Riyad Mahrez Among the Ultimate Premiere League Team of the Last Decade

The last decade of Premier League football has been truly extraordinary to watch. Whether you’re thinking of Leicester City’s fairytale title win, Manchester City’s dominance, or perhaps Liverpool ending their title drought after an incredible season under Jurgen Klopp, fans have never been short of entertainment for the last 10 years.

In that time, numerous stars have plied their trade in the English top-flight, the likes of Riyad Mahrez, Kevin De Bruyne, Virgil van Dijk, Erling Haaland and many more. And all that star power gives rise to debates over who the greatest players in every position are.

Season after season, that debate is settled right at the end when the Team of the Season is confirmed. But what would an Ultimate Premier League 11 look like if we considered players from the last decade? Well, the team at WhoScored, who have collected stats and data on players from various leagues for many years now, have looked at numbers for past and present Premier League players from the last 10 years and have built the Ultimate Premier League Team of the Season team based on who records the best single-season ratings in every position.

The global “WhoScored” website, which specializes in numbers and statistics, chose Riyad Mahrez, the captain of the Algerian national team and current star of the Saudi club Al-Ahli Jeddah, and the former player of the English clubs Manchester City and Leicester City, as part of the ideal lineup of the best players in the English Premier League over the last decade.

WhoScored has built the Ultimate Team of the Season, basing their selections on which player recorded the highest average rating for a season in every position over the last decade.

The optimal lineup, according to WhoScored, caused widespread controversy due to the absence of the Egyptian star of Liverpool, Mohamed Salah, and his former teammate in the same club, the Senegalese star, Sadio Mané, as the Algerian star was the only representative of Arab and African football in this lineup. Some big names do not feature in the XI, including Manchester City icon Vincent Kompany, and former Tottenham striker Harry Kane.

Premier League greats who do record high enough ratings to make the team include Virgil van Dijk, Kevin De Bruyne, and Luis Suarez.

The lineup was set by the WhoScored website based on the evaluation of each player per season over the past ten years. The ideal lineup included 11 players, some of whom are still playing in the English Premier League, and others have moved to other leagues.

Riyad Mahrez was in the ideal lineup for the Premier League after receiving a rating of 7.84 out of 10 during the 2015-2016 season, in which he won the English Premier League title with his former club, Leicester City, and the Best Player Award in the competition presented by the PFA players’ player of the league in the same season.

Back-to-back Leicester title winners. And while Fuchs might fall into the unsung heroes category, Riyad Mahrez was anything but that. Along with Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante, the Algerian winger was one of the stars for Claudio Ranieri’s side as they surprisingly finished the season as Premier League champions, Whoscore said.

Mahrez was chosen on the list of the best players of the last decade, due to his great performance during the seven seasons he spent in England since joining Leicester City in 2014, where he played 284 full matches in the Premier League with Leicester City and Manchester City, during which he scored 82 goals and provided 65 assists. He won the competition title 5 times.

Finishing the season with 17 goals and 11 assists, Mahrez truly burst onto the scene of English football that year, winning Leicester’s Player of the Year award for his efforts in the process. Renowned for outrageous skills and a beautiful first-touch that he still possesses, that title would be the first of five league trophies as he went on to complete a move to Manchester City in 2018, but he would never record as high a rating as he managed while at Leicester. Quite impressive that he manages to keep Salah out of this team, whose best rating for a season stands at 7.69.