Top News

Steven Gerrard, Gareth Bale, Gianfranco Zola, Luis Suarez and Matt Le Tissier are among the Premier League greats who never managed to win the trophy – but these players did.

Winning the Premier League is a huge accomplishment, yet some title winners owe their medal more to being in the right place at the right time than to any major on-pitch contribution.

We’ve picked out eight excellent players who have a Premier League winners’ medal despite making very little – if any – real impact on that title triumph.

Starting with the very first Premier League season in 1992-93, a broken leg pushed Dion Dublin to the fringes during Manchester United’s first league title under Sir Alex Ferguson.

He did find the net early in the campaign after his £1million move from Cambridge United, but soon afterwards he suffered the injury that kept him out for six months.

By the time he returned for the closing stretch of the season, he was behind Eric Cantona in the pecking order and finished with only seven appearances, adding up to 319 minutes.

Dublin was not initially awarded a winners’ medal, but later received one through special dispensation. He was still at Old Trafford when Manchester United retained the title the next season, though he featured even less and did not officially get a medal that time.

“The Premier League trophy means a lot to me, but I only played nine games for that trophy,” Dublin said while reflecting after being inducted into Cambridge’s Hall of Fame in 2017.

“The (1990 Division Four) play-off final medal against Chesterfield means more to me because I like to earn things with blood, sweat and tears.

“I was here for four years and I got this medal because of what the manager put me through. I scored the only goal in front of 27,000 people at Wembley and I’d take this every single time over that one.”

After leaving Manchester United, Dublin of course went on to show he was much more than a decent Premier League centre-forward. He scored more than 100 top-flight goals and famously shared the Golden Boot in 1997-98.

Leeds United were top of the Premier League on New Year’s Day in 2002. At that stage, it genuinely looked as though David O’Leary’s exciting young side could become title challengers.

Just two and a half years later, following a staggering financial collapse, Leeds had dropped back into the Championship and fan favourite academy product Alan Smith was sold to bitter rivals Manchester United.

Smith’s first two seasons at Old Trafford came during a comparatively lean spell for Ferguson’s side as Chelsea rose under Jose Mourinho.

After injury problems and an unsuccessful attempt to turn him into Roy Keane’s midfield successor, he moved back into attack after Ruud van Nistelrooy was sold to Real Madrid in 2006.

But by then he had already slipped down the pecking order, and his contribution to the 2006-07 title win was limited to nine appearances, including six starts, no goals, one fairly insignificant assist against Bolton, and just 480 minutes on the pitch.

Like Dublin, he ended up one appearance short of the usual threshold but was given a winners’ medal through special dispensation.

The La Masia product is one of the most decorated centre-backs football has ever seen, but Gerard Pique did not play a major role in Manchester United’s 2007-08 Premier League triumph as he was still emerging as a young player.

Pique made nine league appearances that season, five of them starts, totalling 480 minutes. He was not a central figure on the pitch, but he did take away lessons that stayed with him for life.

“I remember we were in the changing room at Old Trafford and my phone started vibrating from inside my trouser pocket,” he later recalled in an interview with FourFourTwo.

“Keano could hear the vibrations and went crazy trying to find out who the phone belonged to.

“That’s who he was. Before we beat Celtic 1-0 last season, I noticed him by the side of the pitch as a pundit as we went out to warm up. I hid my face with my hand because he still scares me. I was 26 years old, and I was sh*tting myself.”

Barcelona activated his £5million buy-back clause at the end of that season, and the rest is history.

Deco, Alex, Daniel Sturridge and Yuri Zhirkov were all names considered from Carlo Ancelotti’s free-scoring Chelsea side of 2009-10.

None of them were among the standout stars of that title-winning team, but all of them contributed enough to feel they had properly earned a winners’ medal.

With Juliano Belletti, though, it feels more borderline. The Brazilian, famous for scoring Barcelona’s winner in the 2006 Champions League final, made 11 appearances but only four starts and was almost completely absent during the run-in. Apologies if you’re reading this, Juliano.

The Colombian winger Juan Cuadrado has won no fewer than six Scudetti and four Coppa Italia titles during his spells with Juventus and Inter, and even his brief time on the fringes at Chelsea brought silverware. Some players simply seem to arrive in the right place at the right time.

But if you look more closely at Cuadrado’s numbers, it is probably fair to say Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea would almost certainly still have won the title without him in 2014-15.

He arrived halfway through the season, by which stage Chelsea had already opened up a healthy lead, and he produced zero goals and zero assists in the run-in, making only four starts from 12 appearances and playing 312 minutes. By the summer, he was already back in Italy.

Believe it or not, Gokhan Inler’s arrival at Leicester City created more excitement than N’Golo Kante’s in the summer of 2015.

He was an established and experienced Switzerland international with a wealth of top-level experience, joining directly from a strong Napoli side and seemingly expected to replace cult hero veteran Esteban Cambiasso.

Everyone knows what Kante went on to do at the King Power, whereas Inler barely left any mark at all. He made only five appearances, totalling 195 minutes, during Leicester’s astonishing 2015-16 title win and was swiftly moved on to Besiktas.

Unlike fellow former Manchester City academy prospect Jadon Sancho, Brahim Diaz stayed long enough to make a few senior appearances, with five Premier League cameos in City’s 2017-18 title-winning campaign – the first of six under Pep Guardiola.

The Morocco international just about qualified for a winners’ medal, but all five of those appearances came from the bench and amounted to only 50 minutes of action. When we say technicality, we really do mean it.

Since leaving City as a teenager, Diaz has gone on to win three more league titles in Italy and Spain, and he played a far more active role in those successes.

Another talent Manchester City let slip away, Wythenshawe’s own Cole Palmer got minutes in each of the club’s last four title-winning seasons, but he only met the threshold for a winners’ medal in the treble-winning 2022-23 campaign.

That season he made 14 Premier League appearances for Guardiola’s relentless machine, but 12 of them came as a substitute and both of his starts arrived only after the title had already been secured.

Across all competitions, he registered one goal and one assist in 850 minutes of football. Who knew they had such a gem on their hands?

Alright, calling him “great” may be stretching it a touch, but Christian Norgaard is a very dependable Premier League midfielder – something he showed over six impressive seasons as Brentford established themselves in the top flight.

Then he moved to Arsenal, made exactly one start – after they had already sealed the title – and played just 102 minutes in the Premier League.

Now he is on his way to Everton. Fair enough, really: not a bad season to enjoy the dressing-room atmosphere.