The Most Interesting Player at Every Premier League Club 🤔

There’s a tendency to see the first international break of the season as something of an intrusion. The transfer window has just closed. The club season is just gaining momentum. Players and fans and managers have all shaken off the ring-rust of summer and the year to come is just starting to take shape. And then, for reasons best known to FIFA, everything stops and England has to play Andorra. 

This is, obviously, pure Anglocentrism; its spread is evidence of just how much the Premier League dominates everyone’s thinking. This international break has been full of stories. They’re not all happy, as anyone involved with the USMNT would tell you, but they are fascinating.

Italy somehow remains in contention to qualify for the World Cup. Germany is in the midst of an identity crisis. Spain is not. Nigeria and Senegal, two of Africa’s powerhouses, may miss out. South Africa might return for the first time in 16 years; DR Congo has not made the finals since it was known as Zaire, but is in touching distance now.

We’ll return to some, or all, of those in due course – we have two more international breaks this year! – but in the meantime, I have a promise to keep.

Longer-term readers may remember that one of their number, Dan Everett, wanted to know each Premier League team’s equivalent to Jack Grealish: a maverick talent, a compelling character, someone who provides a particular reason to watch. And this is, first and foremost, a public service newsletter. So, with the caveat that this is my list so I can make up the rules as I go along, see all 20 below.

Arsenal Kai Havertz 🔴

Like his mentor, Pep Guardiola, Mikel Arteta does not have much truck with soloists. The system comes first; the process must be trusted. Havertz fits the bill not so much because of his style of play but because of his personal journey. Havertz has been in England for five years. He has scored a winning goal in a Champions League final. And yet it feels as though he is still discovering what sort of player he is, and – more intriguingly – nobody has yet decided exactly how good we think he is. 

Aston Villa Harvey Elliott 🦁

Lazier newsletter-writers than me would give this to Emiliano Martínez, but there is something a little obvious, even slightly wearying, about his larger-than-life character. It feels knowing, wholly deliberate: the cubicle worker wearing the zany tie. Elliott is much more intriguing: a true No. 10 in an era that seemed to have disposed of them; a fringe player itching for a chance to become the central character.

Bournemouth Justin Kluivert 🍒

There are almost too many players in Andoni Iraola’s squad to choose from – Alex Scott, David Brooks, Evanilson and Amine Adli all fit the bill, too – but there has always been a lost boy quality to Kluivert. The fame of his surname seemed to weigh heavy on him for a while, but when he found himself on the south coast last season; he seemed to have finally discovered a place where he could flourish. With any luck, that will continue once he is restored to fitness.

Brentford Aaron Hickey 🐝

Brentford have the opposite problem: a shortage of obvious mavericks. Mikkel Damsgaard used to be one; Kevin Schade might become one. But for now, we’ll go with Aaron Hickey, a wonderfully gifted Scottish full-back who has lost a considerable proportion of his young career to injury but deserves huge credit for the risks he has already taken. He made his name at Bologna, in Italy, where his success helped to lay the trail that plenty of other Scottish players have gone on to follow. His renaissance, this season, would be particularly uplifting.

Brighton Ferdi Kadioglu 🪽

For a long time, the trait prized above all others in a full-back was steadiness. They were careful, cautious, reliable. They were Gary Neville. Nobody, famously, grew up dreaming of being a full-back. The change in perception of the position and its occupants might be among the more remarkable developments in modern football. Kadioglu is a prime example: not Brighton’s best player, and often not first choice, but without question one of its most fun.

Burnley Marcus Edwards 🐤

The 26-year-old might actually be even closer to the Platonic ideal of the maverick than Grealish. As a youngster at Tottenham, Edwards was regarded with something approaching wonder; his close control and his dribbling ability drew the sorts of comparisons that were not always helpful. He could not quite fulfill that rich potential here, and so moved to Portugal, and Sporting CP, to rebuild his career. This is his shot at proving he can cut it in the Premier League. 

Chelsea Cole Palmer 🔵

Yes, I know: obviously. Chelsea does possess a couple of other players who fit the bill – Alejandro Garnacho, another freewheeling talent, and Robert Sánchez, a goalkeeper with an interesting interpretation of his job description – but it has to be Palmer, a Grealish for the Labubu generation, the all-knowing, unknowable Zen playmaker.

Crystal Palace Jean-Philippe Mateta 🦅

It is entirely possible that in six months or so this post will be filled by Yeremy Pino, the lavishly-gifted, jet-heeled Spanish forward brought in to replace Eberechi Eze, but it is hard to think of a more fascinating player in the Premier League than Mateta: a late bloomer, something of a throwback, and basically indomitable when at his best. It’s his job, now, to carry the memory of what Palace became last year.

Everton Jack Grealish 💙

The inspiration behind Dan’s question, and the standard-bearer for a very particular English tradition, as detailed in the very first edition of The Correspondent. Quite how quickly Grealish has emerged as Everton’s standard-bearer has been genuinely staggering; he looks every inch a player reborn under David Moyes. Less of a surprise is the speed at which Evertonians have fallen, head over heels, for him.

Fulham Emile Smith-Rowe 🖤

This was a difficult selection. The best story at Fulham, by some distance, is Raúl Jiménez’s sparkling second life. Marco Silva’s squad has a whole array of talented but erratic playmakers: Harry Wilson, Tom Cairney, Alex Iwobi. This summer, the club signed a Brazilian called Kevin. There is still no definitive answer to the issue of whether Adama Traoré is any good at football. But trying to work out what Smith-Rowe’s career is going to look like is an absorbing subplot to this season.

Leeds United Dominic Calvert-Lewin 🤍

My hometown team has no shortage of store-brand Grealishes: Jack Harrison, Wilfried Gnonto and even Brenden Aaronson all share traits with the Everton playmaker. But while Calvert-Lewin has absolutely nothing in common with him in terms of playing style, he is – I think – the most interesting player in the Premier League, full stop. He has spoken admirably about mental health and about modern masculinity; he has struggled to become the player he might have hoped. His revival would be the league’s ultimate feel-good story.

Liverpool Ryan Gravenberch ❤️

The sheer amount of money Liverpool committed to sign Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak, as well as the innate magnetism of Mohamed Salah, means they will command much of the attention this season, but Gravenberch might be the champions’ most intriguing player (although Dominik Szoboszlai runs him close). Gravenberch is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a brave, adventurous playmaker tasked with acting as a defensive lynchpin. He is not Rodri, obviously. But in a way that makes him more fascinating. 

Manchester City Rayan Cherki 🩵

Strangely for a Pep Guardiola team, this iteration of Manchester City – what are we on, now? Version four, maybe? – has a particularly high quota of renegades. This is especially odd because Guardiola decided, very clearly, that he no longer wanted Grealish to be among them. Two of the new breed are called Rayan: Ait-Nouri, a left-back who thinks he is an attacking midfielder, and Cherki, a being of raw talent who Guardiola has challenged himself to tame. 

Manchester United Noussair Mazraoui ♥️

This is not me being willfully obtuse, I promise. Yes, obviously, Matheus Cunha is the closest analog to Grealish, in that he is a No. 10 brimming with imagination and daring. But Mazrouai is almost more difficult to classify. Is he a left-back? Is he a right-back? Should he actually play in midfield? Is putting a player with his eye for a pass and his sense of adventure in a specific position really a dreadful waste? 

Newcastle United Joelinton 🐦‍⬛

Not a maverick in any traditional sense – Joelinton’s remarkable transformation under Eddie Howe basically makes him the ultimate system player, a striker repurposed as a buffalo deployed in midfield – but the Brazilian stands out because he is so different to anyone else. It is hard to think of someone who plays quite like him, and that is both an increasing rarity and a considerable compliment.

Nottingham Forest Evangelos Marinakis 🌳

Say what you like about the man who has literally just replaced Nuno Espirito Santo – arguably the league’s most unapologetically defensive coach – with Ange Postecoglou, but Marinakis cannot be accused of following conventional wisdom. Whether Forest build on their incredible success of last season or not is entirely unclear, but whatever happens, it will definitely be because of Marinakis.

Sunderland Enzo Le Fée 🐈‍⬛

Aside from Cherki – and above even Grealish – the 25-year-old might well be the purest No. 10 in English football. For a time, it threatened to limit Le Fée’s ambitions: he shone at Lorient and won only a move to Rennes; when one of Europe’s more traditional giants came calling, it was a Roma team that had no idea what to do with him. He has been given time and space to be himself at Sunderland, and he has blossomed. 

Tottenham Hotspur Djed Spence ⚪️

Both historically and currently, Spurs are the natural home of English football’s free spirits. Whatever the club’s stadium is called, it is the perfect stage for artists: high profile enough to attract attention, not sufficiently successful enough that they are sacrificed in the pursuit of victory. James Maddison, Xavi Simons, Dejan Kulusevski and Cristian Romero all fit the bill, but Spence – a full-back who appeared destined to drift into obscurity but who is, in fact, amazing – stands out.

West Ham Lucas Paquetá ⚒️

If anything, quite how easy it was to choose Paquetá is the most damning indictment imaginable of West Ham. Graham Potter has some other good players, of course – Max Kilman, Jarrod Bowen, Aaron Wan-Bissaka – but only the Brazilian has a little dusting of magic about him. For a team that will not challenge for trophies and should not (but might) get relegated, that is dangerous. What reason is there, at this point, to watch West Ham?

Wolves Jhon Arias 🐺

Anyone without a tribal affiliation to Wolves may not have noticed, but there cannot be many clubs in the Premier League who scout quite such deep cuts. Arias was, by those standards, pretty obvious: he was the standout player from the South American contingent in the Club World Cup that apparently happened this summer. He is much older than most players who make the leap across the Atlantic, something that can largely be attributed to his esoteric style of play. At the same time, that should make him a firm favorite: if anything, what joins all the entrants in this list is that they are the sort of players we want to watch. That is something that should be prized.

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We had two really thoughtful questions about Liverpool and this summer’s transfer spending in the mailbox – please keep them coming by emailing us here – that require, I think, much more detailed exploration than this section allows; Phillip Purcell and Mike Simmons, I’ll return to that subject at a later date.

Another Mike – this time Fernandez – had a much brisker enquiry. “Who are the best players data has a hard time rating? The Non-Data Darlings?” Specific names might be tricky, Mike, but traditionally it has always been much harder to gauge defenders than attackers, on the relatively simple grounds that a defender’s quality is often defined by the things they prevent happening.

That is changing, as far as I know, but measuring absence, rather than presence, is tough. The real holy grail, as friend of the podcast Ian Graham once explained to me, is finding an accurate way to assess the impact of a manager: most of the work they do, he said, can be bracketed as second-order effects. Ian is working on it; he generally comes up with an answer soon enough.

And Michael Bouton (not a Mike, it would seem) is going through a post-transfer window existential crisis. “What utility do the billions of currency spent in the transfer market serve?” he asked. “Transfers feel like an artificial circular economy where fees paid to each club are earmarked for future transfer purchases, where the money continues to be spent on future transfers ad infinitum. Does this economy serve any actual value? Are there any uplifting stories of clubs that have reinvested transfer sales profits back into the club in positive ways that benefited more than just the roster?”

Those sorts of stories are, as you may well have guessed, rare, but they do happen: the Italian team Atalanta has used at least part of its trading profits in the last few years to alter the club’s real estate pretty radically.

Much more common, though, are smaller teams using the windfalls they get from sell-on clauses and “training compensation” – the portion of a fee that is redirected to the clubs where a player developed – in order to secure their futures. I shall check this out and report back, but my instinct would be that AIK, where Isak started his career, will have a decent-sized check coming their way some time soon. It will, I’m pretty sure, be put to lasting use.

That’s all for this week. Thanks, as ever, for reading, and please do keep your questions and comments and thoughts and ideas flowing by emailing us here. We really appreciate them. And enjoy the weekend, whether your eyes are on Ange Postecoglou’s rebirth or on Newcastle’s start to life in the Nick Woltemade era. 

Take care,
Rory

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