There are a number of players who are in the running to pick up this award this year and, unsurprisingly, we think the winner will come from either Manchester club, Chelsea, Tottenham or Liverpool.

It is hard to reconcile the strength of this year’s field for the Professional Footballers Association’s (PFA) Player of the Year award with recent criticisms levelled at the Premier League.

A title race rendered a formality by roundly unquestioned deference to Manchester United and the very real prospect that no English sides will reach the quarter-final stage of the Champions League for the first time since 1995-96 have added weight to detractors of the most lucrative league in the world.

The decline in the standard of top-level defending leads to this years likely contenders being super-seeded by those forwards intent on outwitting the opposition; where the towering likes of Nemanja Vidic and Vincent Kompany were, we find wingers and strikers galore- who all enhance the Premier League’s charter of entertainment.

2001 winner Teddy Sheringham summed up the award, calling it: “The biggest personal award you can win in the game”.

Click the links below to check out the runners and riders for this year’s gong in alphabetical order- which, remember, will be announced in April after each member of the association has submitted two votes each.