Running each day until the new season begins, The Premier League 60 is designed to reflect and honour the greatest players to have graced and illuminated the English top flight in the modern era, as voted for by our writers.
You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order (they didn’t), but we hope you’ll enjoy their stories. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to the series here.
When David Silva made his debut in English football, 10 years and two weeks ago, most people spent the day talking about Joe Hart. Roberto Mancini had just decided to make Hart first choice ahead of Shay Given and he was the star, keeping Tottenham Hotspur out with a string of acrobatic saves.
City escaped with a 0-0 draw but Silva was largely anonymous. The football was too fast and frantic for him to exert any influence. At one point, he got squashed like a fly by Tom Huddlestone and, as he sat dazed and outraged on the floor, extending his arms out pleading to Andre Marriner for a free-kick, the game carried on blithely around him.
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Silva had come to England with a reputation. He was brilliant at Euro 2008 and also involved as Spain won the World Cup in South Africa earlier that summer. But whether he could cut it over here, in the Premier League, was another question entirely. After that first afternoon, the English media were not convinced. “The newcomer from Spain must have spent the first half-hour wondering if he was going to spend the whole of his City career seeing so little of the ball,” wondered one newspaper.
(Photo: Clint Hughes/Getty Images)
It did not feel, watching Silva that day, as if this was the opening sequence of a spell that would change English football forever. Ten years and four Premier League winner’s medals later, that is exactly what Silva has done.
But then Silva is a player whose work has always been best viewed from a wider perspective. Watch him on television and he gets outshone by his brighter team-mates. Watch him on a highlights package — even worse, on your phone — and he will barely feature. But watch him live and you get a sense of his control of the ball. Watch him from high up in the stands and see his mastery of angles and space, like a painting that covers a whole wall, which you need to take three steps back from to appreciate. Watch Silva for not just one season but 10 and you will get a sense of what he has achieved.
City have had individual players whose contributions have been more immediately eye-catching than Silva. In Silva’s first two years in Manchester, Carlos Tevez was their match-winner, at least for the time when he wasn’t on strike. During the middle years of the decade, Yaya Toure became the most complete midfielder in the league, able to do things that Silva never could, whether charging forward with the ball or whipping it into the top corner from distance. In recent years, Kevin De Bruyne has become City’s dominant midfielder, again with a physicality and range that Silva could not match. And then, of course, there is Sergio Aguero, who arrived at City one year after Silva and has 254 goals for the club.
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Each of these team-mates has been used as an argument against Silva: that he was never City’s best player for any specific period or any season in which they won the league. That because Silva only won one City fans’ player of the season award — three fewer than Richard Dunne — he could never be seen as truly elite. It’s a strange way to look at football, to think that the single unit of the season is so important that it is our only way of analysing a good player. Yes, being the best player in a title-winning season is good. But being the best player in a title-winning era is better.
(Photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
If you want to talk about moments, there are plenty of those. Silva only scored 77 goals for City but he scored goals that nobody else could have scored. Goals that relied on the precision of his first touch, his ability to play the game at his speed, even in the most frantic penalty area with opponents charging one way or the other.
Take Blackpool away, October 2010, the kind of away game some thought Silva would never fancy. He got the ball on the edge of the box from a short James Milner free-kick. He shaped to shoot and sent Stephen Crainey charging out of the box, trying to block a shot that never happened. Nobody expects the same move twice, so he shaped to shoot a second time, this time sending David Vaughan sliding across the pitch. As Crainey recovered and tried to knock him over, Silva kept his balance and opened his body to shoot for the third time. This time it was a double-bluff, as he bent the ball around the outside of Charlie Adam and into the net.
Mesmerising stuff from @ManCity's magician 😍#GoalOfTheDay pic.twitter.com/yyP5Ai7bAM
— Premier League (@premierleague) July 22, 2019
There was another goal, almost as good, at Upton Park in October 2014, another goal so classically Silva that no other player would have even attempted it. With the ball to the right of the box, he feinted to go down the line, sending Mark Noble hurtling almost off the pitch. Silva drifted inside instead, darting through a gap between Stewart Downing and Alex Song and curling his shot past Winston Reid and in.
Then there was Queens Park Rangers, November 2011. Edin Dzeko broke down the left and fired a low cross to Silva, running into the box from the right, surrounded by defenders. With his first touch, surrounded by chaos, Silva knocked the ball gently forward into his path. He sent Alejandro Faurlin the wrong way, left Danny Gabbidon rooted to the spot and Anton Ferdinand trying to change direction in his own six-yard box. While everyone else in Loftus Road tried to realise what had happened, Silva strode forward onto the ball and struck it past Paddy Kenny.
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But Silva’s game was about more than goals, and so to use them to prove his worth would be to miss the point. Take another step back. Silva got 140 assists for City in those 10 years and many of them showcased the very best of his vision, timing and control.
Against Bournemouth in August 2017, he rolled a straight pass through to Gabriel Jesus that managed to split the pair of Dan Gosling and Andrew Surman in midfield first, then Nathan Ake and Tyrone Mings at centre-back, leaving Jesus with a simple finish.
Against Wigan Athletic in September 2011, he received the ball on the halfway line, with Martin Atkinson right in front of him and three opponents charging in. He trapped the ball, dragged it back, drawing the tackle from Ronnie Stam, knocked it forward, skipped past Stam, and was just quick enough that when Ben Watson slid in to tackle him, he took out James McCarthy instead. That was the hard part, and rolling the ball between Adrian Lopez and Gary Caldwell for Aguero to score was the easy bit.
One more for completeness. Silva, playing at Old Trafford in October 2011, standing 40 yards from his own goal and receiving a panicked defensive header from Chris Smalling. Silva flicked the ball up in the air with his left boot, steadied himself, then volleyed it diagonally across the pitch, between the retreating Smalling and beyond the covering Rio Ferdinand. By the time Dzeko collected it, he was just far enough beyond both defenders to shoot past David De Gea.
But even the assists can’t tell the whole story. Take another step back and look at some of his 90-minute performances. No Manchester City player has ever played as well at Old Trafford as Silva’s four best performances there. Not just the 6-1 win in 2011, but the 3-0 win on the way to the 2013-14 league title, the 2-1 win in Pep Guardiola’s first season or the 2-0 win that helped to secure the 2018-19 title.
His best performance of all might even have come in defeat. In April 2014, City were 2-0 down at Anfield and Silva seized control of the second half, dragging City back to 2-2 before Philippe Coutinho won it at the end.
You could spend all day going through Silva’s best displays for City. He played 436 games for them — the club’s 10th most appearances ever and the only player from this century in the top 18 — almost all of them to an extremely high standard. But even then, the picture is bigger than just a list of his performances and demands a broader view. Silva’s triumph, the reason he is an all-time Premier League great, is that he solved the fundamental challenge of football.
(Photo: Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)
Every team at every level is an attempt to turn 11 disaggregated individuals into one unified whole. Principally, this is the point of the manager, but the genius of Silva is that he could do that almost by himself. He was the glue or the gel in the team, the rug that tied the room together. He knew where his team-mates were, what they were trying to do, and how he could help them to achieve it. Every player was better for having Silva on the pitch alongside them.
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That is why it makes no sense to hold up the more individualistic contributions of Toure or Aguero as a way to diminish Silva. Because Silva’s work was a necessary condition for every other player to flourish. Everything good that City did over the last 10 years was down to him. City would never have created enough under Mancini without Silva. They would not have been able to pick teams apart under Manuel Pellegrini without him. And no player understood Guardiola’s theories and plans better than Silva, the man he could build around in the middle of the pitch.
In every City side Silva played in, he was the artistic director, the silent leader, the man who turned his colleagues into a team. What more can you ask of a footballer than that?
(Main image created for The Athletic by Tom Slator)
