Which clubs share the most players?

Football Trivia UK · 24 October 2026

Our games use 1,926 hand-checked players and 51 clubs. We counted every pair of clubs those players link. Some pairs share a squad's worth of players. Some of the biggest rivalries in English football share almost none.

The most connected pairs

These are the pairs of clubs linked by the most players in our list (the top 21, including ties). Each link is a player who played for both clubs at any point in his career, including loans. Click a pair to see every player who links them.

Arsenal and Chelsea: a two-way street

With 21 players, Arsenal and Chelsea is the best-connected pair among the traditional big six. The traffic has gone both ways for 25 years: Ashley Cole and William Gallas swapped clubs in 2006, Cesc Fàbregas went from Arsenal to Chelsea by way of Barcelona, Petr Čech went the other way in 2015, and more recently Kai Havertz, Jorginho and Raheem Sterling followed. If The Connection gives you Arsenal and Chelsea, you have plenty of options.

Aston Villa is everywhere

One club that turns up again and again is not one of the traditional big six. Aston Villa shares 20 players with Manchester United, 23 with Everton, 23 with Liverpool and 20 with Chelsea. Villa has long bought players from bigger clubs and sold its best players on to them, from Dwight Yorke and Gareth Barry to Christian Benteke and James Milner. When you see Villa in a round, think of the players who passed through on the way up or the way down.

The big six against each other

The grid shows how many players in our list link each pair of the traditional big six. Click a number to see the players.

Two numbers stand out. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur has only 5, and Liverpool and Manchester United has just 4. Moves between fierce rivals are rare, which is why players like Sol Campbell, Emmanuel Adebayor and Michael Owen are remembered so well. Phil Chisnall's move from Manchester United to Liverpool in 1964 is still the last direct transfer between those two clubs. Our players who crossed the divide article tells more of those stories.

At the other end, the Manchester clubs are both well connected to Chelsea and Arsenal, partly because Manchester City signed several established Arsenal and Chelsea players after its 2008 takeover, from Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Touré to Samir Nasri and Wayne Bridge.

The clubs with the most players

Aston Villa has more players in our list than any other club (196), followed by Chelsea (185), Manchester United (182) and Tottenham Hotspur (181). That doesn't mean they used the most players in history. It reflects which players are most likely to come up in a football quiz about the Premier League era.

What it means for the games

• In The Connection, a pair near the top of the table gives you lots of options, so the country is what really decides the round.
• In The Grid, rare pairs are where you are most likely to lose guesses. Answer the well-connected squares quickly and save your thinking time for the hard ones.
• Settling an argument? Our club connections pages list every player for every pair.