Wind-up merchants XI: Jamie Vardy leads the Premier League’s team of spikiest players

Who joins Vardy in Telegraph Sport’s team of dark arts masters who just love to get under the skin of opponents?

Jamie Vardy knew precisely what he was doing on Monday night. His pre-planned mime, directed at Tottenham’s supporters, pointing to the Premier League badge on his sleeve before making signs to indicate one and zero, for the number of titles in the competition won by the respective clubs, was short, smart and sassy.
It was the perfect bit of football trolling. And how the Leicester fans loved him for it. The man who has remained loyal to their club for nearly a decade after their title season (albeit that he has his wife’s legal bills to settle) demonstrated his fealty in the best way possible: by winding up the opposition. For Leicester followers, he is their man on the pitch, not going through the motions but living it. And the more he is hated by rival fans, the more they love him.
Every club has their favoured provocateur ever keen to get under the skin of opponents, the kind of irritating presence happy to tread on toes at a corner, tug at underarm hair when apparently helping a stricken rival to their feet, in all likelihood perennially skipping the queue in the players’ bar after the game. But here are the most accomplished 11 at the dark arts of trolling in the history of the Premier League.
Here is Telegraph Sport’s wind up merchant XI:  
The goalkeeper who celebrated winning the golden glove award at the 2022 World Cup by going all X-rated with the trophy, is never shy of undermining his opponents. Fond of a shushing gesture to quieten rival fans after he has pulled off a significant save, his favoured theatrical space for goading is the penalty shoot out. Here he verbally assaults players already nervous about the process, throws the ball away before they can take the kick, celebrates in front of those who missed with his signature shoulder shuffle. 
Perhaps his finest moment was at Old Trafford, when Manchester United were awarded a last minute spot kick against Villa. Up stepped Bruno Fernandes, a player hugely skilled from twelve yards. Martínez spent the entire build up shouting in his opponent’s face that Cristiano Ronaldo should be taking the penalty because he was better at the job. When Fernandes missed he turned to the United fans and swished his hips in sneering delight. Nobody does it better.
The only player in Premier League history whose behaviour warranted intervention by the police, Neville’s actions were deemed “inflammatory and irresponsible” by the Greater Manchester force after he had run the full length of the pitch to celebrate a goal in front of the visiting Liverpool fans in 2006. He was duly the subject of a hefty fine by the football authorities. 
Lauded by his own supporters in the terrace chant “Gary Neville is a red, he hates Scousers,” the player turned property developer and pundit was hardly repentant when he talked about the incident some decade and a half later. “I don’t feel sorry for all that celebration,” he told the authors of Red on Red, the History of the United/Liverpool rivalry. “In fact I wish I’d done it again and again and again.”
Intense, physical, unyielding, Keown was a huge presence in the Arsenal defence for a decade. He was also adept at the dark arts. He was renowned by rivals as a pincher, grabbing at them during corner kicks, an idea he had borrowed after a European tie. 
His favoured target was Ruud van Nistelrooy, the then Manchester United striker, who he reckoned was no stranger to administering a wind-up. The pair frequently clashed. Not least in a match at Old Trafford in 2003 when Keown reckoned the Dutchman’s play acting had been responsible for the sending off of the Arsenal midfielder Patrick Vieira. When van Nistelrooy missed a penalty, Keown’s manic celebratory leap in his face became the stuff of legend, not to mention a £20,000 fine. 21 years on, he reckons not a day passes without somebody reminding him of it.
Playing against Manchester United at Old Trafford in 2013, the hugely skilled Brazilian centre-back was shoulder-barged by his fellow countryman Rafael Da Silva. He fell to the ground, clutching at his shin as if he had been hit by sniper fire. He rolled once, twice, then in the middle of his third roll, he looked up at the home supporters and grinned. It was Phd level trolling, his smirk infuriating his rivals all the more because of its deliberate self-awareness. 
He was no less pointed in his response to criticism from pundits. “It’s funny, some people talk about how to win the Premier League, but they’ve never won it,” he once said. “Jamie Carragher never won the Premier League. They talk and say, ‘this player is not right for this league’. Yet I won the league.”
The Scotland captain has long enjoyed himself in Merseyside derbies. He particularly favours laughing in the face of angry opponents. None more so than Jordan Pickford, the busy Everton goalkeeper. In 2023, Pickford, who had been a bundle of nerves all game, pushed Robertson, who duly mocked the level of threat by theatrically chortling right up against the Evertonian’s nose. You imagine him hanging around outside the Sainsbury’s superstore in Liverpool for hours waiting for Pickford to arrive, then pulling into his space just as he is about to park, before heading off, giggling uncontrollably.
A skilled central midfielder, Barton’s career was critically undermined by his inability to control his trolling. At times, as when he stubbed a cigar out in the face of a youth team player or hospitalised his teammate Ousmane Dabo, it strayed into the horribly violent. Mostly, as when, then playing for QPR, he started a fight in the hope of provoking a couple of Manchester City players into being sent off for retaliation, his behaviour on the pitch was as pig-headed, ignorant and ill-directed as his current reinvention as a self-styled speaker of truth to power.
When he was a player, the noisy broadcaster had a mime he would use to wind up opposing fans. He would point to their favourite player, then point to the side of his own shorts, as if to suggest he had him in his pocket. And how it worked. Savage was loathed by rivals. Tottenham supporters hated him for the way his theatrical reaction to the late Justin Edinburgh’s retaliation got the Spurs favourite sent off in the 1999 League Cup final. Aston Villa fans loathed him for provoking Dion Dublin into a red card head butt. Derby fans never forgave him, even after he played for the club, for a blatant dive to win a penalty. Perhaps his finest piece of trolling, however, was when, after being sent off when playing for Wales for a standard bit of provocation, he threatened to take Fifa to the European Court of Human Rights. Magnificent.
The Frenchman is a master of mockery. His favoured trait is, after he has scored himself, to mimic rivals’ goal celebrations. James Maddison, Antony, Wilfried Zaha: all have been at the sharp end of his impressions. Though Arsenal fans’ distaste has a history stretching back to his behaviour in a match played under Covid restrictions when he was still at Brighton. After he went down in a collision with the keeper Bernd Leno, his theatrical yelp of pain was so loud it echoed through the empty stadium. But it was Leno who had been injured. And as he lay on the turf waiting for a stretcher to arrive, Maupay, completely unhurt in the collision, rose from his position of pain to point at the stricken keeper and laugh. Maupay would go on to score the game’s winning goal.
For Costa, football was a constant battle. And he had no worry about what opponents thought of him. In 2015 the French paper L’Equipe named him “Europe’s most hated footballer.” And not just because he played for Chelsea. Skilful, quick and muscular, he was forever in his opponents’ faces, cunningly maintaining his own cool even as those he targeted fumed. When leading the line for Chelsea’s title winning side in 2015, he seemed particularly riled by opponents from Merseyside, mocking Everton’s Seamus Coleman after he scored an own goal, then being sent off for stamping on two Liverpool players. He met his match in the manager Antonio Conte, however, who told him he was surfeit to requirements at Stamford Bridge by text. That’s properly underhand.
There is being lippy, there is being mouthy and then there is Luis Suárez, a player with a weird propensity for biting opponents. Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic proved his tastiest rival. But there were others. Despite his odd gastro choices, Suárez, largely by dint of being one of the finest finishers of his generation, was a leading example of how fiercely his own team’s fans will support their favourite troll. In his native Uruguay he became a national hero after his outrageous handball against Ghana helped project the country to the 2010 World Cup semi-final. And Liverpool fans in their thousands were right behind him after he had been accused of racially insulting Patrice Evra in 2011. Not just the fans either, the manager Kenny Dalglish encouraged his players to warm up for a match in Suárez T-shirts after the player had been banned by the Premier League.
The king of the wind-up, he never stops. Even in the post-match handshakes, when rivalries are supposed to be set aside and mutual respect shown, Vardy will be at work. On Monday, after he delivered his pantomime gesture to the travelling fans, he was upbraided by a couple of Tottenham players who pointed out to him that this was not the best moment for such behaviour. His response? He swore loudly in their faces. Top trolling.