LONDON — Three players from the club that won the Premier League title. One player from the club that finished third. The shortlist the Professional Footballers’ Association released on Friday tells a story the sport has been arguing about all season: whether 2025/26 belonged to a championship collective or to a single man doing exceptional things inside a team that, on paper, had no right to finish where it did.
The PFA announced its six nominees for the Men’s Players’ Player of the Year award, voted on by professional footballers across the English game. Arsenal, who claimed the Premier League title this season, supplied three of their own to the final list: goalkeeper David Raya, centre-back Gabriel Magalhaes, and midfielder Declan Rice. They are joined by Manchester City’s Rayan Cherki and Erling Haaland, and by Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes.
The ceremony will be held on Tuesday, August 25, at The Opera House in Manchester.
Fernandes enters the vote carrying weight that the other five nominees cannot match. He collected the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year award last month — the first United player to win that prize since Wayne Rooney in 2010 — with 45 percent of the votes cast by the English football media, edging out Rice by a margin of 28 votes. The question now is whether his peers will follow the press.
The Portuguese midfielder finished the season with 20 assists and eight goals in the Premier League, becoming only the third player in the competition’s history to reach 20 assists in a single campaign, alongside Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne. United finished third. Sky Sports noted at the time of the FWA announcement that no other United player received a single vote in the polling — the entire argument for the club rested on one man.
That context is precisely what Arsenal’s nominees carry as a counter-argument. Rice was the engine beneath a title-winning side, playing at the highest level of domestic and continental competition. Raya kept the best defensive record in both the Premier League and the Champions League. Magalhaes made 51 appearances in all competitions, contributing nine goal involvements from centre-back while anchoring the same defensive structure that let Arsenal play out from the back with a composure that became their signature in the final third of the season.
Manchester City have two routes to the prize. Haaland won his third Premier League Golden Boot, scoring 27 league goals. Cherki, 22, arrived from Lyon last summer and produced a debut English season so striking that he earned nominations in both the senior and Young Player of the Year categories — a position few players reach in their first year in the country.
There is a structural puzzle embedded in Arsenal’s three-man presence on the list. The players’ vote, unlike the FWA ballot, does not have a ranked or weighted mechanism that would let a faction split cleanly. If Rice, Raya, and Magalhaes divide a portion of Arsenal-aligned votes among themselves, they risk collectively underperforming against a Fernandes candidacy that is concentrated and clear. Whether that dynamic shapes the eventual result is not knowable from the nominations alone — the PFA has not released vote-share data in recent years, and there is no public mechanism to measure how balloting is distributed across squads.
The women’s award carries its own contested logic. Chelsea forward Lauren James headlines a six-player shortlist that also includes Arsenal’s Alessia Russo, the reigning champion Bunny Shaw of Manchester City, Shaw’s City team-mate Yui Hasegawa, Jess Park of Manchester United, and Kirsty Hanson of Aston Villa.
In the Young Player of the Year categories, Arsenal teenager Max Dowman earned a nomination despite starting only once in the Premier League this season. Dowman, 16, is the youngest-ever nominee for the award since its introduction in the 1973-74 season, according to ESPN. Cherki is nominated in this category as well, alongside Liverpool’s Rio Ngumoha, Kobbie Mainoo of United, Junior Kroupi of Bournemouth, and Nico O’Reilly of City.
The PFA has not indicated any change to its standard process: every registered professional in England can vote, the ballot is confidential, and the result remains sealed until the ceremony. What August 25 will reveal is whether professional players, watching each other week after week through the longest season most will have played, rate what Arsenal built collectively above what Fernandes constructed almost entirely on his own.
