We can’t lie, watching this weekend’s football made us feel a bit queasy. The sight of two players we’re not afraid to admit are among our favourites – Raheem Sterling and Son Heung-min – appearing completely washed has made us feel quite sad and very old. The passing of time really is a massive prick.
There’s a famous Big Ron quote – no, not that one – about a struggling footballer ‘playing from amnesia’. It came to mind watching those two this weekend.
So anyway, we decided to wallow in that misery more fully with those two and eight other players who were good at football and now no longer appear to be good at football. Enjoy. If that’s the right word. Which it isn’t.
All manner of Man United players could be here, with the squad-building and general club strategy that has left Eriksen and Casemiro as two of United’s primary midfield options under a manager who specifically requires energy and agility from his midfielders something that needs to be studied.
The frustrating thing is that Eriksen still has magic in his boots if you can accommodate him in a system that emphasises what he can still do rather than brutally highlights things that were never really his strengths even in his very best days.
We’ve seen as much even this year, when in the chaos of those frantic closing minutes against Southampton he possessed the serenity and still the ability to find that achingly beautiful clipped ball over the defence for Amad Diallo to put United improbably ahead in a game they had appeared certain to lose. It was a fleeting moment where the past and the future seemed to meet in a way so perfect that you thought maybe despite it all United are going to be okay.
Then they immediately lost at home to Brighton.
Mild spoiler: lot of full-backs on this list. Maybe the extreme expectations of both attacking and defensive contribution in an era where wide forwards who cut inside have replaced paint-on-the-boots wingers makes it impossible to maintain deep into your 30s. Maybe full-backs who don’t manage to turn themselves into centre-backs by the time they’re 32 are done for.
Trippier has had a pretty incredible career, really. We’re not sure how many people were looking at him and going “now there’s a man who’ll win La Liga and win 54 England caps while becoming the first Englishman to score in a World Cup semi-final since Gary Lineker” when he was eased out of Man City as a young man.
But a career that has taken in Burnley, Tottenham and Atletico Madrid – and there are far worse career trajectories out there – appears to be winding down with a bit-part role at Newcastle.
Again, worse ways to spend your final days at the top of the game, but ‘final days’ is absolutely where Trippier now finds himself.
There are, ahem, reasons why Paqueta’s head may not have been entirely in the game this season but he’s still been one of this campaign’s most conspicuous disappointments.
Over the course of the last five months, the narrative around Paqueta has shifted from ‘How is he still playing for West Ham?’ to ‘How is he still playing for West Ham?’.
And getting his fifth booking of the season at just the right time to get Christmas off was a bit on the nose as well.
We’re absolutely certain the real Jack Grealish is still in there somewhere. We’re really confident Salford City isn’t actually his level. It would be really, really helpful if he’d scored a Premier League goal since 2023 in order for us to have something to base this on beyond our own pathetic hopes and dreams.
Not as exciting as some others on this list, but most of the others still get to at least play some actual football even if they no longer do so quite as well as they once did. Ben Chilwell has gone from being one of the most reliable left-backs in the Premier League for first Leicester and then Chelsea to not even being worth a starting place in the Carabao. However you frame it, that’s quite the drop-off.
We’re really not quite sure how Chilwell ended up still at Chelsea when the transfer music stopped in the summer. We’re not sure he knows, either, with every other member of the infamous Bomb Squad finding at least a temporary exit route. And now here we are, three weeks into January, and he’s still at Chelsea, still not getting a game and still seemingly no closer to the exit door.
Perhaps the saddest name on this list because he’s still only 27. The flipside of that, of course, is that it means there is still bags of time for a redemption arc and happy ending to this tale.
But he has been struggling for ages, and that happy ending if it does come will almost certainly not be at Manchester United, where he has spent all the good times and bad of his career so far.
There were vaguely ludicrous attempts to smear him as the primary culprit for United’s struggles this season. The conspicuous failure of their season to improve in any real tangible way whatsoever – they have won just two of nine games since his banishment, both requiring absurd late drama – confirms the obvious fact that United’s woes run far deeper than one man. It wasn’t even all Erik Ten Hag’s fault, or all the Glazers’ fault. It was never going to be all Rashford’s fault.
But it has maybe been a little bit his fault. We’ve got everything crossed that whatever happens next works out for him.
There have been few better investments than the £8m Liverpool slung Hull’s way for the Scottish left-back eight years ago. He and Liverpool have won the lot in the years that have followed, with Robertson spending a good chunk of that period holding strong claim to being the best left-back in the world.
Never quite as attention-grabbing as Trent Alexander-Arnold on the opposite flank, Robertson has nevertheless been absolutely key to so much of Liverpool’s success with his ability to cover seemingly limitless ground up and down the left flank providing both defensive security and attacking width.
We cannot ever really remember any doubts or concerns around him ever before, until this season. There is mitigation; missing pre-season under a new manager after so many years of success under the previous one is clearly sub-optimal.
But it doesn’t entirely explain the struggles of a man who has lost that precious ability to be wherever Liverpool have needed him. The odd individual defensive mistake is more easily explained away than the near total disappearance of Robertson as an attacking outlet. A player who has nearly 60 Premier League assists for Liverpool has this season managed not one in a team that is doing really quite well.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Bournemouth, Van Nistelrooy, Moyes, Postecoglou, Liverpool sub
Leave the football before the football leaves you indeed. It’s always unfair when one player becomes the focus of wider problems at a club, but it doesn’t usually happen for no reason. There were multiple reasons for City’s bizarre collapse in form, one from which they are only now tentatively emerging, but there’s no denying that Walker was one of them.
He has, in truth, always been a defender capable of a dozy moment or a lapse in concentration. It’s just that until now he’s always been a defender capable of getting away with it by simply running much faster than anyone else on the pitch. It was a useful gift to possess, and one he exploited fully.
It made him one of the most dynamic defenders around for far, far longer than should have been the case. Like Jamie Vardy, a player whose primary asset was pace seemed unlikely to have this kind of longevity.
But while it has taken far, far longer than anyone could have expected, that pace has now gone. And the lapses have continued. Among many harrowing moments this season, one stands out above the rest: the sight of Walker, in added time of a game City were already losing 3-0 to Spurs, literally daring Timo Werner to run past him and Werner simply… running past him to set up number four.
It was an act of bravado in a game situation against his former club where it really wasn’t called for and revealed so many insecurities. He is on his way out of City now, and while we understand and even admire his sniffiness around heading into Saudi semi-retirement we’re also wondering whether it might be an idea. He’d still be quite quick in that league.
This one hurts us bad. We’ve always had a great deal of fondness for Raheem here at F365, and for a long time there calling out the genuinely insane media BS that swirled around him was close to being the site’s raison d’etre. He never was a FOOTIE IDIOT.
Sterling at his best was a vital cog in Pep Guardiola’s City machine at its purring, well-oiled best. There was an extended period where it really did seem like City could create a Sterling far-post tap-in at will, and chose to only do so once or twice a game to avoid raising suspicion and/or breaking the whole sport entirely. Sterling at his best when City were at their best made creating and scoring goals look absurdly easy.
There were great days with England, too, as well as undeniably trickier, tabloid-enraging ones. He and Harry Kane had one of those intuitive connections rarely seen between players who never played club football together.
Chelsea had always seemed an odd next step for Sterling when the City project moved on without him. He wasn’t bad for them, but it never really felt like the right fit. Arsenal did. We had enormously high hopes for Sterling at Arsenal. It seemed like just the right kind of opportunistic late-window move that could prove to the be the one thing both player and club were missing.
It has not been that. He has been either unused or ineffective and we’re really not sure what happens next.
Maybe we should all have seen the writing on the wall when even Gareth Southgate, loyal to a literal fault, realised it was time for England to move on without Sterling. We just really, really didn’t want to.
Son’s season is mirroring Spurs’ own: appallingly, abysmally miserable yet still putting up some really quite absurd numbers as their world falls apart.
One of our very favourite players to watch over the last decade or so of Barclays is now one of the hardest. It is painful to watch this version of Son, all heavy first touches and ponderous, attack-deadening uncertainty where once there was precision and snap and joy. And above all that some of the most clinical finishing in the division.
If you needed a player to score a one-on-one for your life, Peak Son would absolutely have been in your thoughts, along with “What an absurd premise, how on earth did I find myself in this ludicrous situation?”.
There were a great many astonishing and painful sights for Spurs fans on Sunday afternoon at Goodison Park, none more so than that of Son presented with the sort of run through on goal from which he has scored dozens and dozens of goals in Spurs lilywhite except this time he was so hesitant, so unsure, so bereft of the conviction that once defined him that he didn’t even get a shot away before James Tarkowski was able to reel in a five-yard headstart that should have left him a bystander.
Everton fans didn’t, because there was one time he did a foul several years ago, but most would sympathise with Son’s plight. The man is going to complete a decade at Tottenham this summer, and his release date has been put back a further year by Spurs activating an extension in his contract. There are serious criminals who have served less time.
But Son really does seem to love Spurs, the big dafty. Think about how good he has been and for how long, and then think about how the club he plays for is Spurs. Then think about how many times you’ve seen a serious transfer rumour about him over the last five or six years. Doesn’t make sense, does it?
He’s scored 10+ league goals in each of the last eight seasons and will probably just about scrape his way to nine given that Spurs still insist on scoring a great number of goals even when losing all of the games.
He is, though, a shell of the player he once was at a club collapsing around him.
