2017/18 season awards: Our writers pick their best players, transfers, matches, flops, XI and more

The Independent's football writers pick their best - and worst - moments of the season

Manchester City are champions, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool are Champions League, and Swansea City, Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion are Championship. And everyone else was sort of in between.

Here our writers hand out their awards for the best moments of the season…

Player of the season

Miguel Delaney (Chief Football Writer): Given that this is about the Premier League alone, rather than the Champions League, I still think Kevin De Bruyne stands alone. There might be all manner of debate about his form since January but this league was really won in that record-breaking run between September and December. De Bruyne was central to that in so many sense, and was the decisive player.

Jonathan Liew (Chief Sports Writer): Ederson. You could just about make the argument that City would still have won the title without Kevin de Bruyne. Or Sergio Aguero. Or Raheem Sterling. Such was the wealth of City’s attacking options that the goals, the chances would still have flowed from somewhere. But replace Ederson with Claudio Bravo, and I’m sorry, but they’re not winning a thing. Weirdly overlooked in many player of the season discussions, Ederson is that rarest of players: the goalkeeper as conductor, metronome, thermometer. Rarely has a No 1 (or No 31, in his case) been as crucial to the tempo or style or confidence of a title-winning side. He was, in many ways, the ultimate distillation of Pep-ball, the skeleton key that unlocked the whole masterplan. Take him away – his shot-stopping, his command of the area, his touch, his distribution, his calmness – and City are an entirely different prospect.

Mark Critchley (Northern Football Correspondent): Kevin De Bruyne. There are only two right answers to this question, both equally correct, and I’ve struggled to pick between them all year. As these awards are Premier League-focused, as we have a ‘signing of the season’ category and as it felt slightly unfair for Mohamed Salah to take a clean sweep of the proper prizes, I’ll go with De Bruyne. Just.

Jack Pitt-Brooke (Football Writer): Kevin De Bruyne. Yes, Mohamed Salah probably played better, won more games for his team by himself and certainly scored more goals. But football is a team game and Kevin De Bruyne was the best and most important player on the best team in the country. With no De Bruyne, City may not even have won the Premier League, never mind breaking the goals and points records. He is one of City’s two mobile brains, combining touch and vision with the power to rip through opponents. And, unlike Salah, he has the medals to prove it.

Kevin de Bruyne has been Manchester City’s outstanding player this season (Getty)

Ben Burrows (Sports News Editor): I see all of your arguments for Mohamed Salah, they’re all more than valid, but give me the best player in the best team. Kevin De Bruyne took his game to new levels this season and, although it’s been largely overlooked now, in that key September to December run that ultimately secured City the title he was supreme.

Jack Austin (Sports Reporter): He’s the players’ player of the year, the football writers’ player of the year and my player of the year, the one Mohamed Salah will no doubt cherish the most. His goals, speed, intelligence and link-up play have all been outstanding and few defences have managed to shut him out this season as he’s inspired some stunning team performances. Kevin De Bruyne is a close second.

Lawrence Ostlere (Sports Night Editor): I like to judge players by the involuntary reactions they elicit. Most of the occasions when I’ve jolted up, sworn a bit and desperately hunted for the remote to rewind have been at the hands of some unfathomable Kevin De Bruyne reverse pass or one-touch volleyed throughball. And of course, he was the standout player of a standout team. They seem like distant memories now but those power strikes against Chelsea and Tottenham killed what was left of the title race.

Adam Hamdani (Social Editor): Mohamed Salah. You can’t hide from the fact that he’s been involved in 40 goals this season and broken so many records. In most other seasons it’d easily be Kevin De Bruyne, they’ve been the two outstanding performers but Salah just pips him to the crown.

Signing of the season

MD: There can be no debate about this, and the fact it was his first season at a club makes the goalscoring feats all the more sensational: Mohamed Salah.

JL: Um, Mo Salah. Sorry to be boring.

MC: Mohamed Salah. Obviously.

JPB: Mohamed Salah: How could it be anyone else? Salah has produced one of the greatest individual seasons in Premier League history, one that can be compared to Luis Suarez 2013-14, Gareth Bale 2012-13 or Cristiano Ronaldo 2007-08. But those players all had a few years to warm up. Salah has done it in his first season at his club. He hit the ground sprinting back in August and has only sped up since. That £37million fee now looks ludicrous.

Salah won all the awards, and won the best signing from all of our writers (Liverpool FC)

BB: Yeah, it’s clearly Salah.

JA: Obviously, it’s Mohamed Salah, for every reason everyone has already said. However, special mentions also go out to the likes of Davinson Sanchez, Pascal Gross, Ederson and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang for their debut Premier League seasons.

LO: Mohamed Salah has clearly been the Premier League’s best new arrival, but as a smart piece of recruitment I was most impressed by the signing of Pascal Gross. Brighton identified a £3m player with an exceptional record for creating chances, and experience in an equivalent relegation battle with Ingolstadt in the Bundesliga. Chris Hughton used him both as a No10 and in wide areas to great effect, and ultimately the midfielder’s involvement in 15 of Brighton’s 34 goals is what kept them in the top flight.

AH: The best player of the season is also the signing of the season. This is an easy one: Mohamed Salah.

Flop of the season

MD: There is plenty of debate around this, and plenty of candidates from Everton, Chelsea, Swansea City and Stoke City. Even players like Alvaro Morata, Tiemoue Bakayoko and Davy Klaassen had vignettes where they showed why they were signed and why they could yet come on. It’s difficult to look past Jese, though, given his reputation, given how he started with that goal against Arsenal, given the bizarre way it finished and given how it summed up the recruitment problems that ultimately brought relegation.

JL: Alvaro Morata. Honourable mentions to Kelechi Iheanacho, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Javier Hernandez, Renato Sanches and virtually everyone Everton signed last summer. And with them in mind, it might seem a touch unfair to single out a player who scored a respectable 11 league goals despite suffering an injury just as he looked to be settling into English football. But for Morata, the champions’ marquee £60m summer signing, the suspicion remains that while he possesses all the natural gifts to perform at the very highest level, there’s something missing. Call it the iron will, the murderous intent, the unshakeable arrogance of a striker who believes the spotlight is his and his alone. Morata is by no means solely culpable for Chelsea’s underwhelming season. But in a sense, he’s been the perfect emblem of it.

Álvaro Morata once again failed to hit the target (Getty)

MC: Alvaro Morata. With all due respect to Andy Carroll, Peter Crouch and Ashely Barnes, when they are each touted as your replacement four months after signing for £66m, something has gone wrong.

JPB: Tiemoue Bakayoko. Plenty of teams went shopping in Monaco last summer, but it feels as if Chelsea bought the wrong player. They paid £40m on Bakayoko – while selling Nathaniel Chalobah to Watford for £5m – hoping he would add physicality and presence to their midfield. But he has looked out of place, struggling to adjust to the pace of the Premier League, part of a disappointing season.

BB: There are a number of contenders for this illustrious award but I’ll go with Tiemoue Bakayoko at Chelsea. There were worse signings but if your arrival triggered Nemanja Matic to leave Manchester United then you have to deliver and he simply hasn’t done enough. Perhaps a fresh season – and, cough, manager – may get the best out of him again because, as he has shown before, there is a player in there.

JA: In my preseason predictions I said it would be Javier Hernandez and I can say that that is one thing I guessed correctly. Although it could go to any number of West Ham’s new recruits in all honesty. Or Everton’s, actually.

LO: Jese Rodriguez. Renato Sanches. Grzegorz Krychowiak. The loan market has proved the biggest flop of all, despite the odd success like Ruben Loftus-Cheek, and this season’s series of disappointments suggest that bottom-half sides should think twice before hiring one of Europe’s premier misunderstoods to solve their problems.

AH: Tiemoue Bakayoko. He’s just not been good enough for Chelsea, he may well be over the next three or four seasons but when you’re brought in to basically replace Nemanja Matic and completely fail to do that, you’ve not done your job. He’s not been good enough.

Manager of the season

MD: Only between three, and all of them – Pep Guardiola, Sean Dyche and David Wagner – have very persuasive claims. If Burnley’s budget means they shouldn’t have been close to the seventh in the table, though, Huddersfield’s still probably shouldn’t have them close to seventh in the Championship. By all measures, Huddersfield should not yet be a Premier League team – but Wagner has ensured they are for a second season.

JL: Pep Guardiola. It’s fashionable to describe Guardiola as a revolutionary, reinventing the English game and setting new benchmarks for quality and style. And yet, while there’s a lot of truth to that, in another sense there should really have been little surprise to it. Guardiola has simply done what he has done everywhere he has been. At the domestic level (an important caveat), no manager on the planet comes close to his record as a serial winner. This won’t necessarily satisfy the many detractors who won’t recognise his supremacy until he takes Fleetwood Town into the Champions League, as if elite management were simply an elaborate computer game. But for me he’s the best coach in the world by a wildly comfortable margin, and if he can finally unclog his pipes in the Champions League, it won’t be outlandish to discuss him as one of the best ever.

MC: David Wagner. I wrote last month that the award was Sean Dyche’s, at a time when I thought Huddersfield would still slip away. Now Huddersfield have stayed up, all the criteria I set out in Dyche’s favour applies to Wagner and then some.

David Wagner is thrown in the air by his players (Getty Images)

JPB: David Wagner. Getting Huddersfield Town into the Premier League was one thing, but David Wagner has out-done himself this year, securing Premier League safety with one game to spare. And he has done this with weakest squad in the division. A collection of Championship players: Tom Smith, Jonathan Hogg, Tom Ince, Scott Malone, and unheralded imports like Collin Quaner, Laurent Depoitre and Florent Hadergjonaj. It has been a triumph of coaching and management and proof that Wagner can go anywhere he wants in football.

BB: Sean Dyche did a fine job and David Wagner an arguably even better one but my vote goes to the Premier League title winner. Not only did Pep Guardiola win the league, he did it in record fashion with more goals, more wins and more points than anyone before him. Short of winning the Champions League he could scarcely have done any more.

JA: Roy Hodgson. Just for the way he arrived to a team who had scored no goals and won no games and had no confidence then took them up to a comfortable mid-table finish. I think even some bookies had paid out on them going down.

LO: Pep Guardiola probably wouldn’t be very good at managing average players; he proved as much last season. But he is unquestionably the best manager of brilliant players, harnessing their technical skills to achieve things no other coach can. This was one of the great European league campaigns and it is hard to imagine how Guardiola will top it.

AH: Pep Guardiola. Again, the number of records he’s broken has basically given no one else a chance. Most points, most wins and most goals scored. It’s ridiculous how good City have been at times this season.

Moment of the season

MD: You could take any number of Kevin De Bruyne passes, or brilliant Manchester City goals but there was a lovely and poignant uniqueness – especially for anyone who grew up watching in the 1990s – to the moment between Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford.

JL: West Ham fans invading the pitch during the game against Burnley. Ultimately not as pivotal as it felt at the time – I can’t have been the only one who saw Mark Noble grabbing a protester by the buttocks and hurling him to the ground and concluded relegation might be the only sane option from that point – but still richly symbolic, not only in its bizarre imagery but in the way it seemed to encapsulate the heroic impotence of the modern fan in the face of the Premier League’s many and growing indignities. It’s an utterly soul-gnawing experience, and yet every August, they return: back again, year after year for another expensive dose of chagrin. Football fans really are the most unfathomably heroic species on Earth.

MC: The way Jose Mourinho spent two-and-a-half minutes at 10 o’clock on a Friday night putting out the flames of his feud with Antonio Conte, stringing the entirety of the press room along, only to then throw a jerrycan of gasoline over us and light a Clipper by referencing Conte’s previous, unfounded and rescinded suspension for match-fixing. Thanks Jose.

JPB: Not in the Premier League, but I will never forget Cristiano Ronaldo’s overhead kick at Juventus’ stadium in the quarter-final first leg. Not since Zinedine Zidane’s famous volley in the 2002 final has a goal scored been so imaginative, so technically difficult but also so important. And it earned a deserved standing ovation from the home fans, one of the proudest crowds in Europe.

BB: Arsene Wenger’s perfectly pitched Emirates farewell. There are ways these things shouldn’t be done – see West Ham, Boleyn Ground – but this wasn’t one of them. Touchingly sentimental without being overdone or twee this was the ideal send off for one of the Premier League’s greats.

JA: West Brom’s mid-season ‘Lads Holiday’ to Barcelona where they drank, stole a taxi, did a runner, ate loads of last food, ‘ad it large and then got relegated. Classic laddy behaviour. Top bants. Oi, oi!

LO: It came in an inconsequential game between Leicester and West Brom, but Jamie Vardy’s channelling of David Platt was my favourite piece of skill.

AH: Arsene Wenger’s farewell at the Emirates after the game against Burnley. It may well be the right time for him to leave but there’s no forgetting what he has done for Arsenal over the years and that should be appreciated, Arsenal gave him a perfect send-off and his speech was as classy as he has been over his 22-year reign.

Team of the season

MD: David De Gea, Kyle Walker, Marcos Alonso, Jan Vertonghen, James Tarkowski, Fernandinho, Mohamed Salah, Christian Eriksen, Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Harry Kane.

JL: (3-4-2-1): Ederson; Tarkowski, Otamendi, Vertonghen; Walker, Fernandinho, De Bruyne, Robertson; Salah, Silva; Kane. A sign of the times, I suppose, that you could have drawn the entire XI from the top four clubs. But Tarkowski, one of the linchpins of the extraordinary Burnley side that’s qualified for Europe – yes, Europe – deserves his place in this entirely theoretical team that will never take the field.

MC: De Gea; Walker, Mee, Otamendi, Robertson; De Bruyne, Fernandinho, Silva; Salah, Firmino, Sterling. I realise all these players represent northern clubs, but it has not been a vintage year for football elsewhere, nor has it been – in my humble opinion – a vintage year for Harry Kane.

David de Geamade some magnificent saves this season (Getty)

JPB: De Gea; Walker, Maguire, Vertonghen, Alonso; Eriksen, De Bruyne, David Silva; Salah, Kane, Zaha

BB: De Gea, Walker, Otamendi, Vertonghen, Alonso, Eriksen, De Bruyne, Silva, Sterling, Kane, Salah.

JA: David De Gea, Kyle Walker, Nicolas Otamendi, Jan Vertoghen, Andrew Robertson, Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Christian Eriksen, Leroy Sane, Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane.

LO: David De Gea; Kyle Walker, James Tarkowski, Jan Vertonghen, Marcos Alonso; Kevin De Bruyne, Fernandinho, David Silva; Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane, Leroy Sane.

AH: De Gea; Walker, Otamendi, Vertonghen, Alonso; Salah, De Bruyne, Silva, Sterling; Kane, Aguero.

Best match you attended

MD: This season there are probably far more candidates from the Champions League latter stages but it was a match that came in the middle of that that appropriately stood out, because it competed with the elite competition as regards gloriously high-end chaos. That was Manchester City 2-3 Manchester United. I didn’t attend either Arsenal-Manchester United or Arsenal-Liverpool, though, and both probably would have trumped it.

JL: Liverpool 2-2 Tottenham. There were technically better games, and more important games too. But in terms of visceral, end-to-end entertainment, you’d be hard-pushed to top this shrieking, operatic encounter from February, graced with the sublime (Mo Salah’s peerless finishing), the dramatic (Tottenham’s two late equalisers) and the ridiculous (egregious errors, indifferent refereeing).

MC: Liverpool 4 Manchester City 3. The best matches I’ve attended this season have invariably been ones City have lost – not because I take pleasure in their defeats, but because over the course of the year beating this superb team became a monumental feat in itself. Wigan’s FA Cup victory over them was excellent but atypical. The opponents that caused City the most problems came out and played them at their own game. Liverpool’s Champions League home win over City was the single best performance I saw against them, but the 4-3 at Anfield in the league was the best contest.

JPB: Chelsea 0-1 Manchester City. The game when it became clear that this City team were on another level from the rest of the Premier League. City went to Stamford Bridge and outplayed the reigning champions, controlling the game, seizing the lead through Kevin De Bruyne and never letting go. A true ‘statement’ performance.

LO: Crystal Palace 3-2 Brighton. An absorbing derby feel in one of the league’s most atmospheric grounds, with a hero/villain role for the former Palace striker Glenn Murray, who didn’t celebrate his goal and then missed a huge chance in the desperate final throes. Most importantly, a loony first 35 minutes served up five goals which made it so much fun to watch.

JA: Tottenham’s 3-1 victory over Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League to end the ‘Wembley hoodoo’. Harry Kane scored twice, including one which was completely identical to Son Heung-min’s opener. It was also great seeing Christian Pulisic in all his brilliance in the flesh.