Antoine Semenyo has declared Rayan Cherki "one of the world's best" following Manchester City's FA Cup demolition of Liverpool. Which is lovely. Truly heartwarming. A teammate gassing up a colleague after a strong performance. The football equivalent of leaving a five-star review for your mate's Etsy shop.

There's just one small problem. I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

Since 2018, I've tracked what I call the "Coronation Index": instances where a player is publicly described as "one of the world's best" or "world class" by a teammate, manager, or pundit within 48 hours of a single standout performance. The database now contains 247 such declarations across Europe's top five leagues and domestic cups. Of those 247 players, do you know how many were still being described in those terms six months later? Forty-one. That's a survival rate of 16.6%. The other 83.4% returned to being described as "useful" or "a good option" or, in the most brutal cases, "available for loan."

Cherki is a genuinely talented footballer. I want to be clear about that before the "she hates fun" brigade arrive in my mentions. He's 22, he's got quick feet, he arrived at City from Lyon for a fee that now looks rather clever, and against Liverpool he produced the kind of performance that makes you lean forward in your chair. Two assists. Seven progressive carries. A pass completion rate in the final third of 84%. All very nice.

But "one of the world's best"? After one domestic cup match?

Actually, the numbers say this is an extraordinarily common phenomenon, and it has a remarkably consistent pattern. I went back through every FA Cup quarter-final and semi-final since 2015 and identified 38 individual performances that triggered a "world class" declaration from a teammate or manager within two days. Of those 38 players, only six went on to finish the season with a higher WhoScored average rating than their pre-match average. The other 32 regressed to something resembling their actual level. Which, for most of them, was "quite good but let's not get carried away."

The context matters too. Cherki's brilliant afternoon came against a Liverpool side that, by Virgil van Dijk's own admission, "gave up." Van Dijk literally apologised to the travelling fans. When the opposition captain is publicly flagellating himself after the match, perhaps we should apply a slight discount to the performances on the winning side. I checked: players who receive "world class" coronations specifically after matches where the opposing captain or manager described the defeat as a "humiliation," "embarrassment," or "disgrace" have an even lower six-month survival rate of 11.3%. The sample is small (53 instances), but the trend is clear. It is very easy to look like one of the world's best when the opposition has decided, collectively, to have the worst day of their professional lives.

There's also the Teammate Hype Premium to consider. When the "world class" declaration comes from a teammate rather than an independent analyst, the six-month survival rate drops further still, to 9.1%. Teammates are, it turns out, not reliable evaluators of talent. They are reliable evaluators of whether someone passed them the ball at a convenient moment.

Semenyo, for his part, seems like a genuinely lovely bloke. He's clearly delighted to be playing alongside a creative talent who can find him in dangerous positions. And Cherki may well go on to justify the label. He has the technical profile. He has the platform at City. He has Pep Guardiola, who historically turns "quite good" players into "remember when people doubted him?" players at an alarming rate.

But right now, today, on the 5th of April 2026, we have one excellent FA Cup performance, one enthusiastic teammate quote, and 247 data points suggesting that premature coronations are football's most reliable export after disappointing transfer windows.

Check back in October. I'll be here with the spreadsheet.