10 Patrick Vieira
Nationality French
British club Arsenal (1996-2005)

The lowdown
Arsene Wenger’s first signing, and arguably his most important, Vieira arrived as a gangling, awkward unknown from AC Milan’s fringes and his £3.5 million fee seemed extravagant. But within a season he had established himself as the fulcrum of the new Arsenal, with a rare combination of elegance, power and an uncanny ability to retain possession in the face of allcomers. His personal duel with Roy Keane was,
over many years, one of the Premier League’s most enthralling sideshows.
Finest hour
Captaining Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ to the title through
a whole league campaign unbeaten in 2003-04.
He said
“I love the physical battles in England. In Italy there are too many free-kicks for small offences. I even miss Roy Keane.” DB

9 Jurgen Klinsmann
Nationality German
British club Tottenham Hotspur (1994-95, 1997-98)

The lowdown
He arrived in England a pantomime villain and left
a conquering hero. This was no mean feat; English disaffection centred on the import’s reputation for diving and feigning injury. One writer wrote a column entitled ‘Why I Hate Jurgen Klinsmann’. An acrobatic header and some self-deprecating ‘dive’ celebrations later and the same writer was frantically penning a new column, this time headlined ‘Why I Love Jurgen Klinsmann’. The blonde bomber left a year later amid controversy, claiming a contractual clause that chairman Alan Sugar seemed unaware of. He later returned to single-handedly save Spurs from relegation.
Finest hour
Steering Spurs to an FA Cup quarter-final victory at Anfield. He was applauded from the pitch by The Kop.
They said
“He never ceased to amaze me” – Teddy Sheringham. MA

8 Cristiano Ronaldo
Nationality Portuguese
British club Manchester United (2003-)
The lowdown
The 30-year search for the new George Best ended shortly before his death when the Ulsterman finally anointed Cristiano Ronaldo. “Many players have been compared to me,” said Best, “but this is the first time it actually flatters me.”
That was two and a half years ago. Now, Sir Alex Ferguson believes Ronaldo can lift himself still further, onto the plinth reserved for the game’s two greatest players. “At 22, he has the same skill factor as Maradona and Pelé,” Ferguson has said. “Cristiano
is getting to the level of best player in the world. Thereafter, it is up to others to decide whether he is as good as Maradona and Pelé.”
Signed from Sporting Lisbon at 18 for £12.24 million in 2003, he immediately displayed his raw talent, but blemished his reputation with culturally unnecessary stepovers, dives and sulky expressions that even Sir Bobby Charlton called “embarrassing”.
After three seasons Ronaldo could have cut and run when he briefly became a pantomime villain after the last World Cup, but he stayed to enjoy the season of his life – scoring 23 goals, winning the Premier League title and both domestic Player of the Year awards. Last season he won both awards again, scoring 42 goals, 31 of them in the Premier League . As Ronaldo has said: “Maybe I’m too good.”
Finest hour
The free-kick that defied the laws of football physics against Portsmouth in January 2008.
They said
“Just like Michael Jordan, [Cristiano Ronaldo] been blessed with a genius that has never been seen before” – Carlos Queiroz. SP

7 Ossie Ardiles
Nationality Argentinian
British clubs Spurs (1978-88), Blackburn (1988), QPR (1988-89), Swindon (1989-91)
The lowdown
Arsenal fans owe a great debt to Ossie Ardiles. Prior to his arrival at the enemy’s gates in 1978 , Scottish internationals in Division One were regarded as exotic.
On the pitch, the 1978 World Cup winner was a revelation. Alongside Glenn Hoddle, Ardiles’s quick thinking oiled a Spurs engine room buzzing with creativity. Tottenham were soon transformed from mid-table strugglers to trophy winners, claiming the FA Cup in 1981 and 1982 and the UEFA Cup in 1984.
Finest hour
The 1981 FA Cup replay against Manchester City. Despite Ricardo Villa’s two strikes – including that goal – Ardiles orchestrated the Spurs midfield and secured his Wembley dream.
He said
“Ricky and I were nervous when we began but I fell in love with the club and it is still my favourite.” MA

6 Peter Schmeichel
Nationality Danish
British clubs Man United (1991-99), Aston Villa (2001-02), Man City (2002-03)
The lowdown
After arriving from Brondby for just £530,000 in 1991 the Dane, who kept 180 clean sheets in 398 games, would provide the foundation for five league titles, three FA Cups and the Champions League during eight years at Old Trafford. But he was always more than just a shot-stopper. He was a dominator, prowling his box like a territorial tiger and gobbling up crosses; a motivator, constantly haranguing all within earshot; a quarterback whose long throws could begin attacks. While Schmeichel’s status as the greatest keeper of the Premiership era is beyond doubt, it doesn’t quite do him justice. Sir Alex Ferguson believes he deserves something even grander: “A better goalkeeper never played the game.”
Finest hour
Repeatedly repelling Newcastle in a season-defining 1-0 win for United at St James’ Park in March 1996.
They said
“The bargain of the century” – Sir Alex Ferguson.

5 Gianfranco Zola
Nationality Italian
British club Chelsea (1996-2003)
The lowdown
Some foreign players, for all their skill, can rub opposing fans up the wrong way. Klinsmann was seen as a little theatrical, Henry slightly smug and Cantona could be just plain villainous. Gianfranco Zola also had all the skill, but played with such boyish enthusiasm that you couldn’t help but love him. In his eight years at Chelsea he was an example to all, always playing the game with a smile on his face. Chelsea fans voted him their best ever a few years ago, and there aren’t many who would change that opinion now.
Finest hour
The near-post flick against Norwich in 2002 when, seemingly nonchalantly, he back-heeled a whizzing corner into the net.
He said
“[In England] the fans go to the a stadium as if they were going to church. The match is a festival, the chance to give a day in good humour.” LM

4 Henrik Larsson
Nationality Swedish
British clubs Celtic (1997-2004);
Manchester United (2007)
The lowdown
Celtic’s “King of Kings” arrived in 1997 in a £650,000 deal from Feyenoord. Pound for pound, this makes Larsson unquestionably one of the most successful imports ever to grace British football. But while 173 goals in 224 games for Celtic tells its own astonishing story, his contribution not just to Celtic but to the Scottish game was a unique and wholly positive one. Last year’s three-month cameo at Old Trafford, along with the Champions League winner’s medal he won with Barcelona in 2006, firmly nailed the coffin lid on all that “he can only score in Scotland” nonsense.
Finest hour
His core characteristics were best illustrated when he won the Golden Boot in 2001 with a tally of 35 goals – the season after an eight-month lay-off following
a truly awful leg break against Lyon.
They said
“I always admired him. He’s just a great player” –
Sir Alex Ferguson. GT

3 Thierry Henry
Nationality French
British clubs Arsenal (1999-2007)
The lowdown
The vision of Thierry Henry in full flight, drifting in from the left and suddenly shifting up into turbo mode and bearing down on goal was perhaps the scariest sight defenders in the Premier League have ever had to face.
Arguably no other player in the English game’s history has managed to combine grace and athleticism to such devastating effect. Of Arsene Wenger’s many feats of reinvention, his decision to redeploy Henry from misfit wideman to centre-forward was surely his greatest coup. During his eight seasons at Arsenal, Henry scored 226 goals, shattering Ian Wright’s club record, and set the bar at a level that is unlikely to ever be matched – not bad for a player who admitted he “needed to be retaught everything about the art of the striker” after a barren 10-game start to his Gunners career.
Excluding a final season truncated by injury, he never scored fewer than 22 goals in a campaign. Moreover, so many of them were of breathtaking beauty or match-turning and season-shaping importance. Though he was never a born captain, and struggled to accept players who were unable to play on his level, he was remarkably unselfish for a centre-forward and clocked up a huge number of assists.
An unprecedented hat-trick of Football Writers’ Association Player of the Year awards underlined his position as the most consistent virtuoso since the new millennium. And had justice been done in 2004, he and not Ronaldinho would have been officially recognised by FIFA as the world’s best player, not least for his inspirational contribution, including 39 goals, to a campaign in which Arsenal’s “Invincibles” went the entire league campaign unbeaten.

Finest hour
A complete performance, that included two goals – one a trademark dazzler – as Arsenal demolished Inter Milan 5-1 at the San Siro, to avoid a Champions League exit against all odds.

They said
“He could take a ball in the middle of park and score a goal that no one else in the world could” – Arsene Wenger. DB

2 Dennis Bergkamp
Nationality Dutch
British clubs Arsenal (1995-2006)
The lowdown
Dennis Bergkamp’s arrival in North London from Inter Milan in 1995 –
the one significant act of Bruce Rioch’s managerial tenure – was a watershed moment, not just for Arsenal but for English football. He was one of the
first true “A-List” players to arrive from the continent, ahead of the Sky TV bonanza; that he should come to a club tainted by a reputation for dourness was a major coup.
Of the many foreigners who have brightened the British game, perhaps only Eric Cantona and Gianfranco
Zola can have such a transformational effect on the fortunes of their teams. Bergkamp scored plenty of goals – 120 in 424 games – but created even more, racking up 166 official assists. A chance first encounter with Ian Wright at a service station on the M25 just after he signed for Arsenal was the start of an unlikely and beautiful partnership; after Wrighty, Bergkamp went on to form equally potent tandems with Nicolas Anelka and then Thierry Henry. As Henry realised to his cost once his foil retired – and thereafter refused to let his team-mates forget – the Dutchman was quite simply irreplaceable.
His 11 seasons at Arsenal took him to 37 years of age, and throughout he was an exemplary professional whose presence helped pedestrian colleagues raise their game. According to Arsene Wenger, he was the archetypal No.10, orchestrating play in the space between centre and front line, and bringing a previously unseen fluidity to the Arsenal attack. His soft feet, magical range of passing and ability to conjure goals of enduring brilliance – who could ever forget, for example, his brilliant flick, twist and half-volley against Newcastle? – made him unique.

Finest hour
His “perfect” hat-trick against Leicester City at Filbert Street in August 1997 – possibly the best ever scored (it earned a unique 1-2-3 in Match of the Day’s Goal of the Month).

They said
“If Ryan Giggs is worth £20 million, Bergkamp is worth £100 million” –Marco van Basten. DB

1 Eric Cantona
Nationality French
British clubs Leeds United (1991-92);
Manchester United (1992-96)


The lowdown
It was, quite simply, a marriage made in heaven – if you happened to be a Manchester United fan, or if your name wasn’t Matthew Simmons.
Eric Cantona’s arrival at Old Trafford in November 1992 arguably sent Alex Ferguson’s slow-burning Red revolution into hyper-drive, put the grand in grandeur and heralded an age of artistry, pomp and swagger not witnessed at Old Trafford since the halcyon days of Best, Law
and Charlton. Twenty-six years of title-questing thirst were slaked within six months of Cantona’s shock trans-Pennine switch from Leeds United, where l’enfant terrible of French football had spent just nine months.
Under Ferguson’s tutelage, however, he found his spiritual home. Over the next four-and-a-half years, Cantona was at the hub of a further three Premier League successes, including league and FA Cup doubles in 1993-94 and 1995-96, before disappearing as swiftly as he’d appeared, retiring from football in 1997, aged just 31, to pursue a career as an actor and beach footballer.
If outsiders found Le Roi, as he was dubbed by the Stretford End, hard to love, even the coldest heart had to admire the audacity of a man who wore his collar up like a footballing James Dean and rambled like an existentialist philosopher.
What Leeds United’s chief executive Bill Fotherby was thinking was anyone’s guess when he agreed to ship out Cantona just six months after the Frenchman had helped the Whites to their first title success since Don Revie’s 1970s heyday. Fotherby had telephoned Man United chairman Martin Edwards to inquire about
re-signing Denis Irwin. Ferguson, in the office at the time, must have wet himself with glee when his hastily scribbled note ‘Ask him about Eric Cantona’ met with approving noises at the other end.
Cantona wasted little time showing his flair: the goal he made – for Irwin – in United’s 4-1 win at Spurs in January 1993 featured a pass that took out eight defenders in one go, sending John Motson into a fit of hyperbole – “This man… is playing a game of his own.”
Breathtakingly brilliant, he was equally capable of leaving you gasping on other fronts. His infamous kung fu kick earned him a $43,000 fine, a 10-month ban and 120 hours’ community service in lieu of a two-week jail sentence. Being an iconoclast, he scored on his return, from the penalty spot against Liverpool.
A typical Cantona moment came as United sank Sunderland 5-0 in his last season. His first goal from open play in three months, a sublime chip, was followed by a regal 360-degree pirouette. Five months later he’d gone – and rare is the man who calls time on his own United career.

Finest hour
The volleyed winner against Liverpool in the 1996 FA Cup Final was perhaps his most memorable moment, but the influence he had on the emerging talents of Giggs, Scholes, Beckham and Gary Neville helped create the modern-day football superpower that is Manchester United.

He said
“I’m so proud the fans still sing my name, but
I fear tomorrow they will stop. I fear it because
I love it. And everything you love, you fear you will lose.” SM