Mo Memes Says Every U21 List Has the Same Ten Archetypes. The Lad's Not Wrong, But He's Missing the Biggest One.

Right. Mo Memes wrote a piece ranking the ten types of player you always see on these U21 lists after ESPN dropped their women's edition for 2026. Character select screen, he called it. Very clever. Very internet. And I'll give the lad this much. He's spot on.

Every single one of these lists, men's or women's, going back decades, has the same recycled archetypes. The wonderkid who never moves. The one who peaked at 16. The midfielder nobody outside of France has actually watched but everyone pretends they have. I've been watching football since before Mo Memes's parents met. Trust me. This is not new information.

But here's my problem. He's missed the biggest archetype of the lot.

Number eleven. The player who is genuinely, properly, undeniably world class but who gets reduced to a meme the second she appears on a list. That's the one. That's the archetype nobody talks about because we're all too busy doing the "character select screen" bit on social media.

See, back in my day, a young player appeared on a list and you went "right, better watch them on Saturday." Now a young player appears on a list and 47,000 people make the same joke about how lists are meaningless while simultaneously sharing the list. It's madness. Absolute madness.

And before anyone starts, no, I am not saying Mo's article is the problem. It's funny. Fair play. The lad knows his audience. But the reaction to these lists has become bigger than the lists themselves. That's the meme nobody's talking about. We've created an entire content ecosystem around pretending we don't care about rankings while obsessively engaging with rankings. Football in 2026, ladies and gentlemen.

You know what we used to do with a list of top young players? We used to cut it out of the newspaper. Stick it on the fridge. Maybe circle a name and say to your mate down the pub "watch this one." Now it's a 72 hour discourse cycle involving PowerPoint presentations on Twitter and lads called @TacticsGuru_xG telling you the list is invalid because it doesn't account for progressive carries per 90 in low block situations.

I watched women's football at Doncaster Belles in the 1990s when there were forty people and a dog in the ground. These young women on ESPN's list are playing in front of packed stadiums, getting broadcast deals, earning proper money. That's brilliant. That's progress. That deserves more than being sorted into meme categories like Pokemon cards.

Mo, if you're reading this, and I know you are because you lot are all glued to your phones, here's my challenge. Next time one of these lists drops, write me 500 words on an actual player. Pick one. Tell me what makes her special. No archetypes. No character select screens. Just football.

Because the funniest thing about these lists isn't the archetypes.

It's that somewhere on that list is a future Ballon d'Or winner and we're all too busy making content about content to notice.

VAR wouldn't have let this happen. Don't ask me how. It just wouldn't.