As you might already know, this is going to be the first Premier League season that won't feature Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Jurgen Klopp or Pep Guardiola on the touchline -- the first season without at least one of its four history-rewriting, league-defining managers.
Coming off of a World Cup cycle, we're entering into a new, unknown era.
Clubs are still happy to let the manager take all of the blame even though they have increasingly marginalized the role of the "manager." Only one current manager has won the Premier League before, and it's the guy who did it only a couple of months ago: Arsenal's Mikel Arteta. The role, increasingly demoted to "head coach," doesn't have the same influence it once did.
A shift isn't only happening on the sideline. One is also happening on the field. The defining player of the league's past decade, Liverpool star Mohamed Salah, has moved to Trabzonspor in Türkiye. He won the PFA Player of the Year award three times over the past 10 seasons -- the same number of POTY trophies that the pool of active Premier League players can claim.
One of those went to Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk, who turned 35 over the summer. Another went to Phil Foden, who hasn't been able to hold down a starting spot in Manchester City's lineup over the past two seasons. The third, of course, went to this summer's World Cup star, Erling Haaland of Man City.
But beyond Haaland, who are the defining players in the world's richest and most competitive league? At the end of the month, Manchester United midfielder Bruno Fernandes is likely to win the POTY award for last season, but he turns 32 in September. And the league's best team, Arsenal, were so nonreliant on any one player that we spent most of the season screaming about their set pieces.
Ahead of what seems likely to be a question-answering and uncertainty-settling 2026-27 season, let's take stock of the player pool. ESPN's Premier League Top 50 is back for another year.
How the rankings work
We've been doing the Premier League Top 50 for the past two seasons, and we're changing this one up.
Rather than a straight 50-to-1 ranking, this top 50 will be divided up into seven tiers. In a sport in which it's so hard to define what "best" actually means beyond "guy who scores and assists the most goals," the tiers better align with how soccer actually works and how we might think of player value.