Top 10 Best Footballers with no Major Trophies

Steven Gerrard hasn’t won any Premier League Trophies. Anderson Oliviera has got 4. Djimi Traore has 1 Champions League Trophy while Eric Cantona has none. The cliche that great players always win trophies is more of a misnomer. Football is a team game played by 11 players (or more if you include substitutes) on the pitch. Hence, the best team on the pitch wins the games, and consequently the trophies and not necessarily “great players”.
The amount of trophies does not necessarily equate to the talent of the player.  However, the trend of judging players by the number of trophies they’ve won is unfair and popular. Yes, Zidane has won titles. So has Ronaldo. And these are great, legendary players who have won it all. Then there is another set of players who have been greats of the game and have won almost everything but there has been one elusive trophy which they did not have the luck to lift. Johann Cruyff is probably the greatest player ever NOT to win a World Cup. Paolo Maldini is also one such other name.

But there are certain other great players who have the unfortunate fate of not winning anything despite being among the elites of the game. Matt le Tissier, Socrates etc. have etched their names in the football folklore despite winning nothing. Their sheer brilliance, commitment to the game and loyalty towards their team have immortalized them. Essentially Sports has compiled a list of 10 greatest players who had the wretched fate of winning no major trophies in their entire professional career.

Note- For clarification purposes, we are including league titles and the main domestic trophy in any country with a highly-regarded league, as well as major European titles such as the European Cup, Champions League or UEFA/Europa League. International honors such as the World Cup or European Championship are also of course ‘major trophies’, but lesser domestic competitions such as the League Cup in England are not included

Honourable mentions- 

Stuart Pearce, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Robin Friday and Sir Stanley Matthews (An English great who won just a single FA Cup and hence couldn’t make it in the list).

10. Lakhdar Belloumi

A great dribbler and an even better playmaker, Lakhdar Belloumi has been the greatest footballer ever produced by Algeria. He did win trophies, noticeably 2 Algerian trophies but given the amount of talent this player had, those can hardly be counted as “Major” trophies. A strange law in his homeland bounded him to stay there till the age of 27 and hence he had to pass the  opportunity of joining Barcelona. An unfortunate leg-break injury in the African Champion’s Cup meant that the chance to join Juventus went begging.

Most famously scoring the winner against West Germany in Algeria’s historic 2-1 win over the European powerhouse, Belloumi went on to become one of the greatest African players ever and unarguably, the best African player to never win any major trophy.

9. Vasilis Hatzipanagis

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Widely known as the  “Greek Maradona”, Vasilis is another unfortunate story of talent being the victim of geography. Widely regarded as  Greece’s greatest ever player, he only played twice for Greece due to being ineligible having already played for the Soviet Union. In a desperate bid to leave the Communist state, Hatzipanagis signed a horrible contract which bounded him to Greek club Iraklis for as long as the club wished. Arsenal, Porto, Lazio and many more came calling for the Greek star but Iraklis refused to sell their fan favourite and superstar Vasilis to anyone.

He won a Greek Cup, a Balkans Cup and the Soviet second division, but never a major trophy.

8. Antonio di Natale

An Italian and Udinese legend and still going strong at the age of 38 years, di Natale is the sixth highest scorer in Serie A history, ahead of Roberto Baggio and Alessandro Del Piero, and will, in all probability, overtake Guiseppe Meazza at some point of time. A late bloomer, Antonio di Natale started playing his best football after turning 30. He enjoys playing in a No. 10 role or as a support striker to a lead man and thrives in the deep lying forward position since he has lost some of his pace. He has never won a single trophy, although he did reach a European Championship final at Euro 2012 with Italy, only for Spain to thrash Italy them 4-0 in the finals.

7. Neil Franklin

The only person who can give a serious competition to England’s great Bobby Moore’s undisputed title as the greatest English defender ever is Neil Franklin. As a ball playing defender, Neil Franklin was a player way ahead of his times. Instead of winning the ball and hauling it long upfield, he would win the ball and then carry it forward with responsibility and try playing a tidy pass out of defense and create attacks more often than not. Of course, in today’s world, this how defending is supposed to be done but in the 1940’s and ’50’s, this was a renaissance in defending. Franklin’s style of defending turned out to be revolutionary.
A bad decision to leave his country for Colombia due to the wage cap in England and simultaneously to not play the 1950 WC returned to haunt him for the rest of his life as he returned disgraced and failed to reach those heights again. The second place finish behind Liverpool in 1946/47 season was the closest he came to winning the Championship.

He was considered second only to the great Sir Stanley Matthews in England when he chose to leave Stoke City and moved to Colombia. Such a pity.

6. Giuseppe Signori

He is the joint ninth highest goal scorer in Serie A, sharing his place with Alessandro Del Piero. While Del Piero won major trophies such as six Serie A titles, the Coppa Italia, Champions League, Super Cup and World Cup, Signori won none except a Serie B title and an Intertoto Cup which are anything but major trophies. However, to be on level in terms of goals with a great such as Del Piero shows the class of Signori. He was a fantastic striker and was the highest goalscorer in Serie A in 3 seasons and top scorer in Coppa Italia twice. In 1993, he beat the likes of Roberto Baggio, Paolo Di Canio, Franco Baresi, Marco van Basten and other such legends, to win Guerin d’Oro.

5. George Camsell

One of the greatest ever goalscorers in World Football history and most certainly the greatest English goalscorer ever, George Camsell scored 18 goals in 9 games for England, averaging two goals every game, which remains a record till now. Camsell spent his entire career in Middlesbrough and scored a whopping 345 goals in just 453 games. He as well, once scored 59 League goals and 63 overall goals in all competitions in a single season which is now the second highest in English football history. Inspite of all his goal-scoring exploits, Camsell ended his career trophy-less.

4. Johnny Haynes

Pele described him as “The best passer of the ball he has ever seen.”

The former English captain who was capped 56 times and captained his country 22 times has a stand named after him and a statue outside Fulham’s Craven Cottage.
Haynes’ loyalty for his club is evident from the fact that despite interests from AC Milan, who offered Fulham £80,000 for their legend which would have doubled the record transfer fee at the time and made Haynes the best paid player in the world, Haynes remained with  Fulham for his entire professional career, staying trophy-less.

3. Matt le Tissier

Lovably remembered and revered as “Le God” by the Saints crowd, Matt le Tissier can arguably be called as the greatest Premier League player not to win any trophy. A sensational goal-scorer who had 2 magic wands in the form of his two legs. A crazy finisher. Not so much of a crazy athlete.
Le Tissier spent his entire career playing for Southampton despite constant interests from Tottenham and Chelsea. And had he joined any one of them, he probably would have not featured in this list.

Le Tissier scored 161 goals for Southampton and 100 in the Premier League, with many of them being spectacular and stunning strikes, as well as an almost perfect record of scoring from the penalty spot, scoring 47 spot kicks out of a total of 48.

He was not a great runner and his work rate was close to being considered abysmal. But his finishing and technique was so perfect that Sir Alex Ferguson described him as a type of player he would never pick but hated to see in the opposition line-up..

2. Socrates

A genius both on and off the field, Socrates is regarded as one of the greatest midfielders ever to grace the game. A doctorate in medicine earned him the nickname “Doctor Socrates” and his head band reached cult status. Brazil was supposed to win the World Cup in 1982 under the captaincy of Socrates but crashed out of the tournament after being defeated by Italy. He, then, never won any other trophies. No Copa America and no league titles. The only trophies he won came at club level and those being regional/state championships.

1. Sir Tom Finney

Sir Tom Finney’s religious loyalty to Preston North End may not have won him a major trophy, but it has probably made him the most revered one club legend on the face of the planet. He played his entire professional footballing career of 14 years and 596 games, for his boyhood and hometown club of Preston North End, always single-handedly carrying the team on his shoulders. The Lancashire club was so heavily dependent on Finney that a newspaper report once quipped that “Tom Finney should claim income tax relief … for his 10 dependants.”

As close to a one-man team as they come, Finney inspired Preston to finishing as runners-up twice in the First Division and took them to an FA Cup final, but never managed to win a trophy with his boyhood club. The heavy reliance of Preston on Tom Finney was made clear, as they were relegated the season he left the club, and didn’t return to the top flight for 39 years. He also garnered 76 caps for England, scoring 30 goals for the Three Lions, which was a joint record when he retired, later to be surpassed by Bobby Charlton and then by Wayne Rooney.