AS A PROUD and fully paid-up member of the Football Writers’ Association I voted for my men’s and women’s Footballer of the Year this week. 

Surveying a list of previous winners is to showcase the greatest footballers who have played the game in this country since the Second World War. 

The first Footballer of the Year award went to Sir Stanley Matthews at the end of the 1947-48 season after the FWA was founded on board a ship returning from an England fixture in Belgium.