Top 10 Premier League players to have won f*** all as Harry Kane triumphs
Straightforward rules here. It’s not just the big prizes – your Premier Leagues, your Champions Leagues, the World Cups of this… world – we’re talking here about any trophy.
Won a League One title when you were 17? Disqualified. A Turkish Cup? Barred. Toulon glory with England younglings? You my friend are not welcome here.
Harry Kane has finally got himself off the list by winning the Bundesliga.
10) Eberechi Eze
Glancing towards Europe and seeing his friend and former teammate Michael Olise win the Bundesliga at the first attempt with Bayern Munich may well have contributed to Eze reportedly asking to leave Crystal Palace this summer.
A prodigiously talented player, Eze has spent his career so far at QPR and Palace, who have not been prolific trophy-hunters, though the latter could absolutely put that right in the FA Cup final.
Eze has recently won PogChamps 6, an online amateur chess tournament organized by Chess.com. But we suspect the FA Cup trophy may be worth a little more.
9) Gary Kelly
As Leeds return to the Premier League, it’s worth remembering that they were here for rather a long time before, and Gary Kelly played in a club-record 325 top-flight games for his beloved Whites. And won absolutely f*** all.
Kelly was an excellent right-back and was named in two PFA Premier League teams of the year in 1993/94 and 1999/2000 but those Leeds teams never won a damned thing. The closest he came was in 1995/96, when Leeds reached the League Cup final only to be battered 3-0 by Aston Villa.
Stayed with Leeds throughout his career, which robbed him of any tangible glory. Unlike his nephew Ian Harte, who had the good sense to win a couple of Championships in the twilight of his career.
8) Trevor Sinclair
The recipient of 150 hours of unpaid work, a driving disqualification and a £500 fine for calling a police officer a “white ****” in 2018, Trevor Sinclair never actually won a club trophy – despite being able to claim more Premier League assists than Mikel Arteta, Roberto Firmino and David Ginola.
He has won a Goal of the Season award for that overhead kick and finished as runner-up in the Hammer of the Year award to Paolo Di Canio, but club honours somehow evaded him at Blackpool, QPR, West Ham, Manchester City, Cardiff City and Lancaster City. But would he really swap a place in Blackpool’s Hall of Fame for a League Cup medal? Yes, of course he would.
As it stands, Sinclair is in a very elite group of England World Cup quarter-finalists who have never actually won a trophy; even sodding Danny Mills won a League Cup.
7) Kieron Dyer
The proud owner of 33 England caps and yet the prodigious Kieron Dyer never finished higher than third in the league nor played in an actual cup final, having joined Newcastle just after their back-to-back FA Cup final defeats to Arsenal and Manchester United. That under-achievement – and it is an under-achievement considering his natural ability – feels apt as Dyer’s story is one marked by persistent injury and foolishness.
Dyer was so desperate for trophies that he entered I’m a Celebrity in 2015. Although he lasted longer than Chris Eubank and Tony Hadley, he was no Vicky Pattison (who is?); he came fourth. Foiled again.
As Barney Ronay wrote on his retirement in 2013: ‘He never won a trophy or any individual award of note. He leaves effectively no mark at all, his most memorable act on a football pitch being punched by a team-mate in 2005. His career is, in outline, a modern sporting absurdity.’
Oh and Lee Bowyer won a League Cup as a player and League One promotion as a manager. Sorry fella.
6) Leighton Baines
Sliding doors and all that: Leighton Baines came close to joining Manchester United in 2013. Had he been sold, he might have had a medal collection to mirror Marouane Fellaini’s haul of FA Cup, League Cup and Europa League; instead, he has three times come close to claiming a medal and has emerged with jack all.
He was in the Wigan side that finished second in the Championship and then reached a League Cup final in which they were comprehensively beaten by Manchester United. He then joined Everton and reached the FA Cup final in 2009 only to lose to Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea.
“During my time and in recent seasons we have just been beneath, we have come close a few times with cup finals, semi-finals, trips to Wembley but falling at the final hurdle,” said Baines in the summer of 2017 as he allowed himself to dream after a window of significant spending. It never happened and he retired potless.
5) Danny Rose
For good or bad, the careers of Kyle Walker and Danny Rose will forever be entwined and therefore inevitably compared. England international full-backs born in Yorkshire in 1990, both of whom realised their potential in the same precocious Tottenham side. But while one flew the coop and won everything there is to win, the other stayed and stayed before eventually joining Watford.
It is not for the want of trying. Rose did his best to engineer a move in the summer of 2017. “Time is running out and I do want to win trophies,” he said, presumably wary of becoming the next Trevor Sinclair or Kieron Dyer. “I don’t want to play football for 15 years and not have one trophy or one medal. Sorry, that’s not what I am about. I wouldn’t be happy with that. I want to win something.”
The words of Walker – “it’s like trying to describe the birth of your children, you can’t. And you can’t describe the feeling of winning trophies, either” – will hardly help. His former teammate has added a gazillion pieces of silverware at Manchester City. Rose’s Champions League runner-up medal looks lovely next to its 2015 League Cup counterpart.
4) Ollie Watkins
Yeah, we were surprised too. Generally players with Watkins’ kind of route to the top have won something, somewhere along the way. But no. And that circuitous route taken meant he was never around to harvest age-group honours with England.
Watkins might not yet have quite Kane calibre near-misses, but he’s not without his hard-luck stories. He was at Brentford for the play-off heartbreak in 2020 but had left for Villa by the time those demons were exorcised the following season.
Villa are on a steep improvement curve right now, but the Europa Conference was the first time they’ve come close to winning anything in Watkins’ time. And they f***ed that really quite badly in the end when it did appear there for the winning. If West Ham can do it, there really is no excuse for Villa, a proper team under a proper manager.
But then that was another near miss, and Watkins embarrassingly failed to win the Champions League at the first time of asking.
3) Dele
This is not the kind of list on which we should find a player previously touted as a £100m-plus target for Real Madrid and Barcelona. And yet here Dele sits, driving and diving in search of a first trophy, having claimed promotion but no League One title with MK Dons.
Like Rose, Dele has twice been voted in the Premier League’s best XI by his peers and yet Tottenham have come up short when it comes to actual silverware.
Made a tentative return from Mourinho-inflicted wilderness under Ryan Mason’s friendly caretakership at Spurs but early promise under Nuno Espirito Santo proved as fleeting as the manager’s. Nuno was gone by November, and by the end of January Dele’s Spurs career was over as well.
Would that boost his silverware chances? Logically it would be near impossible to reduce them. Except he went to Frank Lampard’s Everton.
“He’s a young player, but he’s not a proven player. At the moment, he hasn’t won anything,” were the chastening words of England manager Gareth Southgate in August 2017. Little has changed, apart from the ‘young player’ part. Even a loan move to Besiktas, a club you’d think has a decent chance of winning some stuff, couldn’t deliver a trophy. And Dele’s own form there was horrible.
Now at Como and increasingly likely to retire without a single gong.
2) Stan Collymore
As Daniel Storey wrote in 2017: ‘England’s very own nearly man. There are many supporters of Nottingham Forest and Liverpool who will talk long into the night about Collymore’s natural talent, but his three England caps and lack of any major career honours is testament to the problems that bubbled under the service.’ As IS the fact that he scored fewer Premier League goals than Dean Holdsworth.
Collymore did at least reach one major final, but he lasted only 74 minutes of the absolutely rotten 1996 FA Cup showpiece before watching Eric Cantona score the winner for Manchester United from the bench. The irony is that Collymore had seemingly been close to joining United the summer before only for Sir Alex Ferguson to opt for Andy Cole (five Premier League medals, a Champions League and two FA Cups).
1) Matt Le Tissier
When Southampton pair Matt Le Tisser and Alan Shearer sat in tears having ended up on the losing side of the Full Members Cup clash with Nottingham Forest in front of almost 68,000 at Wembley, they must have talked about how their chance would come again.
For Shearer it would, with the Premier League being claimed three years later. For Le Tissier, that would sadly be as close as he would ever come to glory. He would never finish higher than seventh and Saints would reach an FA Cup final the year after he left .
Easy to forget now his main purpose in life is being a fully-fledged tinfoil-hat conspiracy rabbithole lunatic who believes the England manager would be too “woke” to seek his advice on taking penalties, but he really was an astonishingly brilliant player. Not that you’ll read about that in the MSM. And despite his current rage against the assorted conspiracies that control our lives, Le Tiss remains pretty happy with his playing career.
“I’ve no regrets whatsoever,” he told FourFourTwo in 2010. “From seven years old I had an ambition to be a professional footballer and I had an ambition to play for England, and I fulfilled both at Southampton. Yes, I knew I probably wouldn’t win any honours, but when you’re at a club that size, staying in the Premier League for 16 years gave me as much pleasure as winning a medal if I’d gone somewhere else. No-one expected us to stay up there for that long. I was so chuffed to be a part of that.”