Jordan Pickford Wins 2025/26 Coca-Cola Save of the Season

Jordan Pickford has been crowned the 2025/26 Coca-Cola Save of the Season winner, and it took a stop of pure instinct and steel to get him there.

Deep into stoppage time at St James’ Park, Everton were clinging to a 3-2 lead over Newcastle United. One last cross, one last scramble, one last swing of a boot. Sandro Tonali met it perfectly, lashing a ferocious volley that seemed destined to rip into the net and rip the points away.

Pickford refused.

The Everton goalkeeper exploded to his right, flung out a hand and somehow managed to divert the ball onto the crossbar and away. Not just a save. A rescue act. A moment that sealed the win, silenced the home crowd and instantly lodged itself into the season’s highlight reel.

David Moyes did not hold back in his assessment. The Everton manager called Tonali’s strike “technically brilliant” and admitted the Italian “couldn't have hit that any better or any sweeter if he tried again”. Then came the real punchline: the save, Moyes said, was “out of this world”.

Alan Shearer, the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer with 260 goals and a man who has seen just about everything in English football, went straight for the top shelf of praise. He labelled it “world class”, describing Pickford’s reaction to flick the ball onto the bar as “remarkable”.

Inside the Everton camp, the admiration was no less emphatic. Centre-back Jarrad Branthwaite, with the perfect view from just in front of his goalkeeper, called it “the best save I have ever seen”.

The award panel clearly agreed.

That stop had already earned Pickford the Coca-Cola Save of the Month for February. It was his second Save of the Month of the 2025/26 campaign and the fourth of his Premier League career, a haul that stands as a league record. No other goalkeeper this season managed to win the monthly prize more than once.

From there, the save stepped onto an even bigger stage. It was one of 10 shortlisted for Coca-Cola Save of the Season, nine of them previous Save of the Month winners, joined by Antonin Kinsky’s fingertip effort for Tottenham Hotspur against Leeds United in May. The shortlist read like a who’s who of the division’s top shot-stoppers: James Trafford, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Martin Dubravka, David Raya, Alphonse Areola, Aaron Ramsdale, Karl Darlow, Kinsky – and Pickford.

The England No 1 came out on top after collecting the highest combined total from public voting and a panel of football experts, his late heroics in Newcastle edging out a field packed with elite saves.

This is not new territory for him. Pickford has now claimed the Coca-Cola Save of the Season award twice, adding this latest honour to his success in 2021/22, the inaugural year of the prize.

On nights like the one at St James’ Park, you see why his name keeps returning to that particular podium – and why forwards across the league know that, even when they catch a volley as sweetly as Tonali did, the story is not always theirs to write.