Real Madrid, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Atletico Madrid all have players you’d love to have on your side and absolutely hate to play against. That’s the beauty of football’s dark arts.

Gone are the days of Sergio Ramos, Pepe and Mark van Bommel, but a fair few of today’s footballers are carrying the flame. Plenty talk a good game, but the genuine practitioners know exactly how to rile an opponent without crossing the line (or at least without getting caught).

With that in mind, we’ve ranked the 10 biggest sh*thouses in world football in 2026.

10. Jude Bellingham

The fact that Bellingham had zero qualms about mouthing off to Lionel Messi says everything about his self-assurance.

That’s a large part of what makes him such a superstar at Real Madrid. It’s clear to see that he absolutely losing.

But beneath the aura is a bit of menace. Never afraid to lob a grenade and dive headfirst into the fallout. You suspect there are few things Bellingham enjoys more than getting under an opponent’s skin.

9. Bruno Guimaraes

Newcastle United supporters adored the Brazilian not only for his quality and commitment, but also how much he seemed to absolutely revel in antagonising opposition players and fans.

We’re sure that Arsenal fans will grow to love him in the same way. His absolute banger against Sunderland will help, and it will have been extra sweet after he was given dog’s abuse by the Stadium of Light faithful all night. Later that night he posted “The Fat Rat wishes you a nice weekend” on his Instagram.

All in the game.

8. Valentin Barco

Barco played a grand total of 19 minutes in Argentina’s World Cup campaign. All of them in a meaningless group-stage dead rubber against Jordan.

To do that rubberstamp his status as the biggest pantomime villain of 2026-27 was some doing. To not even have any role to play and yet have the audacity to celebrate in Bellingham’s face takes a special kind of brass neck.

Chelsea’s summer signing seems a spiky character and has already received massive cheers for getting knee’d in the back of the head by Harry Wilson and ragdolled by Kevin Schade. It could be a long season.

7. Matias Galarza

We’ll be honest. Having spent almost his entire career in South America – Olimpia, Vasco da Gama, Talleres, River Plate – Galarza hadn’t really appeared on our radar until the World Cup.

But he left a big impression. Paraguay produced one of the all-time great sh*thouse displays in their World Cup elimination to France, which was best epitomised by the Scrappy-Doo midfielder.

You almost had to put your hands up and applaud the sheer brazenness of the performance. Credit to France for not rising to it.

6. Cristian Romero

We’re struggling to think of any transfer – anywhere, ever, in football history – more perfect than Romero joining Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid.

A match made in heaven.

5. Bernardo Silva

Martin Odegaard can explain this one.

“This is football, my friend,” was Silva’s justification in the mix zone afterwards. We’re not having that. A coward’s trick.

READ: Bernardo Silva keeps Man City & Arsenal rivalry burning with brutal Odegaard hack

4. Marc Cucurella

As with a few other names in this list, we have absolutely no doubt that Cucurella is a genuinely lovely fella…

Off the pitch. The same was apparently true of Pepe back in the day.

Once the whistle goes, Cucurella has perfected the art of winding up the opposition. He doesn’t deny it.

“It was late in the game,” he reminisced about his infamous, hilarious clash with Adama Traore last season.

“We were barging into one another and I felt myself very close to him, and I thought, well, I’m going to stick my head in here to see if I can stir things up a bit.

“He grabbed me, threw me where he could, and a big brawl broke out.”

How nobody has edited Cucurella getting thrown to the ground by Adama into this gif is beyond us.

3. Bruno Fernandes

You knew he was going to feature somewhere near the top, didn’t you?

There are different kinds of sh*thouses. You’ve got your old-school wind-up merchants, your authentic hardmen and your sneaky little weasels. Bruno Fernandes belongs firmly in the latter category.

Constant gesticulating. Non-stop whinging. Never not in the referee’s ear. His role in Phil Foden’s recent red card in the Manchester derby – kicking him before a theatrical response at his retaliation – sums him up. Clever. Shameless. Frankly a bit embarrassing.

2. Gabriel

Is there a more unpopular footballer in the Premier League right now?

Gabriel should take that as a compliment. He wouldn’t rile as many people up if he wasn’t one of the best centre-backs in the country.

But his propensity to throw himself to the floor at the lightest of touches is infuriating. Particularly when you consider he’s an absolute unit. He knows how to play the game, and he does it to perfection. That doesn’t mean we have to like it, though.

Schadenfreude doesn’t get much sweeter than his missed penalty in the Champions League final.

1. Leandro Paredes

With the 2026 World Cup still fresh in the memory, it was impossible to choose anyone else.

Paredes was – still is – a very good footballer on his day. He’s the kind of endlessly committed midfield lieutenant you love to have fighting your corner if he represents your team, and detest if he’s lining up for the opposition. The pure essence of what this ranking is all about.

Getting booked within seconds of his introduction in the World Cup final summed up his campaign, in which he seemed determined to ruffle as many feathers as possible for an Argentina side that fought tooth and nail to make it as far as they did.

But if you were in any doubt that this was all just a performative hardman act, you only needed to look at his heads-gone reaction at the full-time whistle to see that it’s just who he is. Cut Paredes and he bleeds sh*thouse.

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