We've reached the point of the Premier League season where things start to look more like a knockout competition. There are only so many games remaining, and things such as systems, cohesion and managerial decisions don't matter as much as they do over the course of the whole year. From here, individual brilliance -- a great save, a perfect pass, a fantastic finish -- takes on an outsize role in determining how things will shake out.
That's true at the top of the table, where the gap might only be three points (and a game in hand) for Manchester City up to Arsenal if Pep Guardiola's side win their head-to-head this weekend. It's definitely true in the Champions League race, where eight points separate third from eighth. And it's clearly true at the bottom, where 18th-place Tottenham trail 17th-place West Ham by two points and 16th-place Nottingham Forest by three.
So, what players will have the biggest say in how things go from now until the end of the season? We've got another edition of ESPN's Premier League Top 50 to answer that exact question.
How we rank, and who isn't eligible
I say this every time, but ranking players with any degree of confidence is impossible. And if I really just wanted to identify the true talent of every Premier League player, I'd probably defer to the market, which means the majority of the list would be made up of players from all the best teams.

