PFA Teams of the Year: Analyzing the Premier League and WSL Selections

According to the New York Times, the Professional Footballers' Association unveiled its Premier League and Women's Super League Teams of the Year on Tuesday evening, with five Arsenal players anchoring the men's XI and Bruno Fernandes claiming the Players' Player of the Year on a record-setting 21 league assists. Voted by fellow professionals, the selections function as a diagnostic of how the dressing room reads tactical structure and individual output — and where that perception drifts from the underlying metrics.

Arsenal's structure, City's variety

Arsenal, the Premier League champions, place five in the XI: David Raya in goal, Gabriel and William Saliba centrally, Jurrien Timber at right-back, Declan Rice in the holding role. The distribution covers every line — recognition for system coherence rather than any single flashpoint performer. Drop coverage, half-space occupation, and progressive carries are rewarded collectively, which is exactly how Arteta's block earns peer respect.

Manchester City, the runners-up, supply four: Nico O'Reilly, Rayan Cherki, Erling Haaland, and Antoine Semenyo, the January acquisition from Bournemouth. Brentford's Igor Thiago, with 22 league goals, completes the forward line. Project the shape and it resolves into a fluid 4-3-3 — Cherki rotating between the lines in the half-spaces, Haaland operating as the central reference point, Semenyo providing the vertical width and direct carry on the flank. City's representation tilts heavily toward attacking talent, which matches their shot-creation volume even if the final league position didn't.

The production numbers, and the wider data layer

Fernandes' 21 league assists is the metric that defines the season for United, and the historical frame sharpens it considerably. He is the first United recipient since Wayne Rooney in 2009-10, and the first player outside Liverpool or Manchester City to win in nine years, a streak tracing back to N'Golo Kanté's 2017 award at Chelsea. In the WSL, Khadija 'Bunny' Shaw powered Manchester City's title-winning campaign with 21 goals and took the women's Players' Player of the Year; three City players feature in the WSL XI.

The broader backdrop is that elite football now operates inside an increasingly granular data layer — positional tracking, biometric capture, and live touch logging are routine. That same layer is migrating into consumer devices, and regulators are beginning to respond. A criminal complaint filed by a German rights group against Meta over its smart glasses is the clearest recent signal that identity-linked recording hardware will not operate without scrutiny — relevant context for any sport whose competitive edge now depends on the same kind of sensor data.

Where peer voting and the data diverge

The source's panel of writers flagged Morgan Gibbs-White as the most conspicuous omission: 15 goals and four assists for Nottingham Forest across three different head coaches during a relegation fight, following the turbulent 2025 summer with Tottenham. By several readings, a contextually heavier campaign than Thiago's 22 — eight of which arrived from the penalty spot. Alternative shapes were proposed: a 4-1-4-1 with Gibbs-White in the front four, lopsided 4-4-2s, adventurous 4-3-3s.

Player-voted XIs always reward the dressing-room view of the season, which rarely aligns with what xG and usage-rate tables suggest. The ceiling question for any named player is whether next campaign, with opponents now game-planning specifically for their movement, recalibrates drop coverage and compresses those half-spaces enough to suppress raw output — even as overall contribution to the system holds steady.