is still a baller, and even though Manchester City keep signing young wingers who can dribble circles around everyone else in the Premiership, the 29-year-old keeps starting games for Pep because he does his job and does it well.

If you listen to your intelligent boss and learn something instead of putting yourself before the team, you can get further in life. Maybe someone should teach these young tyrants running around Elon Musk’s online minefield that valuable life lesson.

9. Raheem Sterling, Manchester City

By my criteria, the last five years begins with the 2019/20 season, and it’s easy to forget what happened in that campaign because of a literal pandemic, but Raheem Sterling scored 20 goals from the wing that season.

How many players on this list have done that? The answer is literally two and both of those players are in the top five of this list, so anyone trying to argue that Sterling is too high has an agenda against the guy.

Sterling has now played for pretty much every elite club in England, which tells you that every elite club in England has valued him at one point in his career. And that should tell you that Sterling is an absolute prodigy of this sport.

He’s so smart. I don’t care about that inane fail comp Chelsea fans spread around Twitter about him, because I could make the same one about Diego Costa and tell the world an 80-year-old Antonio Conte could score more goals than him.

It’s amazing how people can put together a few clips of a player’s career and ignore the fact that the same player has been the model of consistency with 57 goals in the last 5 years from the wing and no less than 6 goals in a single one of those seasons.

8. Anthony Gordon, Newcastle

Anthony Gordon’s been getting meaningful Premier League minutes for a few seasons now, but he’s only had one truly good campaign. So you may wonder why that makes him a top 10 Premier League winger over a five-year time span, especially when that means being ranked above someone with Raheem Sterling’s pedigree.

Well, it’s because that one good season was absolutely fantastic. Gordon was the best left winger in the entire Premier League last season and was a legitimate Player of the Season shout alongside fellow standout Alexander Isak at striker.

Gordon is coveted by virtually every elite Premier League club, especially Liverpool, but he’s committed to the Newcastle project and has made Frank Lampard’s initial evaluation look quite prescient.

The 23-year-old scored 11 goals with 10 assists in the 2023/24 Premier League season, showing a quality with his end product beyond that of a U23 player, and he’s already picking up where he left off in the 2024/25 season.

7. Luis Diaz, Liverpool

Anyone who watched Luis Diaz own souls at Copa America 2021 understood that the Colombian left winger was going to be a smashing success and could excel at literally any club in the world.

So you wonder, then, why none of these teams with multi-million dollar scouting budgets decided to sign Diaz promptly after he tore up a major international sporting event to nearly the degree of Neymar, outplaying Lionel Messi (yes, I said that right) in the processs.

But Diaz did get his move a few months later that winter after continuing his fine form with Porto, a Champions League club, eventually helping lead Liverpool to the Champions League Final while proving to be an upgrade on a player ranked higher than him on this very list.

Diaz was the subject of transfer speculation last season due to some questionable end product, but he has made those cries look outright laughable with a start to the 2024/25 season that is so good, you wouldn’t bet him being a Premier League Player of the Season candidate under Arne Slot.

6. Michael Olise, Crystal Palace

Michael Olise didn’t even make 60 total Premier League starts and left the English top flight before he even turned 23, yet he nearly makes the top five of this list because he was so ludicrously good for Crystal Palace during that time span.

The same people who hold up Wilfried Zaha as some sort of a cult hero because they think it’s an unpopular edgy thing must think Olise is a Premier League Hall of Famer in comparison.

And Olise would have been if he weren’t so incredibly good that he ascended beyond the confines of English football and is now playing for the second biggest club on the planet, where he is already the team’s third-best player after Harry Kane and Jamal Musiala.

Olise only started 14 games in his final season with Palace due to injury but still finished with 10 goals and 6 assists. He makes 70 percent of the very impressive footballers on this list want to revamp their entire career CVs. This man is the future.

5. Son Heung-min, Tottenham

Literally everyone knows the name “Song Heung-min”, and he’s scored some of the most iconic solo goals in the history of this league as one of the most explosive athletes of the last decade.

Yet you get the sense that, because he played for Tottenham and then had the double inconvience of being overshadowed by English hero Harry Kane, that his legacy remains highly underappreciated by the unwashed masses.

Son, now 32, has one of the best careers in the history of the Premier League. He’s notched double-digit goals in all eight of his seasons with Tottenham since joining from the Bundesliga, including one season with 23 goals from the left wing position. Son even has three double-digit assist campaigns.

4. Sadio Mane, Liverpool

Sadio Mane ended up leaving the Premier League in 2022 for Bayern Munich because of Luis Diaz’s emergence, but he left the Reds at the right time with nothing but fond memories after scoring 21 goals between the Premier League and Champions League as his club came agonizingly close to a treble – only to come up with a lone FA Cup.

A master of invention and one of the hard-working wingers on the planet, Mane was the most beloved player on a Liverpool side full of superstars Kopites couldn’t help but adore to the fullest.

Mane scored 45 goals in his final three seasons at Liverpool including seven assists in two of those three campaigns. He is part of arguably the greatest attacking trident in Premier League history, and as impressive as his honors are, the stats can never do justice to the intensity, unpredictability, and sheer work ethic he provided.

3. Bukayo Saka, Arsenal

Bukayo Saka is equal parts phenom and leader, an unselfish yet electrifying left-footed right winger whose career accomplishments at the age of 23 are literally unprecedented in English football.

There is nothing to dislike about Saka. He can turn games on their head with a well-placed cross or an impossible finish from beyond the pale while holding tactical width and involving others.

Saka has a combined 30 goals and 20 assists in his last two Premier League seasons, and those statistics are exemplary enough that if you need further explanation on the merits of his qualities, I kindly suggest you to find the exit door to the nearest Manchester United fan page extolling the purported virtues of an Erik ten Hag-coached team, because that is the only cesspool on the Internet to which you belong.

2. Riyad Mahrez, Manchester City

A unicorn in its purest form, Riyad Mahrez seemed to transcend the pitch and was almost too suave for such a well-oiled (no pun intended) and almost mechanically trained Pep Guardiola side.

Mahrez was the purity of football that Manchester City needed and the special touch of magic that made the Citizens irresistible and begrudgingly difficult to despise. He was a throwback to Thierry Henry and Zinedine Zidane, Manchester City’s answer to the grace of Karim Benzema.

The Algerian superstar could kill the most venomous of high balls dead, or he could liven its trajectory further with a hop-skip past the fullback, slicing the ball into the corridor of uncertainty to the next attacker before the goalkeeper knew what hit him.

Mahrez was the perfect marriage of the mesmerizing dribbling of street football and technical elegance beyond what the hallowed halls of Clairefontaine could conduct.

I will not even dare to list a single statistic of Mahrez’s, because reducing what he did to defenses into a singular statistic would be such an insulting act that I would rather condemn myself to a lifetime of watching Guido Burgstaller lead the line for Schalke again.

1. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool

I am tempted to write, “If you thought this was anyone else, I feel sorry for you,” and leave it at that, but, let’s be honest, Mohamed Salah’s statistics are so unbelievable that I’d rather review them for the benefit of the stans who stayed this long just to gloat about how brilliant their Egyptian king is.

Salah is beyond words. Every year, there’s a contingent of rival Premier League fans who pray for his downfall, and then he somehow gets even better, leaving them as dumbfounded as Rafael Benitez when he realized what a trivela pass was.

Since 2019/20, Salah has never scored fewer than 18 goals in a Premier League season. As a winger. As a winger! Salah has become an even better playmaker, guaranteeing a double-digit assist total despite quite honestly meriting 20 in a season if he had a more adept finisher at striker than Darwin Nunez.

Digressions aside, Salah is a gift to football and has a legitimate case for being the best player in the history of the Premier League. That may seem outlandish, but when you comb over his career numbers and accomplishments for Liverpool while accounting for the fact that he is not a striker, maybe you’ll see the logic, too.

If you made it this far into the whole article, thank you for reading. You have my full respect – and not just because I need my ego massaged twice daily. No, it means a lot that in this world of instant gratification, there are still people willing to read long-winded, semi-maniacal content for entertainment. But seriously, thank you.