9 great footballers who somehow have a winners medal

Steven Gerrard, Gareth Bale, Gianfranco Zola, Luis Suarez and Matt Le Tissier are among the Premier League legends who never got their hands on the trophy – but this lot have.

Winning the Premier League is an incredible achievement, but some winners can be more thankful for being in the right place at the right time than anything else.

We’ve identified eight great players who have a Premier League winner’s medal to their name without having made much – if any – contribution at all.

Dion Dublin

Going back to the inaugural 1992-93 Premier League season for this one, a broken leg reduced Dublin to a role on the periphery in Manchester United’s first league title under Sir Alex Ferguson.

He did score in early the campaign, following his £1million move from Cambridge United, but a short while later he suffered the injury that ruled him out of action for six months.

By the time he returned for the run-in, he’d fallen behind Eric Cantona in the pecking order and ended up with just seven appearances totalling 319 minutes.

Dublin wasn’t originally given a winner’s medal, but he eventually got one after special dispensation. He remained at Old Trafford when they retained the title the following season but made even fewer appearances and didn’t officially receive a medal.

“The Premier League trophy means a lot to me, but I only played nine games for that trophy,” Dublin reminisced after being inducted into Cambridge’s Hall of Fame in 2017.

“The (1990 Division Four) play-off final medal against Chesterfield means more to me because I like to earn things with blood, sweat and tears.

“I was here for four years and I got this medal because of what the manager put me through. I scored the only goal in front of 27,000 people at Wembley and I’d take this every single time over that one.”

Of course, after leaving Manchester United, Dublin went on to prove himself a better-than-decent Premier League centre-forward. He scored over 100 goals in the top flight and memorably claimed the Golden Boot in 1997-98.

Alan Smith

Leeds United sat on top of the Premier League on New Year’s Day in 2002. At that point it looked as though there was every chance David O’Leary’s nascent young side would challenge for league titles.

Two and a half years later, after an unthinkable financial collapse, Leeds were back in the Championship and their fan favourite homegrown star Smith was sold to – shock horror – hated rivals Manchester United.

Smith’s first couple of years at Old Trafford coincided with a relatively fallow period for Ferguson’s Red Devils amid the rise of Chelsea under Jose Mourinho.

After struggling with injuries and a failed experiment at becoming Roy Keane’s successor in midfield, he returned to his preferred role of forward following the sale of Ruud Van Nistelrooy to Real Madrid in 2006.

But he’d fallen down the pecking order by then, his role in the 2006-07 title amounted to nine appearances (six starts), zero goals, one relatively inconsequential assist against Bolton and just 480 minutes played.

Like Dublin, he fell game one appearance short of the threshold but received a winner’s medal via special dispensation.

Gerard Pique

The La Masia graduate is one of the most decorated centre-backs in the history of football, but he didn’t have all that much to do with Manchester United’s 2007-08 Premier League title as he started to emerge as a youngster.

Pique made nine appearances (five starts) in the league that year, amounting to 480 minutes. While he wasn’t a key player on the pitch, he learned lessons that stayed with him for a lifetime.

“I remember we were in the changing room at Old Trafford and my phone started vibrating from inside my trouser pocket,” he later recalled in an interview with FourFourTwo.

“Keano could hear the vibrations and went crazy trying to find out who the phone belonged to.

“That’s who he was. Before we beat Celtic 1-0 last season, I noticed him by the side of the pitch as a pundit as we went out to warm up. I hid my face with my hand because he still scares me. I was 26 years old, and I was sh*tting myself.”

Barcelona paid his £5million buy-back clause at the end of that season and the rest is history.

Juliano Belletti

Deco, Alex, Daniel Sturridge, Yuri Zhirkov were all players we considered including from Carlo Ancelotti’s free-scoring 2009-10 Chelsea side.

By no means were any of them leading lights of that title-winning side, but they all contributed enough to consider themselves worthy of a winner’s medal.

With Belletti, we’d say it’s borderline. The Brazilian, who famously scored Barcelona’s winner in the 2006 Champions League final, made 11 appearances but only four starts and was almost entirely absent for the run-in. Apologies if you’re reading this, Juliano.

Juan Cuadrado

The Colombian winger boasts no fewer than six Scudetti and four Coppa Italia from his time with Juventus and Inter, while even a short stint on the fringes at Chelsea yielded silverware. Some players are just in the right place at the right time.

Delve deeper into Cuadrado’s stats, though, and it’s probably fair to assess that Jose Mourinho’s Blues would almost certainly have won the title without him in 2014-15.

He arrived midway through the campaign, by which point Chelsea had already built up a comfortable lead, and notched zero goals and zero assists in the run-in – with just four starts from 12 appearances and 312 minutes played. Come the summer he was already back in Italy.

Gokhan Inler

Believe it or not, Inler’s signing for Leicester City received more fanfare than N’Golo Kante’s in the summer of 2015.

He was a proven, experienced Switzerland international with bags of experience, coming straight from a decent Napoli side to presumably fill the void left by cult hero veteran Esteban Cambiasso.

Everyone knows what Kante went on to do at the King Power, while Inler barely made any impact at all. He made just five appearances totalling 195 minutes in the Foxes’ 2015-16 title miracle and was promptly moved on to Besiktas.

READ: 8 great players who only have a Champions League winners medal on a technicality

Brahim Diaz

Unlike fellow one-time Manchester City academy starlet Jadon Sancho, Diaz actually stuck around long enough to make a handful of appearances for the first team with five Premier League cameos in their 2017-18 title-winning campaign – the first of six under Pep Guardiola.

The Morocco international just about met the threshold for a winner’s medal, but all five of his outings were off the bench and amounted to just 50 minutes of action. When we say technicality here, we really mean it.

Since departing City as a teenager, Diaz has gone on to win a further three league titles in Italy and Spain and played much more of an active role in those.

Cole Palmer

Another one that got away for City, Wythenshawe’s very own received minutes in each of the club’s last four title-winning campaigns but he only met the threshold for a winner’s medal in the treble 2022-23 season.

That year he did make 14 Premier League appearances for Guardiola’s all-conquering juggernaut, but 12 of those were from the bench and both starts came after the title had been wrapped up.

In all competitions, he notched one goal and one assist in 850 minutes of action. Who knew they had such a diamond on their hands?

Christian Norgaard

Alright, “great” might be pushing it a little bit but Norgaard is a very solid Premier League midfielder – he proved that over the course of six great seasons playing a key role in Brentford consolidating their top-flight status.

Then he went to Arsenal, made a grand total of one start (after they sealed the title) and 102 minutes of Premier League.

Now he’s on his way to to Everton. A decent season to soak up the vibes in the dressing room, to be fair.

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