Odegaard, Haaland, Thiago, Pedri and more

It is an immense quirk that we get about 10% of the way through the soccer season before the rosters are actually locked into place. It’s difficult for an American sports fan to grasp, I’m sure. In college football, rosters are mostly set three months before the season starts. In professional sports, you’ve got a trade deadline — which more-or-less matches the purpose of soccer’s January transfer window — but you don’t see blockbuster trades two games into the season. But in soccer, we already saw pretty dramatic shifts in expectations before we even knew for sure who would be playing for, say, Chelsea and Manchester United.

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With the transfer deadline only days away, however, we can begin to make some assumptions regarding who is playing for whom. We can also draw conclusions (until January) regarding a team’s strengths, potential vulnerabilities and the players who will have the most significant impact on both the Champions League and the top league races on the continent.

Here, we’ll focus on that last part. Here are the 25 most important players — to both their teams and to Europe’s top prizes — of the 2022-23 soccer season.

Keys to a top-four finish (and success in Europe, too)

Obviously we’ve had to grow accustomed to the fact that not many teams will actually contend for their league’s crown in a given season. (Italy is arguably the exception to that rule, but we’re not exactly far removed from Juventus’ nine-year title streak there.) But the race for the top four in England, Germany, Spain and Italy — with spots in the Champions League on the line — can be wonderfully chaotic.

Here are some of the players who could have the most impact on said races and, in some cases, potentially control their team’s destiny in this season’s European competitions.

25. Sheraldo Becker, FW, Union Berlin. Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and Bayer Leverkusen have all disappointed out of the gate to some degree, and only…