Ken Early: David Silva is a Premier League great – in pundits’ dreams

David Silva played his last Premier League game with no Manchester City fans present to give him the big send-off he deserved. But then, Silva’s most passionate admirers have long been located not on the terraces, but in the studio. As he departs it should be at least some consolation to Silva to know that he is the most popular-ever player among the Premier League’s top TV pundits.

When Jamie Carragher wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “Silva is City’s finest-ever player”, he was being relatively restrained in his praise. Silva is commonly lauded as the best player not just for Manchester City, but of the entire Premier League era. For example Alan Shearer, writing earlier this year in the Sun: “When we are talking about the best foreign players to grace the Premier League, then David Silva is one of the best – if not the best.” Thierry Henry preferred to qualify by position rather than nationality in December 2017: “He’s the best creative midfielder we’ve seen in this league.” Graeme Souness in 2019: “There’s an argument for him being the best Premier League player ever.”

It’s strange. If David Silva was really the best-ever Premier League player, or the best overseas player, or the best creative midfielder, or even the best Man City player, you would think at some point, somebody other than the top rank of TV pundits would have noticed. Yet Silva’s pre-eminence – obvious to the top pundits – has scarcely ever been formally recognised. Year after year, the Player of the Year awards have gone elsewhere.

You might argue that is typical anti-City bias from the respective voting bodies – the professional players, and the members of the Football Writers’ Association (FWA). As Pep Guardiola remarked sardonically of the FWA award: “This award is always for Liverpool.”

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Disdain

Such is Guardiola’s disdain for individual awards that he forgot Raheem Sterling won this award only last year, becoming the fourth City player to win the writers’ award, though the first in more than 50 years. Curiously, the more prestigious PFA Players Player of the Year award has never yet gone to a City player, though Kevin de Bruyne might still win it this year.

There is one award that only Manchester City players can win: the Manchester City Player of the Year award. Here is where you would expect Silva to have cleaned up, as the best player in the history of City and perhaps of the league itself. Yet he has only once been named City’s Player of the Year, in 2016-17, a less-than-vintage campaign that saw City finish third in the league and go out in the second round of the Champions League. In the same period Sergio Agüero has won it twice, Kevin de Bruyne has won it twice - is it too much to expect that City’s best-ever player might have won it more than once?

Of course, Silva cannot control what people say about him. He can’t help it if Guardiola wants to say: “He is maybe the best in the small spaces. Moving between the lines I have never seen anyone like him.” Silva’s first thought on hearing this was presumably the same as everyone else’s: “Oh really, Pep? what about Messi?” If Guardiola could have been 10 per cent less gushing about the king of the small spaces, he could have sounded 100 per cent more sincere.

What is interesting is why so many pundits have been tempted to make these outlandish claims on Silva's behalf

Neither can Silva do anything about the viral stat posts circulating on social media, showing that he has given more assists and created more chances than anyone else in the league in the decade from 2010-2020 – beating Eden Hazard, Kevin de Bruyne, Mesut Özil, Cesc Fabregas, Wayne Rooney, Christian Eriksen etc. He was also the only one of these players whose Premier League career happened to run from 2010 to 2020; none of the others had been there as long as he had, and most of them had better per-game numbers than he did. The best player in Premier League history shouldn’t need people to argue his case with misleading stats, but then Silva never asked for this.

Absurd

It’s blindingly obvious that Silva is nowhere close to being the best Premier League player, or the best overseas Premier League player, or anything like it. It’s absurd to pretend he was at the same level as players like Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Luis Suárez. Frankly, it’s bordering on insanity to claim that he is better than his team-mate Kevin de Bruyne, who has contributed two goals or assists every three league games during his City career, compared to Silva’s one goal or assist every two. A fairer question would be whether David or Bernardo is the best Silva at City.

What is interesting is why so many pundits have been tempted to make these outlandish claims on Silva’s behalf. Is it because they feel his particular qualities are underrated in the culture of English football and deserve to be boosted? “We know he’s not really the best, but wouldn’t it be great if everybody could be a little bit more like him?” In this he is the successor to Paul Scholes, winner of 11 Premier League titles and zero player of the year awards. Every year pundits hailed Scholes as the best midfielder in the league, yet he never even won one of the two Manchester United club player of the year awards.

It was the same for Scholes as it was for Silva: in any given year there was always somebody better, usually quite a few somebodies. While bigger, faster, stronger players dominated the actual game, Scholes and Silva became the giants of the idealised one. Claiming either of them as the greatest became a way of defining yourself as a romantic: you were saying more about how you wanted the game to be than how it really was. And in a week where the football writers elected Jordan Henderson – king of the big spaces – as their Footballer of the Year, the preposterous overhyping of players like Silva and Scholes seems less a romantic indulgence, more a much-needed corrective.