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For one reason or another, the following selection of stars could never join the pantheon of greats (and not-so greats) to have lifted a league title.
Fierce loyalty and, more often than not, unfortunate timing have conspired against some wonderful footballers over the years. Some people just don’t have the luck...
Gary Lineker
Lineker won a plethora of individual awards, including the World Cup Golden Boot in 1986. He was one of England’s greatest strikers, but finished his career with just an FA Cup, Copa del Rey and Cup Winners’ Cup to show for it.
He did win the Second Division as a teenager with Leicester, but top-flight glory eluded him. He was unlucky too: between 1984 and 1987, Everton finished 1st, 2nd and 1st. Guess which of those years Lineker was there?
He'd moved to Barcelona by the time the Toffees reclaimed their title, where he finished in the runners-up spot twice. He then headed to Spurs, finishing third, just as Barça embarked on a run of four consecutive titles. Ouch.
Fernando Torres
Torres won’t be ending his wait for a first league title this season, as the 34-year-old is currently embroiled in a survival scrap with Japanese outfit Sagan Tosu.
Having ticked almost all of the most desirable boxes in the career of a footballer – Champions League, Europa League, World Cup and two European Championships – it’s bizarre that the Spaniard is still without a league winners’ medal.
He joined Chelsea from Liverpool six months after they won the Double and went out on loan when they clinched the title in Jose Mourinho’s second spell at Stamford Bridge. Some might say that isn’t a complete coincidence…
Marco Reus
Reus arrived at Dortmund's party just as it was winding down. When the winger joined from Borussia Monchengladbach in 2012, he was coming into the team that had won the German title for the last two years.
However, Bayern Munich have since flexed their muscles again, while Jurgen Klopp’s cup final struggles meant Reus finished as a runner-up seven times in his first four campaigns at the club: once in the Champions League, three times in the league, and a hat-trick of near misses in the German Cup.
He eventually got his hands on a winners’ medal after Thomas Tuchel took over from the now-Liverpool boss and led them to a domestic cup win in 2017.
Juan Mata
Five years at Manchester United haven’t helped Mata maintain his reputation as one of the Premier League’s greatest attacking midfielders, and it’s sometimes easy to forget the esteem in which he was held at Chelsea.
The Spaniard is also just a nice guy, so nobody is taking pleasure from his bad timing. While his former Valencia team-mate David Silva was turning into a superstar at Manchester City, Mata headed to Stamford Bridge during a lean spell for Chelsea in the league.
He then departed London just as Jose Mourinho came in the door and Alex Ferguson’s all-conquering juggernauts became David Moyes’s three-wheeler. He does have a Champions League winners’ medal, mind you, so it’s hardly been a complete disaster.
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
The Dutch striker never really threatened to take the Ballon d’Or, but he did finish on top of the Premier League scoring charts twice and deserved more than one Portuguese Cup medal (the 1996/97 edition with Boavista) for a prolific career.
He came agonisingly close to extending his trophy collection on several occasions, finishing second in the Copa del Rey with Atletico Madrid, Premier League and FA Cup for Chelsea, and the UEFA Cup while at Middlesbrough.
By 2008, Hasselbaink was 36 years old as he lined up for Cardiff in the FA Cup final against Portsmouth. Surely this was his moment in the sun, in his fourth final. We all know what happened next...
Jay-Jay Okocha
“The Bolton guy?” we hear you cry. Well, yes, because he’d already made his name elsewhere before he fell into Sam Allardyce’s sweaty embrace.
He kept coming just short, though. Eintracht Frankfurt reached the dizzy heights of 3rd and 5th in the Bundesliga during the Nigerian’s time, while Fenerbahce came 2nd and 3rd as the midfielder scored a goal in every second game.
At PSG, who he joined for £14m, Okocha was again a runner-up. At least at Bolton there were never any pretensions of winning the league and the skilful midfielder could relax and enjoy the ride.
Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher
The Merseyside duo are elephants in the room here.
By including them, it might appear to Liverpool supporters that we’re winding them up with yet another reminder of their title drought, but by leaving them out, the Anfield faithful could take offence at the suggestion that they weren’t great footballers.
So here they are, we’ll leave them here, drop in the word Istanbul and move on. Next?
Giuseppe Signori
When you end up top of the Serie A scoring charts in three out of five seasons against notoriously mean 1990s Italian defences, scoring 107 goals in 152 games, only to finish between 2nd and 5th every year, you’ve got every right to ask questions of the defence.
This was Signori’s story at Lazio, where he wound up 5th, 4th, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. During the striker’s five years in Rome, the club scored 24 more goals than any other Serie A side but were pipped to the title by more ruthless rivals every year.
Signori must have had a fair amount to say at Lazio’s end-of-season parties.
Daniele De Rossi
Francesco Totti wasn’t in a hurry to retire, and as a result his heir as Roma skipper was 34 by the time he took over.
De Rossi led the capital club to the Champions League semi-finals in their first campaign of the post-Totti era, having previously won two Coppas Italia and the World Cup alongside his club-mate.
However, the No.10 did something that the midfielder has failed to match by winning only the third Scudetto in Roma’s history back in 2000/01. De Rossi was 17 at the time and made his senior debut just months after the success, but 17 years later he's still waiting despite having finished as a Serie A runner-up eight times.
Klaas-Jan Huntelaar
Let’s stick with the bare facts here.
Huntelaar had five seasons with serial Dutch champions Ajax. One season at serial Italian champions Milan. One season at serial Spanish champions Real Madrid.
And no league titles. Work that one out.
Bobby Moore
One-club men like Gerrard and Carragher are ideal fodder for this list, but while Moore did have spells at Fulham as well as in the USA and Denmark, he bled claret and blue.
Moore never came higher than sixth in the league during a decade-and-a-half with the Hammers, either side of lifting the World Cup in 1966 just months after submitting a transfer request.
Of course, you don’t always need trophies to ensure hero status at a club, which is the reason why some other legends don’t feature here: Matt Le Tissier (Southampton) or Antonio Di Natale (Udinese) for example, neither of whom were expected to clinch league silverware.
Antoine Griezmann
Griezmann helped Atletico Madrid finish runners-up in La Liga last season, having previously starred in the 2015/16 campaign where they somehow finish third despite racking up 88 points and conceding just 18 goals.
A World Cup win in the summer probably alleviated some of that frustration, but the French forward is yet to lift a league title, having arrived at Atleti the summer after their outstanding 2013/14 La Liga triumph.
Griezmann also fell at the final hurdle in the Champions League final, as well as taking his turn as the third-placed guest star in ‘The Ballon d’Or Show With Messi & Ronaldo’.
Gordon Banks
One of the all-time greats and a member of England’s victorious 1966 World Cup squad, Banks won just two pieces of silverware on the domestic stage; a League Cup apiece with Leicester and Stoke.
However, before characterising his entire playing career by that triumph with England and his subsequent save from Pele four years later, bear in mind that the IFHHS (International Federation of Football History Statistics) rate him as the second-best goalkeeper ever, behind Lev Yashin.
Socrates
The politically-active chain-smoking doctor and midfielder was never a title-winning politically-active chain-smoking doctor and midfielder. Representing one of the greatest teams to have fallen short, Brazil’s 1982 World Cup side, also meant that he ended a superb playing career with a pretty meagre medal collection.
His only spells outside of his home country came with Fiorentina and, erm, Garforth Town, but even back in Brazil he could only get his hands on state silverware rather than national titles.
Not that it seemed to bother him greatly. As he said in his book ‘Football Philosophy’: “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.”
Robbie Fowler
One of the most prolific strikers ever to grace the Premier League, Fowler’s relentless form in front of goal for Liverpool failed to yield a league title.
He scored the majority of his 163 top-flight goals in a Reds shirt between 1993 and 2002, a figure that puts him at number six in the division's all-time scorers ranking.
However, three third-placed finishes were as good as it got at Anfield in that time, and there were two more campaigns without a title after his return to the club in January 2006. Fowler saw out his career in Australia and Thailand, but even then didn’t come close to domestic honours.
Stanley Matthews
It can be all too easy to romanticise English players in the context of the world stage, but Matthews was different.
Aged 41, he won the very first Ballon d’Or and it wasn’t simply an all-English affair either, with votes being cast from 16 different countries – and runner-up Alfredo Di Stefano probably played for half of them.
But despite his longevity, Matthews’ trophy haul was restricted to just one FA Cup (a certain cup final display you might have heard about) and two Second Division titles that were clinched a staggering 30 years apart.
