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The Premier League Team of the Decade
Duncan Alexander |

December 24, 2019

So that was the 2010s. Manchester United stopped being very good, Liverpool went on the reverse journey and three teams in blue, Chelsea, Manchester City and Leicester, swept into the heritage vacuum and won eight of the 10 titles available. Picking eleven players from the 1,959 that appeared between January 2010 and December 2019 is an inexact task but here we go.

David De Gea

The problem with actual decades is that very few players, goalkeepers especially, are good enough to maintain standards for 10 whole years. David de Gea in late 2019 is a calamity magnet, getting outmuscled by Everton players and dropping balls into his own net at Watford. On the flip side, De Gea’s 2017-18 remains the all-time great single goalkeeping season in the Premier League era, preventing around 14 additional goals, based on Expected Goals. Brazilian glamour keepers Ederson and Alisson have since swanned in and changed everything we thought we knew, but for good old fashioned glovesmanship, De Gea gets the nod. 

Trent Alexander-Arnold

Can a man who made his Premier League debut as late as December 2016 be eligible for a team of the decade? Yes, because in 2018-19 Alexander-Arnold set a new record for assists by a defender in a Premier League campaign. His total of 12 is, by way of comparison, five more than (Paul) Scholes of Manchester ever supplied in a single season, and with six already in 2019-20 it feels like the Liverpool right-back is set to utterly dominate the 2020s. 

Virgil van Dijk

Another player who only featured in the second half of the 2010s but hey, it’s Virgil van Dijk. Football managers are always talking about the missing piece of the puzzle but the Dutchman is like 400 pieces of a 500 piece jigsaw of the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Kerk in Breda. Put simply: Liverpool conceded 1.2 goals per game in the 89 Premier League games under Jurgen Klopp before van Dijk joined and 0.7 in the 69 games after he arrived. Non-captain, leader, legend. 

Vincent Kompany

Four Premier League titles, two FA Cups and four League Cups is quite the haul but it’s the footnote called ‘BBC Goal of the Season 2018-19’ that really stands out. Kompany had spent a decade and 36 attempts trying to score from long range and never managed it. Now, playing a for a Pep Guardiola team drilled to smuggle the ball into the six yard box yet struggling to break down a Leicester team, Kompany came up with the second most important goal at that end of the Etihad Stadium in the 2010s (and let’s face it, ever).

 

Leighton Baines

Ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Baines was the only member of England’s squad to recognise Morrissey in a Miami hotel. Only one of those men produced their best work in the 2010s, though, and that was Morr… no, it was definitely Baines, who, in the early part of the decade, was almost as effective as Trent Alexander-Arnold is now, racking up 19 assists between 2009-10 and 2010-11, along with another nine in 2014-15. Still the only defender in Premier League to assist more than 50 goals, the only thing Baines has left to do is create a set of mixtapes that rival Mehmet Scholl’s. 

David Silva

Truly the ultimate 2010s man, Silva made his Manchester City debut in August 2010 and will finish in May 2020. A personal best 15 assists as City won their first Premier League in 2011-12, plus 11 in both 2015-16 and 2017-18, Silva has created 89 goals since he moved to England, 27 more than any other player, and both Steven Gerrard (92) and Dennis Bergkamp (94) are within striking distance before he departs City as arguably their greatest ever player.

  

Jordan Henderson

Alex Ferguson didn’t like his gait but it’s fair to say that Jordan Henderson has outpaced fellow summer 2011 signings Charlie Adam, Stewart Downing and Alexander Doni at Liverpool. Longevity is one thing, and no player has played more Premier League games in the 2010s than Henderson, but 2019 feels like the year that the general public have finally realised the Liverpool captain is actually… good. The first English player to lift the European Cup, the European Super Cup and the World Club Cup in the same year, the only thing Henderson’s gait/gate leads to is a well-stocked trophy cabinet.

Kevin De Bruyne

The 2010s have been fertile times for the mercurial creator and at one point it seemed that Mesut Ozil had this slot tied up, but the Arsenal man has drifted out of position just as Kevin De Bruyne has cut inside and put everyone on toast. The Belgian is the fastest player to 50 Premier League assists (beating… yes, Ozil’s record) and is the only regular player in the competition’s history to have a minutes-per-assist rate of under 200 minutes. On his day he is genuinely unplayable and that’s as good as it gets really.

 

Sergio Aguero

Since 2007-08, Sergio Aguero’s seasonal goals return in league games for Atletico Madrid and Manchester City has been 19, 17, 12, 20, 23, 12, 17, 26, 24, 20, 21, 21 and nine so far this season. He doesn’t even seem like a player who particularly avoids injury yet the relentless output never dims. He has 39 more goals than any other player in the 2010s and two more than Burnley. He finished that chance against QPR, has a joint-high 11 Premier League hat-tricks, he reached 150 goals in only 217 Premier League games, he is three goals away from overtaking Thierry Henry as the top-scoring overseas player in the Premier League history, he is the first player in Manchester City’s history to score more than 200 goals for the club. He is Sergio Aguero.

Dimitri Payet

It should probably be Harry Kane or Raheem Sterling in this spot. England’s two most talented forwards of the decade, they’ve reversed roles in the past couple of seasons, Kane is often now the probing creator and Sterling the clinical penalty box assassin. It’s literally impossible to separate them so let’s pick someone who only featured in 14% of West Ham’s Premier League games in the 2010s but is still, somehow, their second most creative player. Dimitri Payet was too good. Too good for West Ham, too good for the Premier League, too good for any of us. 

Jamie Vardy

It’s Christmas, so at some point your uncle will bemoan modern football and wonder why it’s not the same as it was in the 1970s. True, modern footballers can, infuriatingly, both run fast and be skilful, but Jamie Vardy is a timely reminder that non-league players can still come into the professional game late on and make a gigantic impact. Only 28 players have ever reached three figures for goals in the Premier League and in the next few weeks Vardy will become the 29th, having only made his debut in August 2014. Only Ian Wright will have started scoring Premier League goals at an older age than Vardy and reached 100. Vardy also has the record of scoring in 11 games in a row. Andrei Shevchenko only ever scored nine Premier League goals in total; sometimes it’s better to do your shopping in Fleetwood than it is Milan.

 

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