Ask most people to name the best Championship players in history and you will get a list of famous men who barely played in it. Gareth Bale, John Stones. Wonderful footballers, both, and neither left any real mark on the division itself.
Billy Sharp did. He scored his first Championship goal in March 2008, a header in a win over Coventry, and his 130th fifteen years later. Nobody has scored more. Nobody is even close.
England’s second tier gets treated as a corridor for teenagers heading up, expensive squads heading down, everybody passing through on the way somewhere better. The five footballers below did not just pass through.
What Makes a Great Championship Player?
Nobody hands out a trophy for this, of course, so the criteria are mine and you are welcome to disagree with them.
First of all, I’m counting the Championship from the 2004/05 rebrand only. Before that it was the First Division (different clubs, different money, a different relationship with the top flight…) and comparing across that line would be nonsense.
After that it comes down to evidence. I have looked for goals spread across multiple campaigns, appearances in the hundreds, promotions. Individual honours count too.
And then there is whether the Championship was better for having them in it. Some of these EFL Championship players are remembered for one impossible year. Others for a decade of simply turning up. Both count.
This is not a ranking. Arguing about the order is half the fun.
The Best Championship Players of All Time
Billy Sharp
He was never quick. He was never especially big, and nobody ever built a campaign around him. He just kept scoring in the same division for the better part of twenty years, until the record was so far out of reach that people stopped treating it as a record and started treating it as a fact about Billy Sharp.
One hundred and thirty Championship goals. David Nugent’s old mark of 121 went at London Road in January 2022, and the milestone goal arrived 5,072 days after his first.
He was eighteen when he made his Championship debut, a substitute for Sheffield United against Watford in November 2004, just months into the division’s existence.
Many clubs took him, though it is Sheffield United he belongs to. Six promotions, three of them out of this division: Southampton in 2011/12, then twice more as Blades captain. His best year in the division was 2018/19, when he scored 23 in 40 games and the Championship Team of the Season more or less picked itself.
Peter Whittingham
Ask a Bluebirds supporter to name the finest footballer they have watched at the club, and you will not be waiting long for an answer.
Twenty goals in 2009/10, level with Bristol City’s Nicky Maynard at the top of the division, made up of free-kicks, penalties and the occasional strike from a distance that made no particular sense.
The best of Whittingham’s goals came a season later, a volley against Barnsley that won the Football League’s Goal of the Year award in 2011. Three PFA Championship Teams of the Year followed, then a place in the Championship’s Team of the Decade.
Cardiff had him for eleven seasons after a £350,000 move from Aston Villa in 2007, and for most of them the story was near-misses: an FA Cup final lost, a League Cup final lost, play-off campaigns that went nowhere.
When promotion finally came in 2012/13 they went up as champions, and Whittingham was at the centre of it.
Jamie Vardy
Two Championship titles at the same club, ten years apart. Leicester spent £1m on him in 2012, a record for a non-league player, and for a year it looked like money badly spent. Then 2013/14 arrived: 16 league goals, the title, and 102 points, a club record. Everyone knows what followed.
What almost nobody expected was the second act. Leicester came back down in 2023 and Vardy – by then well past the age at which a striker is supposed to be useful in a division this physical – scored 18 as they went straight back up champions. The Premier League title in between belongs in somebody else’s article.
Both ends of his career were spent proving the second tier could not hold him, and the second time was the harder trick.
Teemu Pukki
Pukki cost Norwich nothing and won them the division twice, which is about the best return available anywhere in football.
He arrived on a free from Brøndby in 2018 with no reputation to speak of outside Finland, scored 29 that season, won Player of the Season and took Norwich up as champions. Relegated in 2020, they went straight back up in 2020/21 with 26 more from him. He left in 2023 with 88 goals, fourth on the club’s all-time list.
His whole Championship career runs to three seasons and 65 league goals. That makes him the counter-argument to Sharp: proof that you do not need twenty years to belong here, provided the years you do have are the right ones.
Aleksandar Mitrović
The 2021/22 season is the single greatest individual campaign this division has produced. Mitrović scored 43 in 44 appearances. He drew level with Ivan Toney’s divisional record of 31 with sixteen games still to play and simply carried on.
On 2 May 2022, with a game still in hand, he scored twice in a 7-0 win over Luton that confirmed Fulham as champions – the second of them taking him past Guy Whittingham’s 42 for Portsmouth in 1992/93, the highest anyone had managed in a 46-game English league season. Numbers like that usually belong to a different era of football.
It was not a fluke season either. He had already taken the Golden Boot in 2019/20 with 26, and before that he turned up on loan in January 2018 and scored 12 in seventeen league games to drag Fulham into the play-offs, where they went up.
Throw in Newcastle’s title-winning side of 2016/17 and he has been promoted out of this division four separate times.
He left for Al Hilal in 2023 for a club-record £50m, and on the evidence of that final season Fulham did well to keep him as long as they did.
Honourable Mentions
Ivan Toney. Brentford, 2020/21, 31 goals and promotion – a divisional record until Mitrović turned up and made a mess of it. The strongest single-season case of anyone not on the main list, but one campaign is a thin body of work.
David Nugent. 121 goals in 415 appearances, and the man who held the all-time record until Sharp took it off him. Promotions with both Leicester and Middlesbrough.
Jordan Rhodes. Retired in 2025 as the second-highest scorer in English league football since 2004/05, behind only Sharp. His most prolific years came at Blackburn, where the promotion never quite came.
Emi Buendía. Player of the Season in 2020/21 and the creative engine of a Norwich team that won the division twice.
Championship career comparison
| Player | Championship clubs | In the division | Promotions (Championship) |
| Billy Sharp | Sheffield United, Doncaster, Southampton, Nottingham Forest, Reading, Leeds, Hull | 2004/05–2023/24 | Three – Southampton 2011/12, Sheffield United 2018/19 and 2022/23 |
| Peter Whittingham | Cardiff City (plus loans at Burnley and Derby) | 2007–2017 | One – Cardiff 2012/13 |
| Jamie Vardy | Leicester City | Three seasons, 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2023/24 | Two – Leicester 2013/14 and 2023/24 |
| Teemu Pukki | Norwich City | Three seasons, 2018/19–2022/23 | Two – Norwich 2018/19 and 2020/21 |
| Aleksandar Mitrović | Newcastle, Fulham | Four seasons, 2016/17–2021/22 | Four – Newcastle 2016/17, Fulham 2018, 2020 and 2022 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does this list only go back to 2004?
The Championship was created in 2004/05 out of the old First Division. Comparing players either side of that line means comparing two different competitions, so I have stuck to the division as it actually exists.
Who is the best Championship player of all time?
On the numbers, Billy Sharp. 130 goals across nearly two decades in the Championship leaves him clear at the top of the all-time list. If you rate a peak above a career, Mitrović’s 2021/22 is the strongest case.
Who has scored the most Championship goals?
Sharp, with 130. He passed David Nugent’s 121 in January 2022 and kept adding to it before leaving Sheffield United the following year.
What is the record for most goals in one Championship season?
Mitrović’s 43 for Fulham in 2021/22. Ivan Toney had set the previous divisional record of 31 only a season earlier.
Which Premier League stars played in the Championship?
Plenty, but the best known are Jamie Vardy, Gareth Bale, John Stones and James Maddison.
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