You know the moments. The ones that you do standing up from your sofa. The kind of thing where you shove the nearest person to you and point at the screen like they weren’t already watching. There were lots of those during the 2025/26 Premier League season -and this year, what made them hit different was the players behind them. Young, bold, and quite frankly a touch daft with the ball at your feet.
Rayan Cherki -England is calling
The disaster story was pre-written in your head before Cherki ever set foot on Manchester City soil after arriving from Lyon last summer. Guardiola’s system. Tactical discipline. Structure. And on the other, a 22-year-old Frenchman strutting like he’s freestyling in NBA2K. Spontaneous. Instinctive. Occasionally baffling. It didn’t go wrong. Not even close.
Cherki had spent the season making Premier League defenders look like they’d been told to catch smoke. Two-footed, no perceived weak side, next move uncertain. With four goals and twelve assists – nobody else in the whole division managed so many as midfielders, Bruno Fernandes excepted -his numbers are almost beside the point. They do not tell you about the shimmy. They don’t add in the part that he is receiving the ball, outnumbered by bodies as if there was no sense of urgency, and with a gap that just didn’t exist two seconds ago.
He’s twenty-two. His best years are ahead of him. And that should scare the rest of the league.
Kobbie Mainoo – The Comeback Nobody Expected
If you witnessed it transpire live, this one hurts in the best way possible.
After being shunned at Manchester United, Mainoo began the season not only cut but down to the very last drop. In the first half of the season with Ruben Amorim, he missed each and every league start, and he nearly left in January. Such an ordeal, with the majority of players quietly leaving the premises. He stayed.
Amorim left. Carrick came in. And then Mainoo started playing. Really playing. The disguised passes came back. That almost lazy ease in tight spots — how the ball always finds its way precisely where it needs to be — returned. Then came the goal against Liverpool. It wasn’t just a goal. It was a kid who had been told he didn’t belong, saying the only way he could say it was that no one would ignore, which is yes, I do.
In the second half of the season, he forced his way into World Cup contention for Tuchel. Nothing else is as satisfying an ending to a story as that.
Morgan Gibbs-White- Genius in an Otherwise Shattered Side
Forest had a hard season. That’s just the truth. But Gibbs-White was not the issue; if anything, he was one of the only players still able to deliver a sustained reminder of what this club looks like when it works.
He has something English football doesn’t always know what to do with. He plays in those pockets and those half-spaces where the ball really shouldn’t be played. In scenarios where he shouldn’t be able to do it, he spins away from pressure. He plays passes that remove two defenders from the equation at once and make it appear premeditated before the ball has even arrived.
But doing that week-in, week-out when results aren’t coming and the side you are playing with is struggling- that is actually the tougher thing. Gibbs-White did it all season and should’ve received greater praise than he ultimately got.
What This Season Gave Us
Arsenal won the title. There was drama throughout the division. That story had its own shape.
Then there is the other version of this season. That Tuesday night when a twenty-two-year-old Frenchman did whatever the heck it is you can do with the outside of your boot that has you scratching your head over what law and gravity got up to. For the kid who was nearly offloaded in January to score his goal of the season, and hardly act surprised. That version was brilliant. Nobody shall tell you otherwise.
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