Depends whether you mean overrated at the time or in hindsight. In the cold light of day, most players who fail to live up to the hype get found out eventually.
Lots of players arrived onto the scene in a blaze of hype and never really did it. I remember in the very early days of the Premier League, players such as Jordi Cruyff (Johan Cruyff’s son) were being lauded as future superstars and yet faded away into obscurity. In later years, Andrei Shevchenko, Mesut Ozil, Michael Ballack, Fernando Torres (for Chelsea) and Andy Carroll (for Liverpool) all made big-money, high-profile moves and failed to live up to their reputations. Manchester United could field a team of recent big-money flops all on their own; Paul Pogba, Alexis Sanchez, Di Maria, etc.
If you mean “everyone thinks they’re great, but I think they were average” then its obviously a bit more subjective, because if lots of people collectively think someone is or was a decent player, there must be ‘something’ there. The answer would probably be an Englishman as there’s a collective blind spot for some English players amongst English fans and media.
Theo Walcott and Delle Alli are two that immediately spring to mind, though I think the tide has started to turn on Alli already.
** Edit, this next bit doesn’t make much sense unless you realise that the original question suggested that Roy Keane was a candidate for the most overrated player.
Roy Keane is an odd shout. A FIFA 100 Inductee, a Premier League Hall of Fame inductee, a PFA Player of the Year, the winner of seven Premier League titles and the Captain and lynchpin of one of the most successful teams in the history of the English game. He’s earned the accolades and awards to back up his reputation. Cristiano Ronaldo credits Keane with being one of his biggest influences, pushing him into becoming the player he is today. That’s pretty solid praise.
Who is the most overrated player playing in premier league at the moment?
Aaron Ramsey.
Many people, Arsenal fans or not, still think that Ramsey has a lot of potential and is a capable midfielder. Unfortunately, in many systems, he is neither.
A true midfielder controls the tempo of the game, carries out tactical instructions, and has good positional sense.
While he is a good passer, and sometimes can score superb goals, Ramsey likes pushing forward too much, leaving space exposed and fails to track back. Defensively, he is often weak.
For instance, let’s look at him in Arsenal’s 4–0 defeat to Liverpool just a few weeks ago (clips from a YouTube video, so quality won’t be the greatest):
Here, we have Arsenal’s goalkeeper Cech kicking the ball out, circled in red. Look at where Ramsey is. He is so far forward that he could be mistaken as an attacker, when he was really part of a midfield duo in the game, partnered with Granit Xhaka to make Arsenal’s two-man midfield.
As the ball is in the air, just look at the arrow separating him from his midfield partner. They are miles off, and thus, he in particular provides no defensive cover and is sorely out of position. He is in no place to provide any sort of control to the game.
Now, Liverpool have won the ball (circled in red), and Ramsey has not only left the defense exposed, but he is also nowhere near where he needs to be, just walking back over (circled in blue).
In essence, Ramsey is overrated because he fails to perform as a central midfielder, lacking neither the positional sense, defensive cover, nor the leadership to carry out his duties.
Who is the most overrated player playing in premier league at the moment?
I have just realized that the inclusion of Jordan Henderson makes this list an all-British compilation of players who are good, but not as great as the people make them out to be. Henderson was once a heavily-criticized player at Anfield. His move coincided with an ill-fated tenure of the club under Kenny Dalglish.
However, as it turned out, Henderson turned the tides and has started to repay the faith that the club have shown in him – but he still doesn’t ooze the quality that a player, who is the captain no less, of a club like Liverpool, should.
Some make it sound as though he is the Roy Keane of Liverpool, when the truth is that he is very, very far behind the player that the Manchester United legend was. Henderson might yet hit prime and go on to become the player that some make him out to be, but he is not there as of yet.
Which football players do you think aren’t overrated but everyone says they are?
Karim Benzema, clearly. In Spain, even among the majority of Real Madrid fans, he is considered an overrated striker who manages to stay in Madrid just because the president (Florentino Pérez) likes him.
However, I completely disagree with their opinion. Let us admit that he didn’t do a good 2017-2018 season: he scored only a few goals, too little for a striker, but Real Madrid’s fans must be the most impatient in the world, and when a player is in a bad time, they love criticising him and even booing in the stadium when he makes a mistake. This affected him a lot last season. He has never been a striker who scores many goals, but last season he was so unconfident.
Above all, when he had to shoot to the net, he would fail a lot, due to his unconfidence. However, the rest of his game and style, he would be as good as always, and here is where my whole point comes: he is not a typical striker, a typical ‘9’. I think the position in which he plays plus the number he wears on the jersey (9) confuse a lot. The way he plays, the way he creates good actions for the rest of the team, the assists he gives, his moves…, they are just the style of a ‘10’. He and Ronaldo understood each other perfectly, and I would love to have seen how many trophies Madrid would have won without him.
People underrate him because of his lack of a great number of goals, but he is amazingly talented. The way he sees the game, only a few privileged in the world can. Of course he can the bad games, of course he could or should score more goals (now without Ronaldo he will have to), but fans criticising him, in my opinion, is disagreeing with people who know much more about football than us. Pellegrini, Mourinho, Ancelotti, Benítez, Zidane and Lopetegui know less about football than the fans who consider Benzema an overrated player for Real Madrid?
If he has been already 9 years in Real Madrid it is because of something, not because the coaches know nothing about of football. His talent, his way of seeing the game, his touch of the ball, those are the things that make him an amazing player, but many Real Madrid fans are blinded by the fact that he is not a huge top scorer.
