logo
logo
league icon Premier League
Benjani the Barclaysman.

Ranking ‘Barclaysmen’ compilations by how well they understood the assignment

Andrew Martin •

It’s 2024, and Twitter is awash with people posting videos and compilations of prime ‘Barclaysmen’. It’s a nostalgia party out there, right now, and we’re quite enjoying it, to be honest with you.

We’ve spent more time than we’d care to mention scrolling through videos of 2000s footballers with atrocious hair scoring aesthetically pleasing goals in gorgeous boots, all set to sleazy indie and hyperactive EDM. So we thought we might as well do something productive.

We’ve picked out nine clips from Twitter and ranked them on how well they’ve nailed the concept of the Barclays era. Starting with a real honker.

9. Brentford

Good players, but Brentford are definitively not Barclays. It comes across as the club’s social media team is painfully conscious of this and are trying to compensate in the most cringeworthy way.

Sit this one out, lads. You’re a good team but allow people to wallow in their nostalgia.

8. Roy Keane x Fontaines D.C.

This one is demented. Honestly not sure what was going through this person’s head. Fontaines didn’t release their first album until 2019, and Roy Keane had won the treble before the Barclays era had begun.

This person has shot both too high and too low simultaneously. A double miss. Shot for the moon and landed on their arse. Shoddy.

7. Lewis McGugan x Black Kids

The song took us way back, thank you, Forest, but you’re absolutely not getting in on this. Let it go.

Having said that, full respect to the social media manager who’s desperately trying to ride the trend wave. We could never…

6. Wigan Athletic x Mas Que Nada

At the time of writing, the great Sergio Mendes, who recorded the best-known version of Mas Que Nada, sadly died very recently. However, it is exactly the use of Mas Que Nada that prevents this compilation from climbing higher in our ranking.

Mas Que Nada is World Cup through and through. No doubt about it. It doesn’t belong anywhere near a Barclays compilation. If we’re hearing Mas Que Nada, we expect to see Ronaldinho doing a little dance, Ronaldo doing an elastico, or Luis Figo in a pair of Total 90s.

5. Stephen Pienaar x The Coral

Solid effort. Decent song choice, a very Barclays (and underrated) player in Pienaar, but Everton just aren’t as Barclays as Wigan, Bolton, Portsmouth, Blackburn Rover etc. They just aren’t. Probably because they’re still in the Premier League, whereas the others (perhaps title-winning Blackburn aside) we associate with that specific era of English football.

4. Portsmouth x Golden Skans

Yep, fair play. Pompey ooze Barclays, they had Harry Redknapp as their manager, they were home to multiple cult heroes, and their Premier League seasons were all contained within the Barclays era.

Golden Skans came out in 2007, right in the thick of the Barclays era. Could feel our legs compressing as the pyschosomatic squeeze of our long-lost skinny jeans puts is in a damn sharpshooter.

3. This specific Didier Drogba goal against Bolton Wanderers

No music, no frills, just The Drog smashing an absolute filthbastard of a shot oast Jussi Jaaskelainan in the Bolton net. The sort of goal you rarely see anymore. Managers in 2024 are constantly looking for the next pass, trying to fashion goals out of geometrics and f*cking maths.

How we long for the days when a manager might allow their big striker to just get his head down and give the ball a good seeing to. We yearn for it. We pine.

Also this Bolton side, managed by Sam Allardyce, is as Barclays as it comes. Perfection.

READ NEXT: An incredible XI of Premier League cult heroes that is too Barclays to function

TRY A QUIZ: Can you name every player to score a Premier League hat-trick in the 2000s?

2. Geovanni x Razorlight

A Barclays player in a Barclays team with a Barclays era song. Hull City, you have understood and fulfilled the assignment. We salute you.

We miss when Geovanni and Elano came over to the Premier League, at the start of the Manchester City reign of financial terror, and nobody had heard of either of them despite the fact that Geovanni used to play for Barcelona. There’s too much data at hand, these days. Do you think anyone knew about Ronaldo Nazario before he signed for PSV? Did they f*ck. Bring back nice surprises, you cowards.

1. Jermain Defoe

We can’t find the song playing over this compilation. We could download Shazam and have the answer at our fingertips in a matter of seconds, but we don’t want to because it sounds a bit like a song our brains might create in a dream set 15 years ago. Like if you asked AI to create an indie sleaze bop that could realistically have been featured in both the third series of Skins and FIFA ’09.

And that is perfect.

Also, a lot of these goals are buried whilst ‘Barclays’ literally scrolls along the advertising boards behind the goal. Lovely touch.

Premier League Lists And Rankings