This award dont mean shit tho
Martin Keown on PFA voting from 2013 proving what a mess the whole thing is.
I was the PFA representative at Arsenal for five years but gathering the players’ nominations for the awards was always a nightmare.
People were not interested, couldn’t be bothered to sit down and write out their nominations and I spent far too much time trying to pin people down. Out of a squad of 22, you’d do well to get half that number of nominations. It used to amaze me how uninterested a lot of the players were.
To get people interested, I would eventually write up a shortlist of players in each position on a whiteboard and try to get people to choose. In most cases though, I’d pick my team and a lot of the others would just copy it. For some, I filled out their forms for them and they’d just sign at the bottom.
Some of them didn’t like the fact they couldn’t vote for team-mates, while others would make sure they didn’t put in a rival for a place in the team of the year.
The English players took most interest because they had grown up following it. Last season there were six Englishmen in the team of the season, a surprising amount.
The same lack of interest applied to the awards evening. There were lots of players from outside the top flight there but not from the Premier League. Arsenal sent people when Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp won but there wasn’t a huge presence in other years. Other clubs were the same although all players are invited.
The PFA do well to have these awards and do a lot of good work but there are improvements that can be made. The timing of it all is not great. The voting forms come out not long after Christmas, when there is too much football left to play. Usually the best players rise to the top at the key moments in the final weeks of the season.
I always based my vote on who played best against me, who gave me the most trouble. So I felt it was odd that players from all leagues were voting on the best player in the Premier League. How did they really know who the best player is? And why are they denied awards for players in their own league?
Players in the Championship should vote for a player and team of the year in their league and the same for League One and Two. It makes sense. Otherwise you end up with the Premier League player of the year being chosen mostly by players who haven’t faced him.
Comment from /u/ModricTHFC /r/soccer thread