Jordan Pickford Wins Coca-Cola Save of the Season

Jordan Pickford has been named the 2025/26 Coca-Cola Save of the Season winner for a moment that felt less like a routine stop and more like a piece of goalkeeping theatre.

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, and then Sandro Tonali exploded through the ball with a volley that looked destined to rip into the top corner.

Pickford didn’t just get there. He attacked it.

Launching himself to his right, the Everton goalkeeper flung out a strong hand and somehow diverted Tonali’s ferocious strike onto the crossbar and away to safety. The home crowd gasped. The away end erupted. The final whistle followed soon after, but the game had already been decided by that split-second of instinct and technique.

“It was worthy of a goal,” Everton manager David Moyes said afterwards. “Tonali couldn't have hit that any better or any sweeter if he tried again. It was technically brilliant, his volley, but I have to say that the save was out of this world.”

Alan Shearer, the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer with 260 goals and no stranger to spectacular finishes at St James’ Park, called it “world class”. He highlighted the sheer speed of Pickford’s adjustment, the reflexes required just to touch it, let alone to steer it onto the bar.

“It is a brilliant strike from Sandro Tonali, but an unbelievable save,” Shearer said. “The reaction to get that onto the bar was remarkable.”

Inside the Everton camp, the reaction was even stronger. Centre-back Jarrad Branthwaite, who had the best view in the house as the ball arrowed towards goal, labelled it “the best save I have ever seen”.

The award panel clearly agreed.

That stop had already been recognised as February’s Coca-Cola Save of the Month, one of two monthly awards Pickford collected during the 2025/26 campaign. No other goalkeeper managed more than one. Those two took his career tally to four Save of the Month wins, a Premier League record, and set the platform for the season’s main prize.

From a field of 10 shortlisted saves — nine previous Save of the Month winners plus Antonin Kinsky’s fingertip denial for Tottenham Hotspur against Leeds United in May — Pickford’s intervention in Newcastle stood tallest. Public votes were combined with the verdicts of a panel of football experts, and the England international emerged on top.

The competition was fierce. James Trafford, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Martin Dubravka, David Raya, Alphonse Areola, Aaron Ramsdale, Karl Darlow and Kinsky all produced outstanding moments of their own across the season. None, though, carried quite the same sense of drama, difficulty and consequence as Pickford’s late, match-clinching heroics on Tyneside.

This is not new territory for him either. The Everton No 1 first claimed the Coca-Cola Save of the Season award in its inaugural year, 2021/22. Now he stands as a two-time winner, the benchmark for spectacular, game-changing goalkeeping in the modern Premier League.

On nights like the one at St James’ Park, with the clock red and the ball screaming towards the top corner, it is clear why.