Bruno has the writers, Haaland has the boot: the Premier League's individual honours heading into the final day
The Premier League rolls into its all-at-once final day on Sunday with most of the individual honours already pointed at one or two men. Arsenal lifted the title last Tuesday. Erling Haaland's Golden Boot is mathematically alive but practically settled. The Football Writers' Association have already given their trophy to a Manchester United midfielder. The PFA vote is the one piece of business still actually open.
Bruno Fernandes already has the FWA
Bruno Fernandes was named the FWA Footballer of the Year for 2025-26 on May 8. He took 45 per cent of the votes from English football media and edged Declan Rice by 28 votes. Erling Haaland came in third. The numbers behind it were eight goals and 19 assists in the Premier League at the time of the vote, on a Manchester United side that finished well outside the title race. He has since added one more assist against Nottingham Forest on May 17 to take him to 20, equal to the Premier League single-season record held jointly by Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne.
Fernandes is the first United player to claim the FWA award since Wayne Rooney in 2009-10. The names ahead of him in the United chapter of that trophy include Cristiano Ronaldo, Eric Cantona, George Best and Bobby Charlton. The 28-vote gap to Rice is what makes the result interesting, not the win itself. It says the writers were almost evenly split on whether to back the player carrying his side or the player driving the title winner, and that is exactly the question the PFA vote now has to answer.
PFA: title-winner or transformer
The PFA Players' Player of the Year shortlist runs eight names: Fernandes, Rice, Haaland, Gabriel, Morgan Gibbs-White, David Raya, Antoine Semenyo and Brentford's Igor Thiago. It is the players themselves who decide this one, and the question is whether they reward Rice and Gabriel for actually winning the league or follow the writers and back Fernandes for carrying a team that was nowhere near it.
Rice has been Arsenal's most influential ball-winner all season, sitting in front of a back four that has conceded fewer goals than any other in the division. Gabriel's defensive numbers are clean enough that he is the centre-back nobody talks about, which is its own compliment. Then there's Haaland, who turns up on every leaderboard a forward can be on but has not lifted the league.
The PFA verdict has tended to tilt towards league winners over the long run. The FWA verdict tilted the other way this season. We will know which side of that the players come down on inside the next couple of weeks.
Haaland's Golden Boot
Erling Haaland leads the goalscoring chart on 27. Igor Thiago of Brentford sits second on 22, a five-goal gap that would need an extraordinary Sunday afternoon for Thiago to close. Liverpool host Brentford at Anfield. City go to Aston Villa. The race is alive enough on paper that one source still calls it open, but the realistic path for Thiago is that Haaland blanks at Villa Park and he scores six at Anfield against a Liverpool team with nothing on the line. Neither half of that is happening.
Haaland is on course for his third Golden Boot in four seasons. He shares the Premier League record of four with Thierry Henry and Mohamed Salah, and a fourth award next year would put him alone at the top of that list at 26.
Raya, Iraola and the rest
David Raya has effectively locked the Golden Glove. Arsenal's keeper has 18 clean sheets in the league, more than any of his peers, and he was always going to win it once the title race tilted Arsenal's way at the back. The Manager of the Season shortlist is six deep, Keith Andrews, Mikel Arteta, Michael Carrick, Pep Guardiola, Andoni Iraola and Regis Le Bris, with voting closed on May 18 and the winner now waiting for the right week to land. Iraola is a strong outside candidate, having taken Bournemouth into a guaranteed top-seven finish and a first European campaign in the club's 127-year history before announcing his exit. Arteta has the title in his pocket. Carrick walked United from the bottom of the table to mid-table inside a single season.
The other ones, Goal of the Season, Young Player, will get sorted out in the same wave. The headline business is what is already known. Bruno has the writers. The players will probably tell us something different. Haaland gets the boot, again. Arsenal get the title and almost all of the team-level numbers under it. The all-at-once kickoffs on Sunday are about Champions League and relegation, not about whose name is on the silver.
Cricket Updates
