North v South? Picking Premier League All-Star teams | OneFootball

Chelsea chief Todd Boehly was the talk of the town on Tuesday when he suggested English football is lacking an annual American-style All-Star game.

“People are talking about why don’t we have more money for the pyramid? MLB did their All-Star Game this year. They made $200 million from a Monday and a Tuesday,” he explained.

“You could do a North vs South All-Star game from the Premier League to fund the pyramid very easily.”

Not everyone would be in favour, with Liverpool boss Jürgen Klopp saying, “When he finds a date for that he can call me. He forgets that in the big sports in America, these sports have four-month breaks so they’re quite happy they can do a little bit of sport in these breaks,” but let’s indulge Boehly for a second.

What would such a game look like in the Premier League?

Handily, the Premier League already has a fairly obvious north-south divide this season that would allow you to split the league into two groups of 10 teams.

This isn’t always the case and can’t be relied on as the norm but, for the sake of 2022/23, it would look like this …

North: Aston Villa, Everton, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest, Wolves

South: Arsenal, Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Southampton, Tottenham, West Ham

Now it’s just a case of picking the teams. In US leagues, like MLS, the NBA, MLB or NHL, fans can vote, with those votes usually combined with votes from coaches and/or picks from league officials.

So it largely becomes a popularity contest. Meaning we would probably end up with something like this …

North

XI: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Varane, Van Dijk, Cancelo; De Bruyne, Casemiro, Thiago; Salah, Haaland, Ronaldo.

Sub XI: Ederson; Walker, Stones, Rúben Dias, Robertson; Rodri; Sancho, Grealish, Gündogan, Saint-Maximin; Firmino.

South

XI: Lloris; James, Romero, Koulibaly, Zinchenko; Rice, Kanté; Sterling, Ødegaard, Son; Kane.

Sub XI: Mendy; Tomiyasu, Fofana, Saliba, Chilwell; Jorginho; Saka, Mount, Kulusevski, Zaha; Jesus.