10 Hardest Players in Premier League History Ranked by Shearer & Richards

When the topic of football’s hardest-ever players comes up, the same protagonists are usually mentioned. Roy Keane, Vinnie Jones and Duncan Ferguson are the ones that immediately spring to mind, and all three of them feature in a list of the top 10 Premier League hard men of all time, compiled by Micah Richards and Alan Shearer.

Richards and Shearer were both given the same 10 players to choose from, but their final rankings are different. There are a couple of players in the 10 from the modern era of football, but the vast majority were playing in the 1990s, when football was perhaps a bit more physical than it is today.

Micah Richards’ Top 10 Premier League Hard Men

Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett

Richards and Shearer both put Diego Costa in 10th, admitting that they weren’t very pleased that Costa was included in the list of 10 players that they had been given to choose from by BBC staff.

Richards said: “He wasn’t a tough cookie. It’s a facade. He shouldn’t be in there. I played against him with Villa and he kept niggling all game. I pulled him in the tunnel at half-time and said ‘What are you doing? If you want to scrap…’ but he didn’t want it.”

Richards ranked Julian Dicks and David Batty ninth and eighth respectively, with Stuart Pearce, his former manager at Manchester City, in seventh. Speaking about Pearce, Richards said:

It’s easy to forget that Patrick Vieira was a teammate of Richards’ at City, with the Frenchman spending the final season of his career at the Etihad before retiring in 2011.

Action Images/Paul Thomas Livepic

Ranking the Premier League midfield great sixth in the list, Richards said: “He was the nicest horrible man. He was elegant, smiling but as soon as you get on the training ground he was disgusting. It was always down your shins. I was star struck when I met him. He came to Manchester City. I’m in awe, this is Vieira. I’ve told him ‘I’ve gone from loving you to hating you within a day of meeting you’. Off the field he was such a nice person but he turned [in training] – two-footed tackles.”

Roy Keane, Richards’ partner in crime on Sky Sports, ranked fifth, but Richards doubts whether he was hard as people say he was: “Some of these guys are before my time and the reason he slipped down to five is because I was watching Duncan Ferguson videos, and Jaap Stam and Roy Keane walked away from a confrontation. So I wondered how hard are you really? Roy let me down. Everyone talks about him being a hard man.”

Richards had Nemanja Vidic in fourth, Jaap Stam in third and Vinnie Jones in second, with notorious Premier League hard man Duncan Ferguson in top spot. Richards said: “From the videos and how big he (Ferguson) is… Stam walked away, Keane walked away. He’s got to be number one. He’s got the eyes, you wouldn’t mess with him.”

Alan Shearer’s Top 10 Premier League Hard Men

Action Images/Nick Potts

Shearer had Costa in 10th with Stam in ninth, and Jones a somewhat surprisingly low entry at eighth. “He was definitely a character,” Shearer said. “At one time, he was a brickie or hod carrier. So to get where he did in football was remarkable and sums him up. But there were some really evil, disgusting challenges. Does it make you a hard man if you scythe someone down?”

Shearer played with David Batty and Stuart Pearce at both club and international level and ranked them seventh and sixth respectively. On Batty, Shearer said: “He had a scrap with Graeme le Saux in Moscow. It was -10 degrees, we lost 3-0, it was a terrible night. I always got the impression with Batts he didn’t really love football. You couldn’t accuse him of not giving his all but he was last into training, first away. He was a great lad, it was great to have him in the team. I was with him at Blackburn and Newcastle. And he won the title at Leeds.”

Arsenal legend Vieira entered Shearer’s list in fifth, with Vidic in fourth. Speaking about Vidic, Shearer said:

Shearer had some infamous clashes with Keane, who he ranked third, most notably in 2001 when Keane was sent off for throwing a ball at Shearer before swinging for the Newcastle striker during a game at St James’ Park. The Irishman admitted he considered retirement after the incident.

“When the final whistle went, Roy was standing at the top of the stairs waiting for me,” Shearer recalled to The Athletic. “I’m pretty sure a few more choice words were exchanged, there was some bustling and scrambling, but there were way too many people between us for anything physical to actually happen. That’s usually how it pans out in football.”

While Dicks placed ninth in Richards’ list, Shearer had him all the way up in second, saying the former West Ham defender’s tackles were “designed to hurt”. He said: “They were there with intent. Some of his tackles were horrible.”

In top spot, again, was ‘Big Dunc’, who Shearer played alongside at Newcastle. He said: