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Manchester United, Manchester City and Spurs starlets are among the climbers as we rank the best young players in the Premier League.
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Over the past few weeks, the Wonderkid Power Rankings – 3 Added Minutes’ weekly attempt to rank the ten best young players in the Premier League on recent form – has found itself split into two.
In the top half of the table, a handful of players who perform consistently well despite their young ages, led last week by reigning number one Myles Lewis-Skelly. In the bottom half, a ceaseless churn as some of the top flight’s most talented Under-21s see their form and opportunities ebb and flow. The pattern continues this week, with a familiar top five and plenty of movement beneath them.
We’ve got no fewer than two brand new entries this week, both players we might have expected to see earlier in the season given the hype they received upon arrival but who are finally proving their worth, while a player who was a staple of the top half of our little table in the first six months of the season makes his way back at long last.
All of which means that three players drop out of last week’s rankings: Yankuba Minteh was largely anonymous against Wolves, while Jack Hinshelwood only got the briefest of late cameos from the bench, which we believe makes this the first Top 10 of the season with no Brighton players in it. They’re joined on the outside by Nico O’Reilly, whose brilliant blast of form has rather worn off. They’ll all be back at some point, we’re sure, even if it’s next season.
The Frenchman arrived with a reputation as one of the brightest talents in the global game, but struggled to make the kind of mark many of us expected – and while two goals and one assist in his last ten matches may not be a startling return on paper, he’s quietly settling in nicely at Spurs and getting more dangerous by the game, especially with the ball at his feet. He also put in a huge and entirely unrewarded shift in the 2-0 defeat to Crystal Palace at the weekend, winning 11 ground duels and forcing five turnovers. It was arguably the best defensive performance in our Top 10 this week. Not his job, perhaps, but worth rewarding after consistent improvements.
Just last week, we were praising the Argentine winger for finding some of his old confidence again – so it tracks that he’d instantly return to more frustrating form, with a tougher week headlined by a fairly glaring miss against Athletic Club, chipping tamely wide when one-on-one with the goalkeeper. A presentable chance from a tight angle went begging after he came on as a sub against West Ham, too. The good last week, the bad this, hopefully no ugly to follow.
Given how much money United spent on the teenage centre-half last summer, they probably expected him to be a more consistently impactful performer this season – but he’s finally starting to get there in earnest, playing well for several games in a row and even picking up an assist in the Europa League, driving into the box before laying the ball off to Mason Mount. There was plenty of rock-solid defending, too, both against Athletic and West Ham, where he barely put a foot wrong in the largely unnoticed way you want from a defender. Promising stuff after a slow start.
Kayode didn’t have an entirely blemish-free game against Ipswich Town and was guilty of being beaten a little too easily on the dribble, but this was still a good all-round game from another recent signing who’s starting to hit his stride in the Premier League. He was at his best going forward, missing a decent chance wide left but creating even better opportunities on a couple of occasions. Dynamic going forward, if he can tighten up one-on-one at the back then Brentford will have one hell of a player on their hands.
For months, Lewis was an absolute staple of our Top 10s and there was an argument that the 20-year-old was one of the most consistent players in the league, of any age. Then he started to slide, got benched more and more, and has only recently begun to force his way back into the starting line-up again. He was doing everything right in the miserable 0-0 draw against Southampton, though, using the ball well, passing and moving intelligently and economically, and letting very little get past him. The result may have been poor, but that was the Lewis we saw for the first four months or so of the season, and have missed since.
It’s a little harsh on Fernandes to dock him a place after another gutsy midfield display in that same 0-0 draw which helped the Saints to avoid being the official worst team in Premier League history – he falls to five less because of his failings and more because others were a little better.
It perhaps says a bit about Southampton’s strikers that his passes were worth more expected goals than his team actually managed in total (in other words, he presented chances which were immediately made harder or simply didn’t result in a shot) – and his one shot was worth 70% of the xG they did create. Stats are strange things, but the long and short of it is that Fernandes represented virtually all of his team’s attacking output while working very hard when off the ball as well.
It was a good week for the Danish left-back, who not only helped his team into a European final but was also one of the few players in a red shirt to emerge with any real credit from the 2-0 defeat to West Ham on Sunday.
He was involved in several dangerous attacks against Athletic Club, playing a key part in the build-up to United’s third goal of the night, and made four tackles in a match in which he was tested very regularly indeed. Coming on as a second-half replacement against the Hammers he wasn’t able to make the same inroads in attack but completed every attempted pass and won every single duel he found himself in. A very good purchase by United, which is a sentence that hasn’t been written many times this season.
In the first leg of Arsenal’s eventual Champions League defeat to Paris Saint-Germain, Lewis-Skelly was arguably the Gunners’ best player. In the second leg, he found the going a little tougher, with the admittedly amazing Désiré Doué giving the England international a pretty hard time.
Lewis-Skelly mostly stood up to it pretty well but he was shakier than usual, less dynamic going forward, and was unfortunate enough to give away a penalty after a rather undeniable handball. He was, at least, rather more solid against Liverpool, dealing with Mohamed Salah without any serious scares even if he wasn’t able to make much of a contribution in the final third.
Lewis-Skelly’s rough evening in France was, we decided, enough to drop him below the reliably impressive Kerkez, who was responsible for a fair amount of Bournemouth’s better attacking moments against Aston Villa even if they ultimately didn’t produce any goals.
He was excellent defensively, too, a real area of improvement this season for the Hungarian, and virtually nothing got past him across the 90 minutes as he produced four turnovers, largely blunting Villa’s threat down their right – the goal may have come from that flank, but Kerkez was both blameless and helpless on that occasion. Kerkez hasn’t been uprooting any trees lately, but he has been pretty much faultless week in, week out.
It says something about the Cherries’ recruitment over the past couple of years that Kerkez can be as consistently good as he has been without even being his team’s most reliable young defender. Spanish international Huijsen was, once again, equal to everything that was thrown at him.
The lanky defender made no fewer than 10 clearances on this occasion, didn’t miss a tackle and his distribution of the ball – uncharacteristically iffy over the past fortnight or so – was much better, with most of his many long passes finding their mark as Huijsen worked to generate counter-attacking opportunities. A magnificent talent who has hardly had a bad game since forcing his way into Andoni Iraola’s first team, and he rightly returns to our top spot once more.