Graeme Souness, in the capacity of a player, manager and now a pundit, has been in and around the beautiful game since the late 1960s – and it’s, therefore, safe to say that he is well-versed. And he once named someone who, in his eyes, is England's best player that has ever graced the sport we love and call football.
In his pomp, the Liverpool icon could be found darting around the engine room, flying into challenges and making an afternoon’s work of disrupting the opponents’ passages of play. Nowadays, fans are used to seeing him with a microphone in hand.
Souness played a key part in Liverpool’s success in the late 1970s and the early 80s, helping them to five First Division titles in six seasons, while he was also a vital cog for the Tartan Army, having accrued 59 international caps between 1974 and 1986.
Despite being native to Scotland, Souness – who was born and raised in his homeland’s capital, Edinburgh – had admiration for one Englishman in particular. And, writing in his column for the Daily Mail in 2023, he revealed which player that was.
Harry Kane, Sir Bobby Moore and Wayne Rooney snubbed
England, who won their first (and only, at the time of writing) World Cup in 1966, have boasted all manner of talent over the years: from the unforgettable Sir Bobby Moore to the bulldozing presence of Wayne Rooney to the sharpshooting Harry Kane.
But none of the aforementioned trio, no matter how gifted they were in their own right, even came close to who Souness believes is the greatest Englishman in football history. That crown is taken by Sir Bobby Charlton, whose influence transcends generations. In his column, the midfielder-turned-pundit wrote:
"It’s not an assertion I would make about any other player, but I can say with some conviction that if I had ever come up against Bobby Charlton on a football field, I would not have wanted to tackle him for fearing of injuring him."
“That’s the stature and the golden aura that Sir Bobby carried,” Souness wrote. “Our careers never crossed, but I am of a generation who witnessed, first-hand, the part he played in helping Manchester United come back from the Munich Disaster – which robbed the club of the most wonderfully talented young players – to win the European Cup in 1968.”
Souness went one step further to honour the footballing career of Charlton, whose 746 appearances for Manchester United is only eclipsed by Ryan Giggs (746), by stating that the Ashington-born talisman is England’s greatest footballer of all time.
“For me, he became the greatest ever English player in the process.”
A bonafide legend among Old Trafford circles, Charlton is also recognised as one of the best footballers of all time by Eric Cantona, a real testament to how his talent is perceived by those who have followed – or, at least, tried to – in his footsteps.
1966 was the crowning year of such a respectable career for club and country – Charlton finished above the likes of Eusebio and Franz Beckenbauer as he picked up the prestigious prize that is the Ballon d’Or, largely thanks to his performances at the World Cup under Sir Alf Ramsay.
He made things tick for his club and country when things weren’t going as swimmingly. That’s what made Charlton so brilliantly endearing as, as mentioned by Souness, he was vital in the Red Devils’ European Cup triumph in 1968, a decade on from when he was one of the 21 survivors of the Munich Air Disaster.