I’ve always thought the PFA Player and Team of the Year awards were hugely important. It is the ultimate accolade to be respected and honoured by your peers. Not that I was ever selected — I kicked too many people for that!
I was the PFA representative at Arsenal for five years but gathering the players’ nominations for the awards was always a nightmare.
People were not interested, couldn’t be bothered to sit down and write out their nominations and I spent far too much time trying to pin people down. Out of a squad of 22, you’d do well to get half that number of nominations. It used to amaze me how uninterested a lot of the players were.
To get people interested, I would eventually write up a shortlist of players in each position on a whiteboard and try to get people to choose. In most cases though, I’d pick my team and a lot of the others would just copy it. For some, I filled out their forms for them and they’d just sign at the bottom.
Some of them didn’t like the fact they couldn’t vote for team-mates, while others would make sure they didn’t put in a rival for a place in the team of the year.
The English players took most interest because they had grown up following it. Last season there were six Englishmen in the team of the season, a surprising amount.
The same lack of interest applied to the awards evening. There were lots of players from outside the top flight there but not from the Premier League. Arsenal sent people when Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp won but there wasn’t a huge presence in other years. Other clubs were the same although all players are invited.