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Who is the best young player in the Premier League? Our weekly countdown works it out...
Curating The Wonderkid Power Rankings – our weekly attempt at ranking the best young players in the Premier League today – hasn’t been easy of late. The players at the top haven’t been at their best, but every time some young gun looks like doing enough to earn a sky-high ranking, they promptly fall away or miss a few matches.
As a result, Lewis Hall ended up clinging onto top spot last week despite putting in perhaps his worst performance of the season against Crystal Palace. Something, we felt, had to give, and that something may be on its way, with a string of big-name youngsters making their way back from injury issues to shake things up.
Kobbie Mainoo and Leny Yoro are on the field. Yankuba Minteh is fit again. Carlos Baleba is back from suspension and in the goals, one of several youngsters to score this week. Only one of those mentioned above make this week’s top ten, but it feels like change is coming, and the Halls of the world need to sort their form out to hold on – and indeed, we’ve got some changes in our top three this very week.
We do lose three players from the Top 10 this time out. Conor Bradley is, sadly, injured and has to make way alongside Levi Colwill, who had only scraped back into the rankings before he was culpable for Dominic Solanke’s opener against Tottenham Hotspur, and Mateus Fernandes, who has been on good form but had a pretty rough ride this past week, especially in missing two golden chances against Chelsea. Anyway, admin out of the way, on with our new Power Rankings…
10. Yasin Ayari – Brighton & Hove Albion (⬇️2)
The stylish young Sweden midfielder only featured in one of Brighton’s two games this past week as Fabian Hürzeler shuffled the pack a little, and while he moved the ball nicely enough against Leicester City, we did notice a little bit of that fragility in one-on-one situations creeping back in, and he struggled to make an impact out of possession. Not a bad week, perhaps, but a less imposing one. His ability to handle more rambunctious midfield situations is the worry with Ayari, and this weekend felt like evidence for the prosecution.
9. Kobbie Mainoo – Manchester United (re-entry)
It’s good to have Mainoo back after what proved to be a far longer absence than most of us originally expected – and two months on from his last outing, he still looked sharp. We didn’t see much of the buccaneering forward runs which are an important part of his game, granted, but his passing was rock steady, his positioning solid and he put his usual hard yards in at the heart of Ruben Amorim’s midfield. It felt like he hadn’t been away, and we felt like that meant he should slot right back in to a Top 10 he rarely leaves when he’s healthy.
8. Savinho – Manchester City (⬇️2)
Manchester City’s summer signing seems to be sliding in the wrong direction at the moment. Rested for the 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest, he wasn’t at his best against Crystal Palace, found it tougher to get involved in the build-up than he normally does, and missed a thoroughly presentable chance wide left. As with Ayari, it didn’t feel like a bad enough performance for us to push him out of the rankings entirely, but dropping two spots feels like a fair punishment.
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7. Rasmus Højlund – Manchester United (RE)
Mainoo isn’t the only Manchester United youngster forcing his way back into the Top 10. Højlund hasn’t been the most consistent player at Old Trafford since Amorim took over but he is starting to do what a number nine is meant to do and scoring goals – three in four now, after bagging one in the 3-2 defeat to Forest. In an ideal world, he’d find ways to contribute to the broader play and create more chances for himself, but at least he’s got his shooting boots back on.
6. Facundo Buonanotte – Leicester City (⬇️1)
Ranking the on-loan Argentina international has been a bit of a headache lately. He’s mostly played very well but has also missed a lot of games – as he was forced to when Leicester faced his parent club, Brighton – and tends to be quite bad when below par, as he was in the win over West Ham United, when he not only struggled to make a dent in the opposing defence but also lost the ball repeatedly in midfield. He slides back into the bottom half, which we feel is probably a fair rough approximation of where he sits after recent weeks.
5. Malo Gusto – Chelsea (new entry)
Amazingly, the French wing-back, who was a staple of last season’s Top 10, hasn’t featured in a single edition thanks to a slow start to the season and a broader struggle to find consistency – and we’re perhaps being overly generous in firing him all the way up into the top five, even though he was absolutely superb against Southampton during midweek.
But Gusto was so utterly dominant down the right against the Saints that we’ve combined that with his improving form and historical class to insert him into a prominent spot anyway. He created one of Chelsea’s five goals along with several other decent chances, and performed brilliantly coming back the other way, making seven tackles and winning every single one-on-one battle he was thrown in to. A rock solid second-half appearances against Spurs on the weekend didn’t harm his cause, either. A very good player who, on average, has probably been considerably better than some of the hot-and-cold players who have had spells in our rankings already this season.
4. Jhon Durán – Aston Villa (⬆️5)
He’s back! After a dry spell that was starting to look terminal for his chances of staying in the Top 10, the young Colombian striker finally hit paydirt once more after getting a rare start against Southampton on Saturday, scoring the winning goal by using his strength and speed to create space inside the centre-back before coolly slotting home past the onrushing Joe Lumley.
He also looked much livelier in his more usual substitute role against Brentford, and while it would be fair to criticise his failure to score from a couple of presentable (if hardly gilt-edged) chances, it was encouraging to see him finding ways to get involved in the play and make space for himself that he hadn’t been managing over the past few weeks. Much better.
3. Rico Lewis – Manchester City (⬇️1)
What a weird week it was for Lewis. One of the most consistent players in the entire Premier League, putting in pretty much the exact same performance for weeks on end, it all suddenly went a bit haywire for the Manchester City man, who both scored and got sent off and even misplaced a few passes along the way, which was probably an almost entirely new experience for him.
You’ve got to give Lewis props for getting over what had looked like a pathological fear of finishing and slotting City’s equaliser in really quite coolly, but not so much for his really silly second yellow or for an atypically flimsy display in midfield – he won just one of his eight ground duels.
2. Lewis Hall – Newcastle United (⬇️1)
Hall’s hold on top spot finally breaks after five consecutive weeks on top during which he had been increasingly consistent and growing into his role as a regular starter both as a defender and as a key part of Newcastle United’s attack – but he’s been a little flakier than usual of late, and that’s cost him his crown.
His only completed one of his ten attempted crosses over the course of the games against Liverpool and Brentford, for instance, and let three dribblers get past him. Not that he played poorly or that any of those little statistical nuggets are especially disastrous, but they do just highlight that Hall has been a little below his best over the past fortnight or so.
1. Milos Kerkez – Bournemouth (⬆️2)
All of which means that we have a brand new number one – for the first time, Bournemouth full-back Milos Kerkez sits atop our throne after the best run of form that he’s put together in his young career to date.
He was brilliant at the back against Tottenham in particular and played a significant role in that 1-0 win with five tackles and interceptions, but his passing was superb, too, with several really dangerous balls down the line as his ability to link up dangerously with his team-mates develops at speed. All of this comes off the back of a quite brilliant goal against Wolves the week before and, not so long ago, an absolutely imperious showing in a 2-1 win over Manchester City. Over the past month or so, Kerkez has simply shone, and richly deserve his spot at the very top of our table.
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