The Wonderkid Power Rankings: Man City, Spurs, Newcastle & Aston Villa starlets in battle for top spot
The Wonderkid Power Rankings: Man City, Spurs, Newcastle & Aston Villa starlets in battle for top spot
Who is the best young player in the Premier League? Manchester City, Newcastle and Liverpool youngsters are among those in our Top 10.
Welcome back to 3 Added Minutes’ weekly Wonderkid Power Rankings, our loosely scientific attempt to answer the question of who the best young player in the Premier League is through the medium of a weekly countdown.
Since the international break, the hot young things of the top flight have decided to make things rather tricky for us. On the one hand, several youngsters scored this past weekend – on the other, all of them were players who were some way outside of Top 10 consideration, while pretty much everyone who made last week’s rankings struggled, or at least failed to shine in the way that they’re more than capable of.
As these rankings are designed to reflect recent form at the top level, one good game or a solitary goal won’t cut it – it generally needs to be backed up over at least a few weeks. That’s why the likes of Omari Hutchinson, Ethan Nwaneri and Justin Devenny don’t make it this time, in case you’re wondering. Either they haven’t played enough, or their recent performances haven’t been consistently impressive, but they’re all very much on our watchlist going forward. They just need a bigger body of work to make it in.
One of this week’s goalscorers does make it, however, and makes his debut in the top ten, while we say farewell to two players for now – Alejandro Garnacho, whose inconsistent form means he had been hanging on by his fingertips anyway, and Facundo Buonanotte, who was suspended and hasn’t now played for a couple of weeks. They’ll be back, we’re sure.
10. Mateus Fernandes – Southampton (new entry)
The Portugal Under-21 international signed for the Saints for £15m in the summer and while he hasn’t made too many headlines, he’s been quietly growing in stature over the past couple of months and finally announced himself properly with a goal against Liverpool, finding a huge tranche of space and keeping his head well to slot Adam Armstrong’s imprecise pass into the back of the net. A dynamic and hard-working young player who’s starting to look comfortable at Premier League level and having an increasing impact at both ends of the pitch.
9. Liam Delap – Ipswich Town (⬇️1)
On the one hand, you have to praise Delap’s movement off the ball, which twice allowed him to get away from Manchester United’s defenders and put him into superb scoring positions. On the other, the finishing once in said positions was poor. A generous judge might say that André Onana made a couple of superb saves, but Delap absolutely should have scored and earned Ipswich a famous victory in Rúben Amorim’s first game in charge of the visitors. Unfortunately for Ed Sheeran and Delap’s ranking, he did not.
8. Yasin Ayari – Brighton & Hove Albion (⬆️1)
The young Swedish midfielder was already building a reputation as a fine technician with an impressive and incisive passing range, but he’s now starting to grow into the more physical aspects of the game as well, and while he’ll never exactly cut an imposing figure at 5’7”, he’s holding his own in one-on-one situations and put in another very solid and surprisingly robust all-round shift against Bournemouth this weekend. Not a standout performance, but one which suggests that his apparent weaknesses won’t define him as a footballer.
7. Conor Bradley – Liverpool (⬇️2)
We didn’t expect Bradley to last long in our top ten seeing as he’s usually a bench-rider at club level, but he did get another chance to stake a claim for a long-term spot due to an injury to Trent Alexander-Arnold – a chance he didn’t really take. Bradley was lively and involved in the final third against Southampton without generating any clear-cut chances or scoring from his three shots, and was beaten on the run in dangerous areas a couple of times in defence. Not the Northern Irishman at his best, sadly.
6. Milos Kerkez – Bournemouth (re-entry)
The Hungarian left-back only dropped out of our Top 10 because he missed out on game time during the international break with an injury and he blasts his way back into the rankings with an impressive outing against Brighton. He may have ended up on the losing side, but he made every single tackle he went for, offered plenty of width down the flank, drew a couple of fouls, won every one-on-one situation he found himself in and put up a 94% pass completion rate. Which is a very stats-heavy way of saying that he was really good.
5. Jhon Durán – Aston Villa (⬇️1)
It wasn’t really that long ago that Durán seemed to have a real stranglehold on top spot in our weekly rankings as he scored goal after goal, breaking records for scoring from the bench and hitting the net more times per game than Erling Haaland – but it’s starting to feel like a long time ago.
Between matches for Aston Villa and the Colombian national team, Durán has now failed to register in six consecutive matches, and in 20-odd minutes on the field this weekend he only touched the ball seven times. His form has definitely taken a downturn.
4. Destiny Udogie – Tottenham Hotspur (⬆️3)
The Italian left-back was by no means one of the most influential figures on the pitch over the course of Tottenham’s quite staggering 4-0 win over Manchester City, but he was more than solid enough to earn a spot in our top five – every key tackles was made, every important pass found its mark, and the opposition never found free and easy space down Udogie’s flank.
If a promotion all the way up to fourth makes it feel like we’re in a rather generous mood, it’s partly because this is also the last time we’ll be writing about Udogie in these columns – he turns 22 this week, officially ageing out of Wonderkid Power Rankings contention having been a pretty regular feature of these lists ever since we started doing them. Happy birthday, Destiny.
3. Savinho – Manchester City (-)
We’re going to introduce our next couple of entries with a caveat – they hold their lofty positions largely because nobody below them in the rankings did enough to earn a higher spot. This was not the best week for the more established young players of the Premier League.
Most weeks would have seen us demote Savinho a little way, because while he was typically lively early in the piece he also faded as the goals continued to go in and went from being of Manchester City’s brighter sparks to fizzling out entirely as Spurs took a strangehold on the game. We saw a few flashes of his excellence, at least.
2. Rico Lewis – Manchester City (-)
From a strictly statistical perspective, Lewis was pretty much faultless, yet again. He so rarely loses possession or misplaces a pass that it becomes a noteworthy aberration every time he makes a mistake of any kind. But what he didn’t do on Saturday evening was impose himself in any way.
He didn’t miss any noteworthy tackles or make any dreadful ricks but neither was he able to get a handle on Spurs’ marauding midfielders and in transition he was often isolated and struggling to make a meaningful impact. Again, on another week, he would have lost some places, but his exceptional consistency despite City’s awful recent run means that he stays well up the ladder.
1. Lewis Hall – Newcastle United (-)
All of which means that Newcastle’s Hall makes it four consecutive weeks on top spot, thanks not only the complete absence of impressive performances from those behind him in the table but also to another largely solid outing in a losing cause on Monday evening.
Hall did, it must be said, make some mistakes. Jarrod Bowen got the better of him on a couple of occasions, and his final ball wasn’t as precise as it so often can be – but by and large he did a solid job, making tackle, dealing with direct balls over the top and offering an option going forward. Was it the performance of the best young player in the Premier League? No, probably not, but seeing as nobody else laid claim, he gets another week in the limelight.
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