EPL 25/26 Season Awards MW1 → MW34

Awards judged by the only metric the discourse leaves behind: how often a player's name appears in fan posts, and the share of those mentions that carry positive vs negative language. Built from 707,550 player-mentions extracted from 339 match-day comment threads (Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube) across every EPL fixture this season. Net sentiment = pos% − neg% of mentions for that player, where positive/negative is detected via a curated football-context lexicon (e.g. goat, class, masterclass, baller vs flop, bottled, passenger).
707,550
Player mentions
across 339 fixtures
62,158
Positive mentions
8.8% of total
36,930
Negative mentions
5.2% of total
648
Players tracked
across 34 matchweeks
🏆
Player of the Year

Matheus Cunha

01
Matheus Cunha MUN
Manchester United
Top-volume praise. Eleven thousand mentions, fan-coined as a 'baller and a dawg'.
12,899
mentions
+1,469
positive
−594
negative
+6.8%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Erling Haaland MCI · 8,885 mentions · net +7.1%
  2. Florian Wirtz LIV · 13,905 mentions · net +4.3%
  3. Bukayo Saka ARS · 14,761 mentions · net +3.1%
👶
U23 Young Player of the Year

Hugo Ekitiké

01
Hugo Ekitiké LIV
Liverpool
23 and Liverpool's loudest positive signal — fans calling him 'class in the making'.
7,199
mentions
+748
positive
−241
negative
+7.0%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Patrick Dorgu (21) MUN · 7,090 mentions · net +6.4%
  2. Estêvão (17) CHE · 4,656 mentions · net +6.1%
  3. Florian Wirtz (22) LIV · 13,905 mentions · net +4.3%
👴
Over-32 Player of the Year

Casemiro

01
Casemiro MUN
Manchester United
33 and reborn. The only O32 with sustained six-figure-engagement positive net.
6,093
mentions
+572
positive
−340
negative
+3.8%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Mohamed Salah (33) LIV · 18,185 mentions · net +2.1%
  2. Virgil van Dijk (34) LIV · 4,387 mentions · net +0.2%
👔
Manager of the Year

Andoni Iraola

01
Andoni Iraola
AFC Bournemouth
Already crowned in the manager-discourse report.
See manager_discourse.html for the full evidence pack.
🤫
Most Underrated

Lewis Miley

01
Lewis Miley NEW
Newcastle United
Lowest noise floor, highest signal. +15% net sentiment despite ~1.5K mentions.
1,488
mentions
+290
positive
−63
negative
+15.3%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Anton Stach LEE · 880 mentions · net +14.1%
  2. Iliman Ndiaye EVE · 1,450 mentions · net +12.4%
  3. Malick Thiaw NEW · 1,736 mentions · net +12.0%
📈
Most Improved

Rayan Cherki

01
Rayan Cherki MCI
Manchester City
H2 conversation 2.6× the size of H1, and net sentiment held at +10%.
4,142
mentions
+581
positive
−151
negative
+10.4%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Max Dowman ARS, 3,751 mentions · 3,751 · net +7.0% · 3.44× H2/H1
  2. Antoine Semenyo MCI, 4,742 · 4,742 · net +7.5% · 2.60× H2/H1
  3. Piero Hincapié ARS, 3,471 · 3,471 · net +6.6% · 2.65× H2/H1
🤑
Best Signing 25/26

Antoine Semenyo

01
Antoine Semenyo BOU→MCI
Bournemouth → Manchester City (Jan 2026)
January arrival, immediate net +7.5%. Fan reaction: 'holy shit, incredible'.
4,742
mentions
+550
positive
−196
negative
+7.5%
net
Sample fan posts
Runners-up
  1. Hugo Ekitiké (LIV, summer) LIV · 7,199 mentions · net +7.0%
  2. Senne Lammens (MUN, summer) MUN · 4,687 mentions · net +8.0%
  3. Florian Wirtz (LIV, summer) LIV · 13,905 mentions · net +4.3%

Methodology

Data: all merged.json files under output/raw/EPL/MW*/*/ — 339 match-day post bundles spanning MW1 → MW34 of the 2025/26 Premier League season. Each file is the union of Reddit, X/Twitter and YouTube fan posts for that fixture.
Player attribution: 2,503 unique aliases drawn from data/players.json (display_name, lastname, common_name, manually-curated aka list). Ambiguous tokens shared across multiple players are dropped automatically. Posts are scanned with word-boundary regex; multi-player posts credit every matched player.
Sentiment: a curated positive lexicon (goat, class, masterclass, brilliant, amazing, incredible, outstanding, unreal, sensational, superb, world class, elite, clutch, baller, magic) and a curated negative lexicon (flop, bottled, passenger, trash, terrible, awful, overrated, garbage, shocking, useless, disgrace, embarrassing, liability, mid) — football-discourse tuned. A post is positive if any positive term hits; same for negative. Mixed posts count toward both.
Award scoring: POTY / U23 / O32 / Best Signing all rank by net_sentiment × √mentions (volume-weighted net). Most Underrated filters to 500–3,000 mentions then ranks by raw net. Most Improved combines H2/H1 mention ratio (split at MW17) with net sentiment. Manager of the Year was previously decided in manager_discourse.html.
Caveats: the lexicon is keyword-based, not a trained classifier — sarcasm and ironic praise will leak through. Players whose surnames clash with everyday English (fire, hall, young) are partially filtered but not perfect. 25/26 signing detection combines historic_teams records with a curated list of summer-window arrivals from foreign clubs (whose previous teams aren't tracked in this dataset).