Premier League Awards Explained: Player and Manager

Three players finished the 2018-19 season on twenty-two Premier League goals, and all three went home with a Golden Boot. Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, two of them team-mates, one of them from a club that finished outside the top four. Nobody applied a tiebreaker, nobody counted minutes played, and the trophy was simply made three times. It is a small thing, and it tells you a great deal about how English football's awards are built: the Premier League counts, and where the count ties, it declines to invent a rule.

That is not true of every award it gives out. Some are decided by arithmetic, some by a panel, some by whoever clicks the most on a website, and the distinctions between them are almost never explained at the point the trophy is handed over. What follows is which awards exist, who actually decides each one, and where the criteria are messier than the presentation suggests.

Which awards the Premier League actually hands out

Start with the separation that causes most of the confusion. There are three distinct sets of English football awards, run by three unconnected organisations, announced within weeks of each other every spring.

Award set	Run by	Electorate	Scope
Premier League awards	The Premier League	Expert panel plus public vote, or a straight count	Premier League only
Footballer of the Year	Football Writers' Association	FWA member journalists	All of English football
Players' Player of the Year	Professional Footballers' Association	Professional players in all four divisions	All of the professional game

The Premier League's own list divides cleanly into the awards decided by counting something and the awards decided by opinion.

Counted: the Golden Boot, for the most goals; the Golden Glove, for the most clean sheets; the Playmaker of the Season, for the most assists. Nobody votes on these. They are the output of the League's official statistical record, and the only judgement involved is in the definitions.

Voted: Player of the Season, Manager of the Season, Young Player of the Season, Goal of the Season, and the monthly versions of each. These involve a panel, a public vote, or both.

There is a third category people forget. The League gives out awards for things other than performance — long service, contribution to the community, a merit or special recognition award presented at the season's end. Those are decided by the League itself and carry no criteria beyond its own judgement, which is honest enough as far as it goes.

The EFL runs a parallel structure of its own, with divisional player awards, a Young Player award and team-of-the-season selections across the three divisions. The mechanisms differ, and our guide to the EFL player awards covers them separately.

• 20Clubs assessed
• 380League matches played
• 1948FWA award first presented
• 1974PFA awards first presented

Structural figures for the competition and the founding years of the two older award schemes.

How Player of the Season is decided

Two constituencies decide it, and they are not weighted equally as far as anyone outside the League can establish.

The process begins with a shortlist. A panel — football people assembled by the Premier League, its composition announced rather than fixed permanently — considers the season's performances and produces a list of nominees. That list is published with several weeks of the season still to run, which is itself a design choice with consequences: a player who has an extraordinary final month is competing against a shortlist drawn before it happened.

The public vote then opens on the League's website. Anyone can vote. There is no requirement to support a Premier League club, no verification beyond the ordinary, and the vote is global rather than British, which matters more than it sounds when the clubs with the largest overseas followings are also the clubs with the most nominated players.

1. 1Panel deliberatesAn expert panel assembled by the League assesses the season's performances.
2. 2Shortlist publishedA list of nominees is announced with the season still running.
3. 3Public vote opensAnyone may vote through the League's website for a fixed period.
4. 4Votes combinedThe public result is combined with the panel's scoring to produce a winner.
5. 5AnnouncementThe winner is presented at the League's end-of-season awards.

The published sequence for the season-long award, not the monthly version.

The League's own description of the combination is that the panel's verdict and the public vote together determine the winner. What it does not publish is the ratio. Whether the panel carries half the decision, three-quarters or a nominal share is not in the public domain, and no amount of reading the Handbook will produce the answer. That is a legitimate criticism of the award rather than a technicality: an award whose electorate is unknown cannot be argued about properly.

The practical effect of a public vote at global scale is a pull towards the best-supported clubs. It does not decide every year — winners from outside the two or three largest followings do occur — and it is a thumb on the scale that a panel-only award would not have.

Manager of the Month, and whether the curse is real

A manager wins Manager of the Month, and his team promptly loses. Everyone has seen it. Sky's commentators reach for it within ninety seconds of kick-off. And the explanation is not football's; it is statistics'.

Consider what the award is measuring. Four or five matches, which is a very small sample of a 38-game season, selected precisely because they produced an outlying result. A manager wins the award in a month where his side took thirteen points from fifteen. That figure is not his team's true level — if it were, they would be on course for something close to a hundred points — it is his team's true level plus a run of good fortune, a favourable set of fixtures and an opponent's missed chance or two.

The following month, the fortune reverts to normal. The results fall back towards what the squad is actually capable of, and the fall looks like a curse because we were told a fortnight earlier that this was the best manager in the league.

There is a second mechanism, and it is about timing. The award is not announced the day the month ends. A shortlist has to be compiled, a vote has to run, and the presentation typically lands a couple of weeks into the following month — by which point the regression has already begun, and the trophy arrives to be photographed against results that have already turned.

1. 1An outlying monthA club takes far more points than its underlying level would predict.
2. 2Month endsResults are assessed and a shortlist of managers is drawn up.
3. 3Vote and deliberationA panel and a public vote run over several days.
4. 4Regression beginsThe new month's matches are already returning towards the true level.
5. 5Award presentedThe trophy arrives a fortnight in, against form that has already dipped.
6. 6Curse observedThe decline is attributed to the award rather than to the sample.

The sequence of the monthly award, showing where the timing gap sits.

Nobody has published a rigorous study establishing a causal effect, and the burden of proof sits with the claim rather than against it. What can be said is that the observed pattern is exactly what regression to the mean predicts, and that a phenomenon fully explained by an ordinary statistical property does not need a supernatural one.

The Manager of the Month process itself mirrors the seasonal award: a shortlist, a panel, a public vote, a combined result. The Player of the Month, Goal of the Month and Save of the Month all run on the same monthly cycle and the same broad mechanism.

The Golden Glove and the problem of counting a clean sheet

Most clean sheets wins it. That sentence hides two arguments.

The first is about eligibility. Without a minimum-appearance condition, a reserve goalkeeper who played eight matches in a strong defensive side could accumulate a competitive total while the first choice missed half the season injured. The League applies a threshold to prevent this, and the sensible thing to say about the precise figure is that it is set out in the competition rules and is the sort of detail worth checking against the Handbook rather than assuming from memory.

The second argument is nastier and comes up more often than it should. What happens when two goalkeepers appear in the same match and the team keeps a clean sheet? A first choice who is substituted at half-time through injury, a keeper sent off and replaced, a late change with the score at nil-nil. Somebody has to be credited, or nobody does, and the rule determining which is the sort of thing that decides a trophy in a tight season without anyone noticing until it does.

The award is shared when totals tie, in the same way the Golden Boot is. Liverpool's and Manchester City's goalkeepers finished level in 2021-22 and both took it home.

Why clean sheets are a strange thing to award an individual

There is a real objection to the whole award, and it is worth stating rather than assuming everyone accepts the premise. A clean sheet is a team achievement to which the goalkeeper is a contributor. A keeper behind a well-organised defence in a side that dominates possession will record more shut-outs than a superior keeper making twice as many saves for a team fighting relegation, and the second keeper's season is plainly the better one.

The League is not unaware of this. The Golden Glove exists as a countable award rather than a judgement, and countable awards have to count something simple. The Player of the Season vote is where a goalkeeper's actual performance can be recognised, and goalkeepers have won it.

Which leaves the Golden Glove as an honest measure of a thing that is not quite the thing its name implies. Useful, widely quoted, and worth reading alongside the defensive record of the team rather than on its own.

Playmaker of the Season, and what counts as an assist in England

The Playmaker award, introduced towards the end of the 2010s, goes to the player with the most assists across the season. Kevin De Bruyne's 2019-20 campaign, in which he reached twenty and matched Thierry Henry's record for a Premier League season, is the benchmark most people reach for.

The complication is that an assist is a definition rather than an observation. A goal is a goal — the ball crossed the line, and the technology confirms it, as our guide to goal-line technology in English football sets out from the officiating side. An assist requires somebody to decide how much intervening action breaks the chain between a pass and a finish.

The awkward cases are familiar to anyone who has argued about a fantasy football team:

• A pass is deflected off a defender into the scorer's path. Assist, or not?
• The scorer beats two players and shoots from twenty-five yards after receiving a simple square ball. Assist, or not?
• A shot is saved, the rebound is converted. Is the original shooter credited?
• A free kick is won by a foul, and the free kick is scored directly. Does anyone get an assist?
• A defensive error puts the ball at a striker's feet after a hopeful long pass. Assist, or not?

Different providers answer these differently, which is why an assist total published in one place can differ from the same player's total published elsewhere. There is no dishonesty in it. There is a definition, and there is another definition.

For the Playmaker of the Season, the Premier League's own official record is what counts. That is the right answer administratively and it does not make the underlying figure objective — it makes it authoritative, which is a different property. Anyone comparing an assist total across eras or across leagues should know they may not be comparing the same measurement.

Goalscoring records are cleaner in this respect, which is one reason the Golden Boot generates far less argument. Our pages on the Premier League Golden Boot and the competition's all-time leading scorers cover that side of the ledger.

Young Player awards and the cut-off dates that do not match

Three separate young player awards operate in English football and they do not use the same eligibility rule. This is a genuine trap.

The Premier League runs a Young Player of the Season for its own competition. The PFA has run a Young Player of the Year since 1974, awarded across the professional game and voted for by players. The FWA has at various points recognised young players too. Each sets an age ceiling — the under-23 line is the common one — and each applies it from its own reference date.

The reference date is where the mismatch bites. An age assessed at the start of a season and an age assessed on a fixed calendar date can produce different answers for a player with a summer birthday, and a player can be eligible for one award and ineligible for another in the same campaign. Anyone writing about these awards should check the criteria for the specific trophy rather than assume the rule carries across.

Kevin Beattie of Ipswich Town won the first PFA Young Player of the Year in 1974, in the same inaugural round of awards that produced the senior prize. The award has served since as a reasonable, though far from infallible, indicator of who the English game thought would carry the next decade.

There is an argument that under-23 is now the wrong ceiling. A player who has spent four seasons in a Premier League first team by the age of twenty-two is not a prospect in any meaningful sense, and the award increasingly goes to established internationals rather than to emerging ones. The academy structure that produces them is covered in our guide to the EPPP academy system. Lowering the ceiling would make the award mean what its name says, and would also make it considerably less interesting to broadcast.

The FWA and the PFA: two older awards with different electorates

Both predate the Premier League by decades and neither is confined to it.

The Football Writers' Association has presented its Footballer of the Year since 1948, when Stanley Matthews became the first recipient. It is voted for by FWA members — journalists who cover the game — and the criteria have always included conduct as well as performance, which gives it a slightly different character from a pure merit award. The FWA now also honours a Women's Footballer of the Year.

The Professional Footballers' Association introduced its awards in 1974, with Norman Hunter of Leeds United taking the first Players' Player of the Year. The electorate is the union's membership: professional players across all four divisions, voting on their peers. That makes it the only major English award decided by the people actually on the pitch, and it is the one players themselves tend to say they value most.

Feature	FWA Footballer of the Year	PFA Players' Player	Premier League Player of the Season
First presented	1948	1974	Premier League era
Voted by	FWA journalists	Professional players	Panel plus public
Eligible from	All English football	All four professional divisions	Premier League only
Announced	Before the season ends	At the PFA ceremony	End-of-season awards

The PFA also selects a Team of the Year for each division, which is the part of its awards programme that reaches furthest down the pyramid and matters most to players outside the top flight. And it presents a Merit Award for a career rather than a season, which has gone to figures whose contribution to the English game was never going to be captured by a single campaign.

Doing the double — taking both the FWA and the PFA awards in one season — is the clearest signal English football produces that a player's year was beyond argument. It has happened often enough to be recognisable and rarely enough to matter.

When the awards go outside the title race

The most common complaint about English football's awards is that they follow the trophy. It is a fair observation and an incomplete one.

Robin van Persie took both the PFA and the FWA awards in 2011-12 while Arsenal finished third. Luis Suárez did the same in 2013-14 with a Liverpool side that fell short of the title in the final fortnight. Neither player was on a championship team, and in both cases the electorate looked at a body of work rather than a medal.

The manager awards have their own examples. George Burley took the season's manager award in 2000-01 after leading a newly promoted Ipswich Town into European qualification, which is about as far from the title race as the award has travelled. Jürgen Klopp received it after a season in which Liverpool finished a point behind Manchester City, having won both domestic cups.

Golden Boots have gone to players in mid-table sides more often than the general impression suggests, because a striker in a team that plays 38 matches and scores from a heavy shot volume can outscore a forward in a rotating attack at a title-winning club. The Golden Glove is far more resistant: clean sheets are so strongly a function of team strength that the award has a much narrower field of realistic candidates each year.

The players nobody can vote for

Relegation closes the door almost completely, and the reason is arithmetic rather than snobbery.

A club that goes down has, by definition, spent the season losing. Its best player may have been outstanding — a goalkeeper making forty more saves than anyone else in the division, a forward who scored a third of a struggling side's goals — and the numbers that reach a voter still arrive attached to a bottom-three finish. Panels and journalists find that difficult to weigh, and a public vote finds it nearly impossible.

The monthly awards are more forgiving, because a month is short enough for a relegation-bound club to have a good one. A side that takes ten points from four matches in February and goes down in May can still put its manager on a shortlist, and the smaller sample that makes the monthly award statistically noisy is exactly what makes it more democratic.

There is one route that does open occasionally. Because the PFA's electorate is professional players across all four divisions, a performer at a struggling club is judged by opponents who played against him rather than by an audience watching highlights, and the players' vote has a longer record of noticing individuals in poor teams than either of the other two electorates does.

Historically, the winners list correlates strongly with the champions of the same season, which our page on the Premier League champions through the years sets in context. Correlation is not the same as automatism, and the exceptions cluster in the individual awards decided by players and journalists rather than in the counted ones.

The case that the winner is decided by the table

Take the argument seriously rather than dismissing it. There are three defensible versions.

The first is a claim about attention. A player at a title-winning club appears in more televised matches, in more highlight packages, and in more of the conversation that shapes a voter's impression. A comparable performance at a club selected for broadcast six times a season is watched by fewer of the people voting, and by all of them less often.

The second is a claim about the measure itself. A team's success genuinely does produce individual numbers. More possession, more attacking territory and more chances created mean more goals, more assists and more clean sheets for the players involved. On the counted awards this is not bias at all; the counts are correct. It does mean the counted awards are partly a measurement of the team.

The third version is harder to dismiss and concerns what the awards are for. If Player of the Season is meant to identify who played best, the champions' best player should not win automatically. If it is meant to honour the season's defining performance, then the player who drove a title is a perfectly reasonable answer, and the complaint dissolves.

The Premier League has never stated which of those two it means. Nor has the FWA, nor the PFA. Every year's argument is at bottom a disagreement about the question rather than the answer, and it will not be settled while the criteria stay unwritten.

There is a fourth possibility worth naming, since honesty about uncertainty is more useful than a confident position: the correlation may simply reflect that the best players in a given season tend to be at the best clubs, because that is where the best clubs recruit them to be. Some of the pattern is bias. Some of it is the transfer market working exactly as intended, and separating the two from the outside is not really possible.

Goal of the Month, and how a shortlist gets built

Somebody has to watch every goal scored in a month and choose six.

The shortlist is compiled by the League from the month's goals, and it is the stage where the real editorial judgement happens — far more so than the public vote that follows. A long-range strike, a team move finished at the far post, an improvised finish from a tight angle: the shortlist decides which categories of goal are in contention, and the public then picks between them.

Two known biases run through it. Distance beats difficulty, consistently. A thirty-yard shot into the top corner will outpoll a close-range finish that required three defenders to be beaten first, because the spectacle is legible in a five-second clip and the skill is not. And the goal's importance to the match rarely features, since a consolation in a heavy defeat is judged as a piece of technique with no context attached.

The monthly winners go forward to a Goal of the Season shortlist, voted the same way. Save of the Month follows the identical pattern for goalkeepers, which is one of the few places the League recognises goalkeeping as something other than a clean-sheet count.

None of this is presented as a measurement of anything, and that is precisely why it works. Goal of the Month is a popularity contest that admits to being one, which puts it ahead of several awards on this page.

Where the results are published, and when the voting opens

The League publishes everything on its own site, and that is the authoritative record.

The monthly cycle is predictable. A month's fixtures conclude, shortlists appear within a few days, the voting window runs for a short fixed period, and winners are announced in the week that follows. Anyone wanting to vote needs to be watching for the window, because it opens and closes faster than most people expect.

The season awards run on a longer arc. Nominations are published in the closing weeks of the campaign, voting is open for longer, and the winners are revealed at the League's end-of-season ceremony. The FWA announces its Footballer of the Year on its own schedule, traditionally before the season's final matches, and the PFA presents its awards at a separate ceremony of its own.

A note on the awards that get confused with these. The Ballon d'Or is run by a French magazine and covers world football; it is not an English award and has no connection to the Premier League's process. FIFA's awards are global. Neither has any bearing on who wins anything described on this page, and both get folded into English awards discussions every year regardless.

More on the English game across its competitions sits in our football section, with longer pieces in the blog.