10. Liverpool RB Trent Alexander-Arnold
Honestly, I can’t comprehend why there are so many amateur pundits who spend their days disparaging Trent Alexander-Arnold’s defending as if he were on the level of a backup at Lecce when, in fact, he’s an excellent one-on-one defender as a fullback.
It’s just that people can’t seem to understand that an attacking fullback who actually tries to add value to his team going forward is going to inevitably get caught out defensively on occasion, with the frequency of those occurrences unduly distorted by an army of fail comp “artists” who clearly need a job.
Alexander-Arnold is a better one-on-one defender than Reece James, who apparently earned a reputation as a superior defensive right back on the grounds of being physically bigger and having one good Champions League tie against Real Madrid three years ago that Chelsea lost anyway.
Since 2018/19 when Alexander-Arnold won the Champions League and had 12 assists that Premier League season, he has been the best right back in England. How we aren’t praising this guy more for this lengthy spell of unbridled quality when he’s still just 25 is tantamount to an outright institutional failure of footballing media (or, in other words, simply par for the course for us as a collective group of utter idiots).
9. Liverpool CB Virgil van Dijk
Virgil van Dijk is the best center back in the world. Eder Militao is maybe the only other guy I will pretend to entertain, but I am sick of hearing the same five Arsenal fans yell on and on about William Saliba as if he’s accomplished even half of what VdV has in his career.
Maybe van Dijk moving so effortlessly and using fewer steps isn’t him being lazy, but rather him being smarter than the so-called modern-day defenders who are really just brutes with no discipline who part the Red Sea for the striker when they chase aimless passes harmlessly bouncing toward the wing.
If you take a frame-by-frame snapshot of every van Dijk match in a season and comb over all of them, you’ll find maybe five egregious mistakes, which is what you should see from an elite center back. Now that do that for Antonio Rudiger or Cristian Romero and witness the carnage before you.
8. Tottenham LW Son Heung-min
Son Heung-min once scored 23 goals with 7 assists in a single season for Tottenham while sharing the spotlight with Harry Kane, and yet it feels like he only got half the respect that Bukayo Saka or Marcus Rashford would get for a lesser season.
The South Korean superstar is one of the finest goal-scorers, creators, and athletes in the Premier League over the last decade, and when Kane went down in 2018/19, it was Son who stepped up and took Tottenham to the Champions League Final in historic fashion.
Son is 32 years old and still every bit as good as he was five years ago – and maybe even better now that he has refined his game creatively, especially after the experience of filling in as the No. 9 in 2023/24.
7. Liverpool LW Luis Diaz
Luis Diaz is a massively underrated player on a global scale, and the one thing I always like to bring up about him is that he was the actual second-best player at Copa America 2021 behind Neymar but still didn’t get signed by anyone until Jurgen Klopp wisely plucked him from Porto that following winter.
The Colombian international was so good that he, in fact, outplayed Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane down the stretch of his first season at Liverpool, reaching the Champions League Final against Real Madrid.
Although Diaz wasn’t at his best last season, Liverpool are getting the most dangerous version of their left winger in 2024/25 under Arne Slot, with the 27-year-old already at five goals in six games.
Diaz is in the prime of his career and is one of the most explosive and productive dribblers in world football, and it’s an affront to the sport that more fans don’t consider him world-class.
6. Manchester City DM Rodri
While I think it’s quite laughable that nobody cared about Rodri for months and then suddenly, at the behest of the most annoying set of Manchester City fans in online spaces, the wider media decided to position the Spanish international as a Ballon d’Or candidate on the level of Jude Bellingham, a player so far superior to Rodri as a teenager that it isn’t even remotely funny.
But all of the false hype belies the fact that Rodri is indeed an excellent footballer who is good enough to be the sixth-best player in the Premier League despite being a defensive midfielder.
Rodri has actually become a player with game-changing end product, capable of scoring the mildest “screamers” from outside the box and also creating direct assists from deep.
I’ll never understand how people can pretend Rodri is as impactful of a player as two-time Champions League Final standout Vinicius Jr., but I can absolutely get behind Rodri as a borderline top-five overall player in his own league.
5. Arsenal RW Bukayo Saka
Bukayo Saka is a 23-year-old winger with three double-digit goal-scoring seasons and a combined 30 goals and 20 assists in his last two Premier League campaigns for Arsenal.
I’ve waxed poetic about Saka’s unselfishness, work rate, technical quality, and creativity in so many articles, so I’ll just leave you with this. Saka is the best player Arsenal has produced since Thierry Henry and makes Mesut Ozil, Alexander Lacazette, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang look like the footnotes in club history that they should be.
4. Manchester City ST Erling Haaland
Erling Haaland is the most boring superathlete and 30-goal striker I have ever seen, and while part of that is down to the maniacally monotone attacking setup Pep Guardiola has created at the Etihad, another part is due to Haaland’s own stagnation into a Ruud van Nistelrooy clone of a poacher.
And like van Nistelrooy, Haaland is quietly becoming just as unlikable, cowardly throwing the ball at an Arsenal’s defender’s head before later talking trash to Mikel Arteta after the game as if his team didn’t just squander two points while playing 12 vs. 10 (the 12th man stands for the referee).
Haaland was a generational striker at Dortmund who was much better as a passer and dribbler than he was given credit for. At Man City, he is a drone, a soulless goal-scoring machine who has numbers comparable to Cristiano Ronaldo but plays the game with the coldness of a forgotten No. 9 of 1970s Serie A.
3. Manchester City AM Kevin De Bruyne
No matter how many goals Erling Haaland scores in his Manchester City career, he can never touch the legacy of Kevin De Bruyne. In all honesty, De Bruyne is the only player in the history of Man City who I could ever put above David Silva, and that’s because what he’s conjured over the years is untouchable in its brilliance.
Who else can make Pep Guardiola’s, football’s mad scientist himself, head spin. De Bruyne sees passing lanes, angles, and arcs that nobody else does. He executes pressing traps, wins the ball, then mashes it into the six-yard box with such precision that even Dean Windass could score 20 in a season with KDB as his teammate.
De Bruyne is such a marvelous playmaker that his sheer passing brilliance led to him mistaken as a one-dimensional No. 10 in the Ozil or James Maddison mold, when, in fact, he’s always been a better all-around midfielder than teammate Ilkay Gundogan.
2. Chelsea AM Cole Palmer
Cole Palmer scored four against Brighton without even trying. He had the best season of any Chelsea player since Eden Hazard, and he wasn’t even a first-choice player for the whole campaign.
Just 22 years old, Palmer scored 22 goals with 11 assists in the 2023/24 season and already has 6 goals with 4 assists in 6 matches to start the 2023/24 campaign. He is an elite creator who scores with the volume rivaling many Premier League strikers, while dribbling as well as any midfielder in England.
If anyone could possibly compete with Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham as the best footballer in England, then it would be Palmer. Anyone who ranks Palmer as the best in the league would be well justified in doing so, and anyone who thinks it’s too soon to place Palmer in the conversation moves with the mental speed and vigor of the United States Supreme Court.
1. Liverpool RW Mohamed Salah
Mohamed Salah is the best player in the Premier League. He is the benchmark. Cole Palmer is the one with the hot hand, but Salah has been breaking records and winning trophies for Liverpool for years and years.
Last season, Salah showed his best level yet as a creator, and he would have easily had more than 10 assists with better finishing from his teammates. (Note that “teammates” are plural, let’s not just throw Darwin Nunez under the bus by himself, yeah?)
Salah is a professional in every sense, a goal-scoring machine and explosive athlete who never stops training, running, shooting, or going for that next action that will take Liverpool one step closer to the title. He isn’t just the best player in the Premier League today, he’s arguably the best of all time.
The managing editor of The Trivela Effect, Kevin has 15 years of experience in digital media. He covered Real Madrid from 2019-2022 for The Real Champs as a site manager. You can contact him at the site’s official Twitter handle @TrivelaEffect or via the site’s official email thetrivelaeffect@gmail.com.