Time has a curious way with football. One moment, the turf is still damp with last season’s tears of joy and despair; the next, the frost of a new calendar year glimmers under the floodlights, and the old debates begin anew. As I sit here in 2026, gazing back at the arc of 2024 – a year that felt like a bard’s tale scribbled in grass stains and confetti – I find myself humming the same refrain: who, truly, were the immortals among men? The Team of the Year looms once more in Ultimate Team, a ritual that threads our digital dreams with the visceral roar of stadiums. But before the voting opens for EA FC 26, let me take you back to the canvas that was 2024, and paint the eleven (and one more) who carved their names into the firmament. This is not a prediction; it is a memory stitched into starlight.

Spain reclaimed their European throne after twelve long years, making the continental crown feel like a familiar heirloom – four times now they’ve clutched it. Manchester City wrote a Premier League saga with four successive titles, a feat previously confined to the realm of myth. And in Madrid, Real doubled down on destiny by marrying a Liga triumph to their fifteenth Champions League coronation, while Liverpool, suddenly unstoppable under Arne Slot’s quiet sorcery, began to command the present tense like no other. All through this, individual flames burned so fiercely that choosing just twelve souls feels almost sacrilegious. But I must try.

Who commands the space between calamity and salvation? For me, only one man’s silhouette stretches that high, and it belongs to Thibaut Courtois. Yes, the backline ahead of him in the 2024-25 campaign was a carousel of bandaged limbs and hurried patching. Yet, when the storm clouds gathered, his gloves became the anchor. Without his gravity, how could Real Madrid have stayed within whispering distance of the summit after such a fractured start? The answer is written in every impossible save, every silent assertion that the goal belongs to him alone. In a continent teeming with superb guardians, Courtois still looks down upon them – and not just because of his height.

The defence, that fragile art of organized chaos, demands a human wall. Mine rises from the rubble. At right-back, Dani Carvajal was less a defender and more a talisman of victory. Everything Madrid and Spain clutched in those dizzying twelve months passed through his veins. His subsequent injury – that brutal trinity of ruptured ligaments – didn’t just wound Real’s campaign; it threatened to unstitch an entire tapestry. Left facing the void, all we could do was recall how indispensable he was. Alongside him, Virgil van Dijk rebuilt his fortress brick by imperious brick. Liverpool’s ascension under Slot was built on the Dutchman’s stillness; the best defensive record in England, only a single goal conceded in their first six European nights, and back-to-back conquests of Manchester City and Real Madrid in a single breathless week. Is there a more complete colossus? He forms my central axis with Antonio Rüdiger, a warrior who remained a lighthouse in Madrid’s perpetually shifting backline, a defender who could stare into the abyss and not flinch. Completing the quartet, I turn to Joško Gvardiol, a left-back so refined he morphed into City’s second most venomous attacking spur behind Erling Haaland. That statistic, while flattering for him, also whispers a darker truth about Guardiola’s injury-ravaged puzzle – but it doesn’t diminish the Croatian’s multifaceted brilliance. Is there a more complete defender roaming the left channel today?

Then comes the pulse of every side: the midfield. Rodri didn’t just win almost everything a man can win – the Premier League, the European Championship, the UEFA Super Cup, the Club World Cup – he redefined the role of the anchor. A defensive midfielder shouldn’t have 12 goals and 15 assists whispering around his name like a quiet incantation, yet there they were. And that deeper, scarier number: with him, City averaged 2.7 goals per game; without him, a mere 1.4. His nation never tasted defeat when he strode onto the pitch. The Ballon d’Or was not just a prize; it was a public acknowledgement of midfield domination as high art. Beside him, Jude Bellingham painted his own fever dream across Madrid’s canvas – playing as a striker when called, plunging back into deep midfield when needed, always carrying that English heart. I can still see the overhead kick against Slovakia in the Euros, a moment when he snatched a nation from early heartbreak and hurled it toward a final. And who could overlook Florian Wirtz? Barely out of boyhood, the 21-year-old maestro conducted Bayer Leverkusen’s symphonic march to the Bundesliga title with over 40 goal involvements, a hat-trick to crown the season, and the winning strike in the DFB Pokal final. Bayern Munich chase him now as if he were a stolen secret. Shouldn’t they? He is the poetry that has no meter yet.

Now, to the trident of divine selfishness up front. Mohamed Salah entered 2024 with contract whispers swirling like autumn leaves, yet his football became a blizzard of certainty. More well-rounded than ever, his goals refused to decline, and his assists became the threads holding Liverpool’s attacking tapestry together. Some players age; Salah just deepens. No question. Next, the impossibility of omitting Erling Haaland. Sure, City’s form nosedived as the year aged, but the Norwegian’s appetite for devastation never diminished. A fourth consecutive title and a second straight Golden Boot? He is not merely a striker; he is a statistical inevitability, a force that bends probability. Finally, I gaze at Vinícius Jr. If trophies were a language, the Brazilian would be its great poet. Another LaLiga, another Champions League triumph – with his own goal sealing the latter – and a Ballon d’Or second place that still feels like a coronation in waiting. Who deserves this final spot more than he? No one. He dances on the edge of impossibility.

But what of the ones who knock yet don’t quite fit into the original eleven? The 12th Man pick is often the most painful omission, a reminder that art is cruel. For me, he edges out Kylian Mbappé himself. Viktor Gyökeres – the former Coventry City striker turned goal machine in Portugal – has become a celebration first, a person second. Fans who have never watched a full Sporting CP match can mimic his motion by heart. He is destined for a summer transfer to the Premier League or La Liga, and his form screams for a monstrous card. He is the future, already living in the present.

So there it hangs, a constellation of names I’ve arranged against the blackness of a year gone by. Do you whisper your agreements into the night, or would you rearrange the heavens differently? In the end, isn’t this debate – this endless, passionate communion over who reigns supreme – the very pulse that keeps football eternal? Let me know what your soul says, for the game never stops listening.