Most Premier League appearances

Nobody sets out to be on this list. It is not won by being the best player of a generation; it is won by being fit, useful and wanted for twenty years running, which turns out to be far rarer than being brilliant for five.

These are the twenty most-selected players in Premier League history, counted from 1992/93. The top of it is unusually tight — five appearances separate first from second — and the names in the middle are the ones that make this the hardest of all the all-time lists to reconstruct from memory.

Longevity here means something close to two decades of first-team football. James Milner's total spans twenty-four Premier League seasons across three clubs on this list alone, and Gareth Barry's 653 games were played almost entirely without being anybody's idea of a superstar. That is the trade this table records: reputation for availability.

Only five of the twenty did it at one club — Giggs, Carragher, Gerrard, Scholes and Terry — which makes the one-club men the exception rather than the pattern, even at this level of service. Two goalkeepers make the list, David James and Mark Schwarzer, which is a reminder that the position ages differently from every other one on the pitch.