
Mohamed Salah leads nominations for PFA Men's Player of the Year award
Earlier this year he was voted footballer of the year by the Football Writers' Association, and will now be favourite to win the vote of his peers.
Mohamed Salah hopes to add another accolade to his FWA Footballer of the Year award (John Walton/PA)
He is joined on the shortlist by team-mate Alexis Mac Allister, Arsenal's Declan Rice, Cole Palmer of Chelsea, Newcastle striker Alexander Isak and Manchester United midfielder Bruno Fernandes.
Mac Allister was a key part of Liverpool's midfield, playing 35 times and contributing five goals and five assists.
Palmer won the PFA Men's Young Player of the Year award for 2023-24 and while he arguably did not hit the same heights for the Blues last season, he still hit 15 goals and helped Chelsea win the Conference League.
Chelsea's Cole Palmer is also on the PFA shortlist (Mike Egerton/PA)
Rice starred in midfield for Arsenal, hitting a career-high nine goals while adding 10 assists in 52 appearances in all competitions.
Isak was a key part of Newcastle's success in qualifying for the Champions League and winning the Carabao Cup, hitting 23 goals for the Magpies.
Fernandes was a shining light in a largely disappointing campaign for Manchester United. He provided eight league goals and 10 assists for the Red Devils.
This year's awards ceremony will be held in Manchester on August 19.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Independent
23 minutes ago
- The Independent
Palace boss makes transfer admission with star midfielder close to departure
Crystal Palace manager Oliver Glasner indicated that Eberechi Eze has likely played his last game for the club. Eze reportedly pulled out of Crystal Palace's Conference League play-off match against Fredrikstad on Thursday morning, citing illness. Arsenal is reportedly close to finalising a £60 million deal for the England international, with confirmation possible this weekend. Glasner expressed frustration over Crystal Palace's lack of transfer activity, stating the club missed the chance to replace Eze early enough. Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish acknowledged Eze's departure, stating the club must move on and find new players.


Scottish Sun
34 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
Hibs 1 Legia Warsaw 2 – Hibees hero Josh Mulligan keeps Conference League dream alive after narrow defeat at Easter Road
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THEIR league phase hopes had looked Pole-axed by Legia VARsaw at Easter Road. But just when Hibs seemed down and out of Europe Josh Mulligan gave them fresh belief. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 6 Legia score from the spot to take the lead Credit: Alamy 6 Pawel Wszolek scores goal no 2 and celebrates Credit: Willie Vass 6 Josh Mulligan wheels away after scoring Credit: Willie Vass This Conference League tie looked over when Edi Iordenescu's side raced into a two-goal half-time lead. David Gray's side fell behind in the 35th minute when ref Mohammad Al-Emara adjudged Rocky Bushiri to have handled after a FIVE MINUTE video check and Jean Pierre Nsame slammed home the spot kick. Pawel Wszolek volleyed home the second in the time added on at the end of the half by the lengthy delay. But with three minutes left Mulligan slammed home to get them back into the tie. And having already won in Belgrade this season Hibs will believe they can do so in Poland, too. Gray made several changes for his side's Premier Sports Cup win at Livingston at the weekend. But he brought his big guns back in here with Rocky Bushiri, Josh Mulligan and Kieron Bowie all starting. And Jordan Smith was also back in goal with Thibault Klidje and Jamie McGrath among the subs. Across the city AC/DC were belting out their greatest hits out at Murrayfield But there was no better - or louder - atmosphere in the Capital than at Easter Road as Hibs looked to Shoot to Thrill. Scenes at Easter Road as Hibs players celebrate with fans after thrilling Partizan win And they passed up a brilliant chance to take the lead after just 52 SECONDS. Kieron Bowie picked out Martin Boyle whose clever flick played Josh Mulligan through on goal. But rather than prod the ball past Kacper Tobiasz he tried to go around him. And a combination of red shirts and the keeper eventually managed to crowd him out. It was a big opportunity and another came straight after as Hibs hustled and harried their opponents. This time Tobiasz could only claw away Josh Campbell's low cross, the ball evading Jordan Obita. Campbell headed wide from Obita's corner in the 6th minute as the fast start continued. And last week's hero Bowie again went for goal from distance but this time blazed high over. Campbell was booked a minute later for a late challenge on Jan Ziolkowski. The Poles threatened with a quick break which saw Warren O'Hora block Jean-Pierre Nsame's shot. But Hibs were on the front foot again soon after, Bowie firing wide from Chris Cadden's cutback. And Bartosz Kapustka was carded for scything down the striker just inside the Legia half. 6 Legia players celebrate victory Credit: Alamy 6 Klidje missed a good chance for the Hibees Credit: PA 6 Rocky Bushiri goes close for Hibs Credit: PA As the half wore on, though, Legia began to see more of the ball in the home half. Warren O'Hora stepped in twice to make timely clearances as they threatened Smith's goal. But on the half hour mark it was the Polish side who took the lead at Easter Road. Augustyniak was given way too much time and space 25 yards out from the Hibs goal. He fired in a shot that Smith could only beat into the path of the oncoming Vahan Bichakhchyan. Bushiri was alive to the danger and threw himself across goal to block his effort. But when play stopped Finnish ref Al-Emara was told by VAR he had possibly used his arm. It took an age before he was called to the screen but having done so the ref pointed to the spot. And this time Augustyniak beat Smith with a high shot to his right to put Legia ahead. It was a hammer blow to Hibs and it rocked Gray's men. After such a positive start they needed to get to half-time and regroup. Instead, in the injury time caused by the VAR check, they fell further behind in the tie. Campbell gifted the Poles possession, in keeping with their ragged play following the penalty. Augustyniak could have gone for goal himself but instead curled the ball to the back post. And Wszolek beat the offside trap to volley home and give his side a commanding cushion. Hibs now needed to just try and keep the tie alive ahead of next week's return in Warsaw. Bushiri headed over from a corner at the start of the second half, another good chance. Gray made changes soon after with Jamie McGrath, Nicky Cadden and Miguel Chiawa on for Campbell Jack Iredale and Dylan Levitt. Boyle was inches away from getting on the end of McGrath's curling cross in the 56th minute. Legia thought they'd scored a third on the hour but Kapustka's effort was ruled offside by VAR. Unmarked Bichakhchyan blazed over at the back post and really should have scored. So should Bushiri, who just failed to get on the end of sub Junior Hoilett's low cross. And sub Klidje headed Cadden's 83rd minute ball wide with no-one near him. But with three minutes left Hoilett got a header on target, with Tobiasz making a good stop. The rebound fell to Mulligan, whose first shot was charged down by a red shirt. But when the ball came back to him he fired home to give Hibs hope this tie isn't over. Keep up to date with ALL the latest news and transfers at the Scottish Sun football page


Times
44 minutes ago
- Times
Why Tomas Soucek is unique player in Premier League
During his first months at West Ham United, after the medical and the signing and the debut had passed in a blur and he was beginning to settle into his new surroundings, Tomas Soucek became aware that he was missing something when his team-mates talked about the club's Rush Green training ground. His English wasn't great at that point, but it didn't have to be to detect the fizz and jest of playful banter. Eventually he got the message: Rush Green was commonly considered, by Premier League standards, pretty basic. When he found out that they were dissing the training ground, Soucek was genuinely and sincerely amazed. It had never occurred to him that it was anything other than top-notch. At his previous club, Slavia Prague, they used one training pitch all year round, and in the winter it was bumpy and hard to pass on. Here, they had five pitches, beautifully mown and perfectly flat, each one a gorgeous, lucent green. He turned up to training each morning and felt like a holidaymaker arriving at a resort with five swimming pools. 'Everyone told me it was basically a second-division training ground,' he told the Czech website iRozhlas, 'and I was like, 'What more could you want?' ' Obviously, this story sums up some of the qualities that have made Soucek, in his 5½ years in England, a cult hero to West Ham fans. His lack of hauteur. His uncomplicated way of going about things. But in hindsight I wonder if it's even more telling than that, if it hints at something essential about Soucek the footballer. To him, you see, the absence of luxurious trappings beside the training space was an irrelevance. To him, the space was the luxury. At the start of his seventh season Soucek is facing one of the lowest moments in his West Ham career. Before Chelsea's visit on Friday night, they have taken ten points from their past 12 matches, and he is fighting to convince an under-pressure head coach in Graham Potter that he is worth a place in an underperforming team. In the loss to Sunderland on Saturday he came on after 71 minutes and the game slipped from 1-0 to 3-0. This may be the beginning of the end or just another bump in the road. Regardless, he has earned a moment of appreciation. About 550 players will take to the field in the Premier League this season, but not one of them uses this rectangular canvas quite like Soucek does. He may well be unique in English football. Soucek, you've probably noticed, was not blessed with pace. We can quantify this: with a top speed of 30.2km/h (18.8mph), he was the fifth-slowest player in the entire top flight last season, behind Bernardo Silva, Craig Dawson, Mikel Merino and Casemiro. However, he uses his limited gifts of locomotion in an extraordinary way. According to a fascinating article by Ali Tweedale for the Opta Analyst website, last season Soucek spent a higher percentage of his game time jogging than any other player in the league, and a lower percentage of his game time walking than anyone else (he spent just 54.2 per cent of his time walking, compared with 77.6 per cent for Matheus Cunha, the top outfielder by this metric). As a result, only Dejan Kulusevski covered more ground per 90 minutes than his 12.2km. In other words, in a game increasingly tilted towards explosive, high-intensity bursts, Soucek is a total outlier, cruising around the pitch with the slow, incessant, purposeful motion of a robot lawnmower. And as he moves, he affects the game in an assortment of ways that no one else comes close to emulating. Consider: since his Premier League debut on February 1, 2020, only 24 players have scored more than his 36 non-penalty goals, and only three of them — James Maddison, Bruno Fernandes and Kevin De Bruyne — are midfielders. He has scored only two fewer than De Bruyne, even though, in that period, Manchester City have averaged 65.2 per cent possession, whereas Soucek has been working with 43.8 per cent. He is an exceptionally efficient shooter: his 36 goals have come from 262 shots. De Bruyne has taken 356 for his marginally superior haul, and Fernandes, for four more goals, has attempted 539. Only four players have scored more non-penalty goals than Soucek from fewer shots: Yoane Wissa, Alexander Isak, Jamie Vardy, and his new team-mate Callum Wilson. What makes Soucek even more unusual is that he doesn't really do any of the things that prolific midfield goalscorers typically do. For example, in those 5½ years, Maddison, Fernandes and De Bruyne have played a combined 303 through-balls; Soucek has played two. Last season Scott McTominay had a sort of 'deluxe Soucek' season at Napoli, crashing the box and banging in goals and using his big frame to win duels and aerials. But he also made 56 progressive carries (moving the ball either into the box or at least ten yards towards the goalline) and attempted 88 take-ons. Soucek, in a comparable number of minutes, mustered nine progressive carries and 12 take-ons. On the other hand, if we look at the 26 Premier League players who, since Soucek's debut, have scored more or as many non-penalty goals as him, they've averaged in that time 10.3 blocks and 67.5 clearances. Fernandes has the most, with 17 blocks and 197 clearances. Soucek has made 98 blocks and 492 clearances, a number of defensive actions which, in that company, even considering that he has spent more time out of possession than most, looks absolutely prodigious. Soucek has said that his way of playing is 'a lot about intuition' and that he is guided by the impulse to 'simply be useful at the back and going forward'. You may not be surprised to learn that he was not a shining academy prospect: in fact, his formative loan spell at Viktoria Zizkov only happened when the manager, Jindrich Trpisovksy, who was initially reluctant, was prevailed upon to take him because the loan was free. (When he went back to Slavia, the coach, Dusan Uhrin Jr, was honest enough to admit he too was unconvinced. 'It didn't look very good when he was running,' he told BBC Sport.) Because he wasn't a prized starlet, Soucek continued to play with his high-school friends in the Prague grassroots league, the Hanspaulka, up until his late teens, and it's this which is the most visible and interesting influence on how he plays: that connection to the untutored, amateur football of weeknights on astro and one-man-and-his-dog Sundays. Soucek plays football, essentially, like any of us might, if we were gifted with elite-level mentality and engine and heart: putting himself about the pitch, making himself useful, obeying the instinctual satnav of his own brain. As he put it in an article for Bez Frazi, in what sounds like a fallacy but is actually, I think, a profound and meaningful statement: 'I learnt football by playing football.' Of course, he's not a flawless player. Soucek has some big weaknesses that affect West Ham in real ways. All the things those sceptical coaches saw in his youth are still kind of true: he is slow. His passing is ordinary. For a player in his position, of his size, he doesn't win the ball a lot. Potter, who is trying to get back to the best work that he did in his latter seasons at Brighton & Hove Albion, when he had much more technical midfielders like Alexis Mac Allister and Moisés Caicedo, hasn't seemed enamoured of him, and West Ham have lately been linked to midfielders including Southampton's Mateus Fernandes and Barcelona's Marc Casadó. Yet Soucek, for all his limitations, has that thing you can't teach: stickability, resilience, the drive to get the absolute most out of himself game after game, year after year. Of all the players signed in that January window, only Soucek, Fernandes and Jarrod Bowen are still at the same Premier League team 5½ years on. West Ham have signed six midfielders since then — Nikola Vlasic, Flynn Downes, Lucas Paquetá, Edson Álvarez, James Ward-Prowse and Guido Rodríguez — and, besides Paquetá, Soucek has outlasted or outperformed them all. They have tried to evolve beyond him before, and every time he has hung on to his place with the obstinacy of a limpet. Maybe this is the moment when Soucek's sheer determination finally stops being enough. Or maybe we haven't seen the last of the man who can't be moved, and who never stops moving.