Declan Rice Named Arsenal’s Player of the Season Again

Declan Rice arrived in north London to change Arsenal. Two years on, he has become the face of their revival.

For the second straight season, the midfielder has been voted the club’s men’s Player of the Season, taking 44% of the supporters’ vote for 2025/26 after a campaign that dragged the Premier League trophy back to north London for the first time in 22 years and carried Arsenal to only the second Champions League final in their history.

David Raya finished second in the poll, Gabriel third. This was Rice’s award, though, and everyone knew it long before the votes were counted.

Joining an elite Arsenal club

Back-to-back Player of the Season winners at Arsenal are rare. Rice now becomes only the sixth player to do it, stepping into a lineage that reads like a roll call of club royalty: Liam Brady, Ian Wright, Thierry Henry, Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard – and now Rice.

He had come close immediately. In his debut season, 2023/24, he finished runner-up in the same vote. Since then, he has simply taken ownership of the midfield and, increasingly, of the team’s identity.

This year confirmed it. Rice was not just Arsenal’s best player. He was their constant.

The heartbeat and the metronome

Call him a holding midfielder and you miss half the story. Rice spent the season patrolling in front of the back four one week, then stepping higher to snap into tackles and link play behind the frontline the next. Wherever Mikel Arteta needed balance, aggression and control, Rice filled the space.

The numbers underline what the eye test had already shouted.

• No Arsenal player created more chances: 96 across all competitions.
• No one won the ball back more often: 239 recoveries.
• No one made more tackles: 91.
• No outfielder played more minutes: 4,456 of them, spread across 55 appearances.

Those minutes matter. They tell of a player trusted in every context, every stadium, every storm. A player who starts the season and is still there, driving the team, when the pressure peaks in April and May.

End product to match the graft

Rice’s work without the ball defined Arsenal’s structure, but his contribution at the other end sharpened their title push.

He finished with nine assists in all competitions, a steady supply line from set-pieces and open play alike. He also scored five times, picking his moments with the timing of a seasoned forward rather than a midfielder whose first job is to protect.

The standout? A brace in a pivotal win over Bournemouth in January, a game that felt like a litmus test of Arsenal’s nerve in the title race. Rice didn’t just pass it. He imposed himself on it.

Set-pieces became a quiet weapon. His delivery and presence turned dead balls into live threats, an extra edge in a season where fine margins separated champions from chasers.

Recognition beyond north London

Arsenal supporters were never going to overlook a season like this. Neither did the wider game.

Rice earned a place in the Champions League Team of the Season, his influence in Europe acknowledged on the biggest stage. He was also nominated for both the Premier League Player of the Season and the PFA Player of the Season awards, a sign that peers and pundits alike had taken full measure of his impact.

Now he carries that form into the international arena. As part of the England squad at the 2026 World Cup, he arrives not as a promising anchor but as a fully formed leader, fresh from orchestrating a title-winning midfield and pushing a club deep into Europe.

For Arsenal, the numbers will sit in the record books: two consecutive Player of the Season awards, over 50 games played in each of his three campaigns as a Gunner, the statistical leader in almost every meaningful midfield metric.

For everyone watching, the question is simpler: with Rice setting this standard at 27, how much higher can he drag this Arsenal side in the years to come?