Bruno Fernandes Wins PFA Players Player of the Year After Assist Record Season

Bruno Fernandes has been crowned the men’s PFA Players’ Player of the Year for the 2025-26 season. Wayne Rooney was the last Manchester United player to win the award, back in 2009-10, which makes Fernandes the first Red Devil to claim it in sixteen years. Manchester City’s Bunny Shaw took the women’s prize for a second time on the same night, at a PFA Awards ceremony that also handed out young player honours, EFL prizes and two merit awards for a lifetime in the game.

For Fernandes, the award caps a campaign in which he rewrote a piece of Premier League history. The 31-year-old finished the season with 21 assists, a single-season record that took him past Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne, and added nine goals of his own as United recovered from a difficult opening half of the campaign to finish third under Michael Carrick and secure a return to the Champions League.

Fernandes on Being Voted For by His Rivals

The PFA award is decided by a vote among fellow professionals, and Fernandes said that made it stand out from the other honours he collected across the year. “It is obviously a very proud moment,” he said. “They are the ones you go on the pitch against and it’s probably not easy to vote for someone you play against, so it is a very good moment.”

The trophy adds to the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year award Fernandes picked up in May, giving him two of English football’s biggest individual honours inside the same year. His assist tally alone tells the story of a season in which he carried much of United’s creative burden, setting the tone for a second half of the campaign that turned a shaky start into a third-place finish.

The record he broke had stood for more than two decades in one form or another. Thierry Henry set the previous mark of 20 assists in 2002-03, a season in which he also scored 24 league goals for Arsenal, before Kevin De Bruyne matched that total in 2019-20 from 35 appearances for Manchester City, finishing at least seven assists clear of any other player in the division that year. Fernandes needed 21 to move past both of them, a total that puts his 2025-26 campaign among the most productive individual seasons the Premier League has ever seen.

A Long Road to United’s Top Individual Honour

Fernandes built his reputation long before he arrived at Old Trafford. He began his career at Italian club Novara before spells at Udinese and Sampdoria, then moved to Sporting CP in 2017, where he was named the Primeira Liga Player of the Year in back-to-back seasons. He left Portugal with 63 goals and 50 assists across 137 appearances for Sporting, numbers that explain why United paid up to £68m to sign him in January 2020.

He was handed the United captaincy in July 2023, and the role has come to define his career at the club just as much as his output has. Carrying United through the harder stretches of recent seasons has often fallen on his shoulders, and this year’s record-breaking tally of assists arrived while the team searched for consistency under a new manager. Both the club and the player emerged from that search in a stronger position than where they started.

Shaw Claims a Second Women’s Prize

Shaw’s award recognised a third straight Golden Boot for the Manchester City forward, who scored 21 goals on her way to the club’s maiden Women’s Super League title. The 29-year-old first won the PFA Women’s Player of the Year prize in 2023-24, and her second triumph puts her among the league’s most consistent finishers over the past three seasons.

O’Reilly and Smith Take the Young Player Awards

Manchester City’s Nico O’Reilly was named men’s PFA Young Player of the Year off the back of a campaign that ended with him helping England win World Cup bronze this summer. “I had a great season,” the 21-year-old said. “I’m very proud of the season I had. I won two trophies with my club and managed to play at the World Cup with my country. I’m over the moon how it turned out.”

Arsenal’s Olivia Smith won the women’s Young Player of the Year award for a second year running, having first claimed the prize in 2025 for her form at Liverpool before continuing that level after her move to the capital.

Team of the Year Filled With Arsenal Champions

Champions Arsenal placed five players in the PFA Premier League Team of the Year, with David Raya, Gabriel, William Saliba, Jurrien Timber and Declan Rice all included. Fernandes was joined in the side by his Manchester City counterparts O’Reilly, Erling Haaland, Rayan Cherki and Antoine Semenyo, alongside Brentford’s Igor Thiago.

City also dominated the WSL Team of the Year through Shaw, Kerstin Casparij and Yui Hasegawa. Last year’s PFA Women’s Player of the Year, Mariona Caldentey, made the XI alongside fellow Arsenal players Emily Fox and Alessia Russo, while Tottenham’s Toko Koga and United’s Jess Park were joined by the Chelsea trio of Hannah Hampton, Ellie Carpenter and Lauren James.

EFL Winners and Two Merit Awards

In the EFL, former Middlesbrough midfielder Hayden Hackey won the Championship PFA Players’ Player of the Year after a £24m summer move to Everton. Dom Ballard, who joined Bristol City from Leyton Orient earlier this year, claimed the League One prize, while Swindon striker Aaron Drinan picked up the League Two award.

Sir Kenny Dalglish and Karen Carney both received the PFA’s merit award in recognition of their contribution to the game. Dalglish, Scotland’s most capped player with 102 appearances, won three league titles as Liverpool manager after a playing career at Celtic and Liverpool, and later led Blackburn to the Premier League title. Now 75, he confirmed in June that he is undergoing treatment for cancer.

Carney won 144 caps for England and was part of the Lionesses squad that finished third at the 2015 World Cup. She came through the ranks at Birmingham before winning the quadruple with Arsenal in 2007, and later added a league and FA Cup double with Chelsea in 2018.

Both merit award winners represent a different kind of recognition to the ones handed to Fernandes and Shaw, built on a body of work across entire careers rather than a single standout campaign. Dalglish’s award came only weeks after he confirmed he is undergoing treatment for cancer, while Carney’s honour recognised a playing career that ran from her time coming through at Birmingham through to league and cup success at both Arsenal and Chelsea.

A Turnaround Season Recognised at the Top

United’s own campaign carried its own arc worth remembering alongside Fernandes’s individual honour. A club that spent long stretches of the season fielding questions about its direction under Carrick turned that narrative around in the second half of the year, climbing to a third-place finish that secured Champions League football for the first time in three seasons. Fernandes was the constant thread running through both halves of that story, captaining a side that looked far from its best in September and finished the year competing with the division’s strongest teams.

The scale of his contribution puts him in rare company among United captains. Assists alone rarely tell the full story of a player’s season, but a total that breaks a two-decade-old Premier League record, set by two of the finest attacking players the competition has produced, leaves little room for doubt. His fellow professionals had the final word on the matter when the votes were counted, choosing the man they had spent the season trying and failing to contain.

For Fernandes, the night closes out a season that began with question marks over United’s direction and ended with him holding two of the game’s most respected individual honours. The record he now holds, 21 assists in a single Premier League season, sets a new mark that the rest of the division will be chasing for a long time to come.

The identity of the voters gives the award its own character. Every player in the division had a say, including plenty of defenders and midfielders who spent the season trying to close Fernandes down before he could pick out a final pass. Winning that vote, rather than a media or supporter poll, adds a layer of respect that comes only from the people who understand exactly how difficult the job in front of him was.

United’s third-place finish sets up a demanding year ahead. A return to the Champions League brings extra fixtures, extra travel and extra scrutiny, and Fernandes will again be expected to set the tone as captain of a squad trying to build on the turnaround that defined the second half of last season. Carrying two individual awards into that campaign, the PFA prize and his FWA honour from earlier in the year, gives Fernandes a level of personal recognition that matches the responsibility already sitting on his shoulders as club captain, and sets a standard for the season he now has to try to repeat.