Famous football players

6. Karim Benzema (Al-Ittihad)

It would be tempting to say Karim Benzema enjoyed the ultimate Indian summer in 2022/23 but in reality, he simply did what he has always done: lead the line, score goals, win trophies, repeat.
Everything Real Madrid have achieved in the last 14 years has been achieved under Benzema's watch. He has not always been treated with respect, Real Madrid have tried to replace him with plenty of strikers over the last decade, but nobody has been able to fill the No.9 role quite like him.
Benzema gets through a remarkable amount of dirty work in 90 minutes. He digs deep and acts as a wide/inside forward's dream, the ultimate pivot point to build attacks around. Benzema is happy playing with his back to goal and that often proves just as dangerous to opponents as bearing down on them directly. Play a 'one', make a darting run and you'll always receive the 'two'. He is a complete striker who finally received the praise his play deserved before exiting for Saudi Arabia.

5. Erling Haaland (Man City)

Haaland has normalised the abnormal. Arguably, the Norse titan's only flaw in 2022/23 was setting the bar insurmountably high from the very start. Between the start of the season and the end of 2022, Haaland found the net 22 times in just 15 Premier League games. For context, that total would have won the Golden Boot in seven Premier League seasons. He cooled off slightly after Christmas, but still played at an extraordinary level.
His physicality is unrivalled, his finishing ability – including improvised, instinctive finishing by any means necessary – is staggering and he boasts a turn of pace that few in the Premier League could match. The best bit? We're mostly likely yet to see Haaland at his absolute peak. The next few years should be explosive and if he proves his consistency over several years, he will sit No.1 in this list without a doubt.

4. Harry Kane (Bayern Munich)

The relative mystique of foreign leagues can often inflate a player's reputation as we are fed their many highlights and rarely see their 4/10s, the days they'd rather not remember, their misses and their failures. The Premier League, in all its hyper-exposed, tribal glory, is often not a place where rival fans can appreciate world class talent when they see it. It feels like in 2023, we finally hit that peak with Kane. And then he left. For a foreign league.
Kane's season-end tallies remain consistent around the 30-goal mark with a bundle of assists and uncountable contributions setting him above almost every other striker in the world.
His finishing is exemplary, his positioning to accommodate for a lack of raw pace is second-to-none, though his unique selling point is his uncanny playmaking ability, to pick a pass from deep, to swing a cross in, to play the No.10 and No.9 roles simultaneously and effectively and he achieved all of that in a team that, with the greatest respect, was simply not at his level and rarely has been near his standard. He is deadly for club and country, and started life in Munich without skipping a beat.