Football awards can drift into either nostalgia or noise. The 365Scores’ 2025 Awards avoid both by locking onto moments and decisions that genuinely shifted the season. This was a year defined by sharp turns rather than slow trends: a midfielder discovering a new superpower on a Champions League night, a superclub rethinking itself after losing its brightest star, a manager imposing clarity where chaos felt inevitable, and two generational talents proving that age and context are increasingly optional. These awards aren’t about who shouted loudest or trended longest. They’re about who bent 2025 to their will.
Here’s the 2025 honours board, with a little confetti and a lot of context.
365Scores’ Best
Best Goal: Declan Rice, second free kick vs Real Madrid
Some goals look pretty on your timeline. This one felt like a message to the entire Champions League.
Arsenal’s 3–0 first-leg win over Real Madrid on 8 April 2025 already had the first Rice free kick: the “wait, Declan Rice can do that?” curler that made the Emirates go full theatre. Then came the second, and it did something rarer. It removed the remaining doubt.
The set-up screamed “shoot if you fancy it”, which is usually code for “hit the wall and jog back into shape”. Rice took the invitation personally. The angle was tighter, the distance felt ruder, and the execution was pure conviction: pace, dip, and that late swerve that turns elite goalkeepers into bystanders. There’s a special kind of chaos when a crowd realises what’s happening half a second before the net moves.
Best Team: PSG, the post-Mbappé superclub that actually evolved
Paris Saint-Germain winning trophies is not breaking news. PSG winning the way they did in 2025 felt different.
Start with the obvious: Mbappé was gone. He left in 2024 for Real Madrid, ending the era where PSG’s story always orbiting around one gravitational force. Most clubs respond to that by panic-buying the nearest famous name. PSG responded by building something that could breathe without a single-player oxygen tank.
The results were ridiculous. Ligue 1 title. Coupe de France. And then the big one: PSG’s first ever Champions League, delivered with a 5–0 demolition of Inter in Munich that looked less like a final and more like a statement of pure dominance. That scoreline matters because finals are supposed to be tight and nervy, full of “moments”. PSG turned it into a sprint, with youth and energy doing the heavy lifting and the talent doing the finishing.
And PSG didn’t stop at the treble. They added the UEFA Super Cup in August, coming back from 2–0 down against Tottenham before winning on penalties. Then, in December, they won the FIFA Intercontinental Cup on penalties as well, giving their 2025 trophy haul the kind of breadth that makes your rivals start arguing about definitions of major honours.
They did lose the expanded Club World Cup final, which is important context because 2025 wasn’t a flawless fairytale. But as 365Scores’ Team of the Year pick, that blemish almost helps. It proves the season wasn’t curated. It was earned, across formats, across opponents, across the calendar.
🚨 FOOTBALL TWIST OF FATE! ⚡️
— 365Scores (@365Scores) May 31, 2025
PSG win the Champions League 🏆 right after Mbappé leaves for Real Madrid 👀
Meanwhile… Real Madrid get knocked out in the UCL quarter-finals for the first time since 2004 ❌😳
Paris rises 🇫🇷 as Madrid falls 🇪🇸 — football writes the wildest… pic.twitter.com/Q6G8AexqQp
Manager of the Year: Luis Enrique
If PSG are the team of the year, Luis Enrique is the engine-room of the story.
The easiest way to summarise his 2025 is this: he turned a potential identity crisis into a coherent identity. Post-Mbappé PSG could have drifted into “collection of excellent players” football, the kind that looks fine in October and collapses in April. Instead, Luis Enrique created a side that played like it had shared instincts: aggressive without being reckless, patient without being passive. It got better throughout the year.
The Champions League final is the advertisement, but the season is the proof. PSG’s domestic dominance stayed intact while Europe stopped being a psychological obstacle. And in the biggest matches, they looked organised, not anxious. That’s a managerial fingerprint.
It’s no surprise he capped the year by being recognised at the top of the sport’s awards circuit. But even without the trophies on his shelf, 2025 would still read like a coach winning an argument against football gravity.
Young Player of the Year: Lamine Yamal
The “young player” category is usually where you reward potential, flashes, and the odd month where everything clicks.
Lamine Yamal does not live there anymore.
What makes Yamal stand out is not just the talent, it’s the decision-making. He doesn’t play like a kid trying to impress you. He plays like a winger solving problems: when to accelerate, when to pause, when to take the full-back on, when to slide the pass early. That’s the scary bit for everyone else. Pace and flair are common enough at the elite level. Control is rarer.
Calling him “the best young player” almost undersells it, because the real point is that he’s already in the broader “best players” argument. The youth label is just a reminder of how absurd the trajectory is.
FAQs
How many trophies did PSG win in 2025?
They won multiple trophies across 2025, including the Champions League, Ligue 1, Coupe de France, UEFA Super Cup, and the FIFA Intercontinental Cup, plus the Trophée des Champions played in January 2025.
When did Declan Rice score the two free kicks vs Real Madrid?
In the Champions League quarter-final first leg on 8 April 2025, as Arsenal beat Real Madrid 3–0.
Did PSG win the Champions League for the first time in 2025?
Yes. PSG won their first Champions League title by beating Inter 5–0 in the 2025 final.
Why is Lamine Yamal eligible for “young player”?
He’s still under the typical age thresholds used for youth awards (often under-21). In 2025 he was still a teenager.
By Nicky Helfgott – NickyHelfgott1 on X (Twitter)
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