Picking the most spiritually ‘Saturday 3pm’ Premier League players in 2025-26 | OneFootball

While there’s been hullabaloo and panic about the death of Christmas football and Easter football, the traditional fixture that is actually in danger – in the Premier League at least – is the dear old traditional Saturday 3pm game.

What with the new TV deals offering more and more live games, there have been times when the Premier League has only had two games left in the most traditional of all the footballing timeslots.

The time draws near, we reckon, for when all 10 Premier League games are spread across the weekend from 8pm Friday to 8pm Monday with each and every one its own standalone event.

At that point Saturday 3pm might not even be one of those times, if the blackout holds. That might be the time for all the football that isn’t the Premier League. We’re not even sure we hate the idea.

But there are still some teams and players fighting the death of the Saturday 3pm Premier League game. These are the ultimate Saturday 3pm Barclaysmen, raging, raging against the dying of the light.

There will always be players we associate with specific timeslots. To us, a Saturday lunchtime game should always be a tricky away test for Big Six team or, failing that, a local derby the police don’t want played any later thank you very much.

Mo Salah is thus the most Saturday lunchtime Premier League player.

The Super Sunday headline slot is boringly probably just Erling Haaland right now. The earlier Sunday 2pm slot is for players who play Europa League football for a club that will rarely if ever be able to command the headline 4.30pm time.

This year, therefore, it is for your Morgan Gibbs-Whites or your Morgan Rogerses. Historically, it’s a very Harry Kane timeslot. Based on nothing but an instant and powerful gut feel, it also feels like all Kaoru Mitoma’s good games are Sunday 2pm games.

It should also be an Ollie Watkins time, but Ollie Watkins is a pure Saturday 5.30pm man and we make no apologies for that.

We’re less sure about the most MNF player currently, but are confident it’s an Everton man. Might be Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall.

Pascal Gross

We put it to you that until he popped up with that lovely assist for Mitoma’s even lovelier finish at Spurs the other week it was entirely possible to have watched every second of legally available live Premier League football in the UK this year without even noticing Pascal Gross had returned to Brighton four months earlier.

We wouldn’t blame you at all, even though it absolutely definitely doesn’t apply to us. Nosir.

Wilson Isidor

One could make the argument, if one were so inclined, that the story of Sunderland’s season and its surprising narrative arc can be told in their kick-off times.

Eleven of their first 17 games back in the Premier League were in the traditional, blackout slot. Only three of their last 17 have been Saturday 3pm affairs.

But that’s still a hefty number of Saturday 3pm kick-offs all told, and leaves a Sunderland player an absolute necessity on this list.

The temptation is to go for the most attention-grabbing member of the squad, but Brian Brobbey has, if anything, for me, Clive, grabbed his attention almost too well. He’s done his most attention-grabbing work, for good and bad, in the biggest and thus more TV-friendly games.

Step forward, then, Wilson Isidor, whose early-season work was so key in establishing Sunderland’s credentials as both a force to be reckoned with this season, but also a quintessentially Saturday 3pm side.

His late cherry-on-the-cake goal against West Ham to announce Sunderland’s return to the big time and then an even more dramatic late winner against fellow 3pm stalwarts Brentford are both goals imbued with pure Soccer Saturday “There’s been a late goal but for who?!” energy.

Even the 2-1 win at Chelsea in which Isidor scored again was a Saturday 3pm job. Quality work, with a nod due here also to Enzo Le Fee.

Jean-Philippe Mateta

Crystal Palace are another historically potent Saturday 3pm team, albeit tempered slightly this year by their European commitments and the inevitable slew of Sunday 2pm kick-offs that form part of the deal.

There’s also a certain Monday Night Football element to Crystal Palace, but only – and we cannot stress this enough – for home games. Sure, it’s very easy to imagine a Monday night game under the lights at Selhurst Park, isn’t it? With, say, Everton the visitors? Villa maybe.

But try imagining Crystal Palace away from home on a Monday night. That’s right, you can’t do it.

All Palace away games, apart from those necessarily afflicted by European action, must by ancient Barclays lore be played at 3pm on a Saturday.

Our unscientific (to the point, if we’re honest, of non-existence) research suggests Jean-Philippe Mateta is the leading scorer of goals that could not legally be watched live on television in the UK across the last five years.

Callum Wilson

A significant quirk of West Ham’s curious season has been not just the number of Saturday 3pm games they’ve managed to sneak in as a fairly big club having a fairly interesting season, but how many of those Saturday 3pm games have been objectively large.

They’ve played both north London clubs as well as both Manchester City and Liverpool in the traditional timeslot.

That leaves only Man United – who they somehow ended up playing in two midweek rounds – and Chelsea as the only Big Six teams they didn’t play at 3pm.

Given how few 3pm games those six clubs play – and it will be even fewer for Spurs next season given how often they’re going to be the TV pick in the Championship (i.e. every week) – it’s certainly an oddity.

It’s absolutely enough to tell us we need some West Ham on this list, and there’s really only one contender once you start digging into it.

Your Jarrod Bowens and your Crysencio Summervilles are just a bit too high profile and a bit too flash. They’re too memorable when you watch them in the TV games West Ham do get.

What you need is someone who you never notice at all unless they’ve just scored a goal because these days they don’t really do much else.

Step forward Mr Callum Wilson. The perfect figure here. Utterly forgettable in almost everything he does, apart from when it is utterly unforgettable.

Has arguably scored the two biggest goals of West Ham’s season. Both injury-time winners, both in Saturday 3pms.

Without his late winner at Spurs back in January, we probably wouldn’t have a relegation battle at all. It was the goal that Dr Tottenhamed West Ham’s recovery into life as well as a key early plank of Spurs’ spiral into misery and despair.

Without that kickstart, West Ham’s miserable winter form may well have continued and we would have three teams adrift at the bottom and all be complaining that Spurs have somehow got away with another point-a-game season without punishment.

Wilson then popped up last weekend with a goal to keep that story going just as it appeared a potentially decisive double sickener might go against West Ham.

Everton’s late equaliser and Spurs’ late winner at Wolves threatened a brutal swing of points that would have left West Ham back in the dropzone and with it all to do again.

Less dramatic but also significant was an equaliser late in the first half against Burnley at the London Stadium, scored at 3.44pm precisely on the afternoon of November 8 in what would eventually be a key 3-2 victory.

Chuck in a pair of goals in the 2-2 draw at Bournemouth and you’ve got a man scoring 83 per cent of his Premier League goals this season in attention-grabbing fashion in Saturday 3pm kick-offs. It’s elite work.

Igor Thiago

From absolutely nowhere to the 3pm GOAT in one astonishing season. Brentford have at times erred slightly on the side of 5.30pm Saturday, but for the most part have felt like a pure 3pm team and somehow specifically Thiago himself.

We’ve not actually crunched the numbers – that wouldn’t do at all. Declaring a Barclaysman is all about vibes, and that’s especially true of Saturday 3pm Barclaysmen, we’ve decided.

We don’t need planet-destroying AI or massive supercomputers monitored by lab-coated technicians looking pensive and carrying clipboards around for this. We need only the cocksure certainty of our convictions.

And our conviction is this. Igor Thiago has scored 21 Premier League goals this season, and, what, 17 of them have come in 3pm kick-offs?

Alas, there’s no way to try and prove or disprove that. Don’t try. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s true.

It matters whether it feels true, and if you just casually said down the pub “Did you know 17 of Igor Thiago’s 21 Premier League goals this season have come in Saturday 3pm kick-offs, the most since Darren Bent’s 18 in 2009-10” absolutely nobody would challenge you.

It just sounds right, it feels right, and if the modern world has taught us nothing else it’s that comfortable lies are always better in the long run than awkward truths.