This is an updated version of an article first published by The Athletic in November 2022. It has been updated to reflect James Milner equalling the Premier League appearance record by playing in his 653rd match in the competition, as a first-half substitute for Brighton & Hove Albion against Aston Villa on Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Excellent touch and control. Works hard in sessions. Rating: 5
The engine of the team. Can turn a game instantly. Rating: 5
A good communicator, finds space well and has good awareness: Rating 4
Has performed in different positions, always to a high standard of play. Rating: 5
Very quick, covers a tremendous amount of ground during a game. Rating: 5
A natural leader, leads by good example, great athlete and oozes confidence. Rating: 5
The report was filled out by Pete Collins, a Leeds United academy coach, in December 1998. And if you didn’t know which player he was evaluating, you could probably guess.
James Milner was only 12 at the time, but he was already ticking every box: the excellent touch, the work ethic, the fitness, the driving force, the communication, the awareness, the versatility and the attitude that would see him fast-tracked to make his Premier League debut within four years.
Another coach at Leeds did identify a weakness. Daral Pugh lauded Milner’s tremendous ability, but said the youngster “still needs to have more faith in team-mates — in that he will get the ball back if he passes. If he adds this to his game, James has a tremendous future”.
John Buckley, who coached him in Leeds’ under-14 team, smiles upon hearing his assessment of Milner in May 2000: “possesses real quality”, “touch and technique excellent”, a “strong and determined character” and a “good athlete who works hard even on an off-day”.
“If you really break it down like that, there was nothing he couldn’t do,” Buckley, who is now an academy coach at League One side Doncaster Rovers, says. “It was as if he was destined to be a player. He was like a sponge, the way he soaked everything in.”
Milner’s academy report at Leeds United (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)
Buckley’s mantra to Milner was about mixing his game up, surprising his opponents by trusting his left foot as well as his right. The individualist streak that Pugh mentioned was curbed to the extent that the young Milner matured into the ultimate team player.
Jurgen Klopp says he was “blessed” to inherit Milner at Liverpool. Manuel Pellegrini, who was his head coach at Manchester City, once remarked that there were players who were quicker or more technically gifted, but added, “Show me another who does all the things that Milner does well. There isn’t one. It’s very difficult to find another Milner — an intelligent player with big balls and a massive heart.”
Now at Brighton & Hove Albion, more than 23 years on from his senior debut, Milner is making history. At the age of 40, he has just equalled Gareth Barry’s record of 653 Premier League appearances.
In an interview with The Athletic at the start of this season, Milner expressed ambivalence about the record. “It’s one of those,” he said. “If I get it, fantastic. But to be honest, I would rather be remembered for winning every domestic trophy with two clubs (Liverpool and City) or winning the Champions League (Liverpool) or scoring in the Premier League for Leeds when I was 16.”
Those sorts of numbers have never interested Milner. He has always been more interested in his day-to-day statistics — his high-intensity running, the number of sprints, his lactose levels — than the record books, even if breaking one particular record became a motivation in the early days…
Milner remembers sitting on the bench at Elland Road in early November 2002. This was the Premier League, the big time, and it was so close he could almost touch it.
Two months short of his 17th birthday, he had been called up to Leeds’ senior squad for the first time, but he had just missed out on a place among the substitutes for a match against Everton. He had been invited to sit on the bench anyway — “to get a taste for it”, he was told, as if he was not hungry enough already.
Among the Everton substitutes that Sunday was a familiar face. Milner had first witnessed Wayne Rooney’s incredible talent when the clubs played an under-12s game five years earlier. Rooney had then disappeared from Milner’s radar — within 18 months, he had been fast-tracked into Everton’s under-15s team — but now, suddenly, everyone knew about him.
Two weeks earlier, Rooney had become the youngest goalscorer in the Premier League era, aged 16 years and 360 days, when he came off the bench to score a dramatic last-minute winner against Arsenal. “Remember the name!” screamed ITV commentator Clive Tyldesley, prophetically.
And now Rooney was coming off the bench at Elland Road, turning away from Eirik Bakke, running at Lucas Radebe and beating Paul Robinson to score another late winner. And now he was celebrating in front of the delirious away fans and being mobbed by his team-mates. Everyone was mad about the boy.
A 17-year-old Wayne Rooney celebrates after scoring for Everton at Leeds in November 2002 (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Milner couldn’t take his eyes off Rooney, who was barely two months his senior but was living a totally different experience. He was determined to make his Premier League debut before he turned 17 early in the new year. If he did that, he might have a shot at breaking Rooney’s goalscoring record.
At the final whistle, one of Leeds’ coaches, Steve McGregor, tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re desperate to do what he’s doing, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re not that far off, you know.”
Six days later, Milner made his Premier League debut as a late substitute away to West Ham United. Further appearances from the bench followed, the fourth of them away to Sunderland on Boxing Day — December 26. Five minutes into the second half, he slid in to convert Jason Wilcox’s cross in front of the away fans. At 16 years and 356 days, he had broken Rooney’s record by four days.
Two days later, Milner scored a beauty against Chelsea at Elland Road, turning the great Marcel Desailly before curling a wonderful shot inside the far post.
Like Rooney, this kid was here for the long haul.
Milner fires in his second Leeds goal – against Chelsea at Elland Road in December 2002 (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
In August last year, Milner converted a penalty in Brighton’s 2-1 win against Manchester City. In doing so, at 39 years and 239 days, he became the second-oldest goalscorer in the Premier League era behind former England forward Teddy Sheringham (40 years, 268 days) — as well as the second-youngest, having seen that record broken by former Everton forward James Vaughan (16 years, 270 days) in 2005.
Going into last weekend’s fixtures, 5,094 players had made at least one appearance in the Premier League since it began in 1992. Of those, no fewer than 49 per cent have played a game either alongside or against Milner.
At Newcastle United, he played under a manager born in 1933 (Sir Bobby Robson). He is now playing for one born in 1993 (Fabian Hurzeler). He made his debut in 2002 against a West Ham team featuring a player born in 1963 (Nigel Winterburn). At Brighton this season, he has a team-mate who was born in April 2008 (Harry Howell), by which time Milner had already made 167 Premier League appearances.
Then there are the wider changes in English football over the past two decades, so many of them fuelled by overseas investment and another boom in broadcast revenue. If it is possible to pinpoint Roman Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea in July 2003 as the second watershed of the Premier League era, Milner preceded it. He played against Ken Bates’ Chelsea and he faced City at their old home of Maine Road, where the mood was usually bleak rather than expectant.
On a purely trivial note, there was no pre-match rigmarole in those days. Players just ran out of the tunnel and went to warm up at their end of the pitch — no anthem, fair-play handshake or anything of that sort. As for goal-line technology and VARs, these were the type of mind-blowing ideas that might occasionally be floated in BBC science and technology series Tomorrow’s World.
Wages? Milner was still earning £70 a week as a “scholar” when he made his debut. With his first win bonus, he bought “my own phone line, my own Sky box and my own TV, which, if you remember the TVs back then, was way too big for my bedroom at my mum and dad’s”.
As a 12-year-old, Milner had accepted a deal that would take him to an eye-watering £600 a week upon turning professional at 17. That was swiftly renegotiated upwards after a record-breaking start to his Premier League career. His weekly wage rocketed to four figures and then, as his career progressed, to five figures and well into six, swelled by trophy bonuses after he joined City in 2010 and Liverpool in 2015.
But even the sums Milner has earned over a long, successful career might soon sound quaint to some of those now taking their first steps in the Premier League.
Likewise the revelation that he was stunned, as a teenager, to learn that Nike was willing to pay him to wear its boots, rather than the reverse. When the man from Nike asked whether there was any more gear he needed, Milner panicked. All he could think to say was that he would love a new pair of flip-flops.
Aged 12, Milner had accepted a deal that would earn him £600 a week upon turning professional at 17 (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
At Sunderland he returned to the dressing room to be reminded it was his job to pick up his team-mates’ dirty kit off the floor and load the crates onto the bus?
Five days later, on his 17th birthday, he returned to the dressing room after an FA Cup tie against Scunthorpe United to find his team-mates had cut up his tracksuit and trainers for a prank. He remembers walking to the bus thinking that people were looking at him and saying, “Is that tramp the kid who has just scored two goals in the Premier League?!”
It was all about keeping young players grounded, he was told. But Milner was born grounded. And he wasn’t going to change.
Footballers’ lives have changed in so many ways since Milner made his Premier League debut. And the conventional thing to say here would be that the game itself has remained the same.
Conventional, but untrue. Because the football played in the Premier League in 2002 was very different to the football that is played in it now the influence of Arsene Wenger, Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and others has been so widely felt.
At the start of the 2002-03 season, there were only four overseas managers in the division (Wenger, Claudio Ranieri, Gerard Houllier and Jean Tigana) and, while Terry Venables and Robson were synonymous with a more European style, having coached abroad, Graham Taylor, Sam Allardyce, Peter Reid, Mick McCarthy and others were not.
Whatever any pundit who played in that era might try to tell you, the modern Premier League is far more technical.
In 2006-07, the first season that Opta’s data covers, 19.4 per cent of passes in the Premier League were hit long. Now (despite an uptick this season), it is just 11.4 per cent. Only 69.8 per cent of passes in 2006-07 were successful. Now it is 82.5 per cent. By contrast, the number of tackles per game has dropped significantly, from 47.5 to 33.9, and the number of aerial challenges (again, despite an uptick this season) has fallen even more sharply.
In other words, it is a different game from the one Milner grew up playing. The technical, physical and tactical demands have changed dramatically.
He is not inclined to favour one Premier League era over another. He says there were aspects of 2000s football (such as “being booted up in the air”) that would shock today’s players and vice versa. The reality is that the game has evolved, and Milner has had to evolve with it.
It is often suggested that modern professionalism, fuelled by sports science, has normalised longevity. But players such as Cristiano Ronaldo (41), Luka Modric (40), Lionel Messi (38) and Milner are freakish exceptions rather than the norm. If anything, the speed of the modern game and its congested schedule — as well as the intensity of the media spotlight that surrounds it — seems to shorten careers at elite level.
The next oldest outfield player to have appeared in this season’s Premier League is Seamus Coleman, who, at 37, has made three appearances totalling 11 minutes for Everton. Among current players — indeed, among those whose career began after the start of this century — the next-highest for Premier League appearances are his former England team-mates Jordan Henderson and Kyle Walker, who trail a long way behind.
Shortly after Whoop, the fitness and health tracking tool, revealed last year that Ronaldo’s “biological age” was 28.7 years, Milner shared that his was 27.7 years. “I knew that would wind a few people up,” he said.
Like Ronaldo, Milner is a freak of nature, a cross-country running champion in his youth and even today keeping pace with younger team-mates at Brighton on the training ground. Virgil van Dijk, his former Liverpool team-mate, calls him “the machine”.
He puts it down to discipline: never touching a drop of alcohol, obsessing over his nutrition, conditioning and fitness. Such dedication might be common now, but it certainly wasn’t when Milner started out.
For many players in those days, the concept of sports science went little further than “Bin-bag Thursday” — going to the pub the pub on their usual Wednesday afternoon off and then wearing a bin bag under their training kit the next day to try to sweat off their excesses. Milner took one look at that and decided it wasn’t for him.
“Everything you hear of players doing now, being ultra-professional in terms of diet and nutrition and preparation and recovery, he’s been doing that stuff for years,” his former Liverpool and England team-mate Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, now at Celtic, says. “He was probably one of the first ones doing it. He doesn’t skip anything. Every day, the same attitude. Consistency brings longevity, and he’s the most consistent person I’ve ever seen with how he is as a professional.”
“We played together at Villa and with England, and I think we’re the last of our era that are still playing,” says Ashley Young, now 40 and playing for Ipswich Town in the second-tier Championship. “I always feel a lot of that comes down to hunger and desire. We’ve both got that mentality of working hard, week in week out, year after year. Not just game day, but day in, day out. I pride myself on that, but I think ‘Milly’ has got an even bigger mindset than what I have.”
Young and Milner on opposite sides of a Manchester Derby in the 2011 Community Shield (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
“Eating the right things, drinking the right things, trying to prove myself, trying to prove people wrong,” Milner said, when asked to explain the secrets of his longevity. “You’ve got to have the love for it and the drive to do your best every day, season after season. That thing of, ‘I don’t really feel like it today’, I’ve never really had that. It’s having that drive to keep doing it. The mental side is probably the biggest thing.”
Again, we come back to Rooney.
You do not become Manchester United’s and England’s record goalscorer without a serious dedication to your trade — and rarely would you see a player more driven on the pitch than Rooney appeared at the peak of his powers. But he also liked a burger, a drink and a cigarette, and at times he struggled to keep the weight off.
Since retiring, Rooney has admitted his alcohol intake was problematic. United’s then-manager Sir Alex Ferguson repeatedly warned Rooney his lifestyle, as well as his physique, could curtail his career at the highest level. He would probably admit now that Ferguson was right.
By contrast, Milner was a teenage sensation who, after the instability he encountered at Leeds and Newcastle, ended up a relatively late bloomer at Aston Villa. He won 46 England under-21 caps before finally making his senior debut at the age of 23. He won the PFA Young Player of the Year award at 24 after making more than 300 appearances at club level.
He is probably right when he cites his final season at Villa, 2009-10, as his best from an individual perspective, but after that, with City and Liverpool, he became a model of consistency in teams competing for the biggest prizes.
“If I think back to under-14 days, Wayne Rooney was absolutely frightening,” Buckley says. “He had a brilliant career, as everyone knew he was going to have. But James has ended up with a different kind of career. It’s phenomenal what he has achieved. And you know what? Success and money usually change people, but James is still the same kid.”
There are two common misconceptions about Milner.
The first is that he is boring.
Collaborating with him on his book Ask A Footballer in 2019, I found him to be deadly serious when it comes to his work but also very funny and engaging company in his downtime. Intelligent too; as well as speaking Spanish fluently (including with his children), he got seven A grades at GCSE, including maths, which led him to offer an amusingly thorough (and, sadly, entirely fictitious) answer to a question about how many bottles of Ribena it might take to fill up the European Cup/Champions League trophy.
James Milner discusses how many litres of Ribena the European cup could hold pic.twitter.com/5Sbai3T8Fj
— Jeremy Driver (@J_D_89) November 2, 2022
The second misconception is that he is low-maintenance.
In some respects, yes — Klopp has said Milner made a manager’s life easier at Liverpool with the way he and Henderson ran the dressing room, setting the highest standards of professionalism — but his demanding nature cuts both ways. He was livid at being left out of cup-final starting XIs at both City and Liverpool, even if it didn’t stop making played a significant part from the bench. Only at this late stage of his career, as a squad player at Brighton, has he begun to find it easier to accept a place on the bench.
He was already on 619 Premier League appearances, potentially within a year of breaking Barry’s record, when he joined Brighton in the of summer 2023, but the past two-and-a-half years have been the hardest of his career: His first season on the south coast was cut short by a hamstring injury and his second was largely a write-off: first because of a knee issue, then complications arising from surgery that left him unable to move his foot for months.
Milner was left fearing the worst after his injury at Arsenal in August 2024 (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
He wanted to tell himself that, if he could not play again, he would simply be grateful for the career he had enjoyed. But he wasn’t ready to do anything that might weaken his resolve to get back to action. He made it back for a brief cameo in Brighton’s final game of last season, and was determined to make this campaign count.
So often, discussion of Milner comes down to his professionalism, but it is also fascinating to note how he has evolved through his career: from fleet-footed winger in his early days at Leeds and Newcastle to thrusting box-to-box midfielder with Villa, from reluctant wide player at City to midfield dynamo in his first season at Liverpool, then a reluctant stand-in left-back, back to midfield and, increasingly, as the years have gone on, a utility player who can either speed a game up or slow it down as a substitute, depending on what the circumstances require.
As a player, Milner has kept evolving, relentless in his pursuit of self-improvement, in the example he sets and in the demands he makes of his team-mates.
During Milner’s difficult first season at Newcastle, their then manager Graeme Souness infamously said that: “I don’t see myself being here for a long time (…) if I go down the road (of) buying a team of James Milners”. It was intended as a comment on the need for experience, rather than a slight on a young player, but Milner took it personally and vowed to prove Souness wrong when he was sent on loan to Villa the following season.
Milner has proved his point many times over. Indeed, Souness goes out of his way to tell him as much any time their paths cross. As an outspoken critic of many of today’s footballers, he loves the player Milner has blossomed into, combining the best old-fashioned values with the hyper-professionalism the modern game demands.
A team of James Milners? If only there were enough of them for every team to have just one.
