This week, The Independent is counting down through the 100 greatest players ever to grace the Premier League.
We asked all of our sportswriters to rank their greatest players in the history of the league, with each player assigned points before an overall list was then worked out.
In voting for the greatest ever Premier League player, we generally considered a few broad factors: a player’s ability and the actual application of that ability; the consistency of that application; the level they reached; their influence on the competition and – of course – their level of achievement.
Here’s our Chief Football Writer Miguel Delaney explaining exactly what we were looking for, and how the process works.
Each day this week at 10am we will be revealing twenty players, with the winner finally crowned on Friday. We began with numbers 100-81 on Monday, 80-61 on Tuesday and 60-41 on Wednesday.
Here are next twenty players in our countdown, placed from 40th—21st.
IndyPL100: 40—21
Keep an eye on our social media as we have plenty of Premier League 100 features running in tandem with our countdown across the week, including:
- Luke Brown on our No 51 Dimitar Berbatov, the Premier League’s most misunderstood player
- Simon Hughes on our No 54 Xabi Alonso, Liverpool’s smooth midfield shied
- Miguel Delaney on our No 67 Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a super sub but so much more
- Tom Kershaw on our No 76 Gilberto Silva, Arsenal’s invisible Invincible
- Jack Rathborn on our No 93 Arjen Robbenand what might have been
- And the entire team on the players who were unlucky to narrowly miss out
