In football, the number 10 is the shirt worn by a team's chief creator — the attacking midfielder or second striker who receives between the opposition's midfield and defence and turns possession into chances. Over the years it has been carried by some of the sport's greatest names, and the creative role it describes is still very much alive today, even when the player filling it wears a different number on his back.
Most shirt numbers describe where a player stands. The 10 came to describe what he is responsible for. Somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s the number stopped being a squad allocation and became a label for the team's imagination — the player trusted to unlock a packed defence, to find the pass nobody else sees, and to decide a tight match with a single moment.
That expectation is why the shirt still carries weight, and why supporters scan a team sheet to see who has been given it. But the modern game has loosened the link between the number and the role. Many of today's finest creators wear 8, 11, or 22, because coaches now spread creative duty across midfield and attack rather than housing it in one fixed position. When people ask about number 10 football players today, they usually mean the players who do the 10's job, whatever is printed on the shirt.
Any list of great 10s starts in the same place. Pelé turned a number handed out almost at random at the 1958 World Cup into the most famous shirt in the sport, and Diego Maradona gave it its drama, wearing 10 as captain when he dragged Argentina to the 1986 title almost single-handedly. Between and after them came a lineage of players who each defined the role in their own country's image: Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane in France, Roberto Baggio in Italy, Zico and later Ronaldinho in Brazil, and eventually Lionel Messi, who inherited the shirt at Barcelona and carried it for Argentina to the 2022 World Cup.
These names are the reference points every modern creator is measured against. But the more interesting question for today's game is what a number 10 actually looks like now — because the single label hides several very different players.
The classic version of the role is the pure creator, the player who lives in the pocket of space between the lines and exists to supply the final pass. Argentina's Juan Román Riquelme was the modern icon of this style — an enganche, or "hook," who slowed a game to his own tempo and made teammates play at his pace rather than the other way around.
The type survived into the modern era through players built around vision rather than speed. Germany's Mesut Özil made a career out of the killer pass, one of the most productive assist-makers of his generation. Spain's Isco and Colombia's James Rodríguez — the latter the top scorer at the 2014 World Cup — belong to the same family: creators who do their best work receiving on the half-turn and threading a runner through, prioritising the assist over their own shot. Portugal's Rui Costa and Romania's Gheorghe Hagi carried the tradition a generation earlier, playmakers whose value lived almost entirely in the chances they manufactured for others. The pure creator is the hardest type to replace, because a team built around one is often left without an obvious alternative when he is marked out of a game.
Not every 10 is a pure supplier. A second strand of the role belongs to players who create and score in almost equal measure, drifting closer to the forward line. Italy produced two great examples in Francesco Totti, who spent his entire career in the shirt at Roma, and Alessandro Del Piero, a deadball specialist and second striker who scored as readily as he set others up.
Argentina's Paulo Dybala, nicknamed La Joya, carries the same instinct into the present day — a creative forward comfortable dropping into the 10's space but always a threat to finish moves himself. This kind of 10 is the choice when a coach wants a goal threat in the hole rather than a metronome, and judging him on assists alone would badly undersell what he offers. Italians even have a word for the hybrid — the trequartista, the three-quarter player who operates just behind the strikers with licence to shoot. It is the version of the role that blurs most easily into an out-and-out forward.
The biggest change to the role is that much of its creative work now happens further from goal. As teams packed the final third with bodies, the space the old 10 loved began to disappear, and the best passers dropped deeper to find room. Croatia's Luka Modrić became the template for the deep-lying creator, orchestrating from a central midfield position rather than the tip of the attack.
Belgium's Kevin De Bruyne pushed the idea further, combining the passing range of a classic playmaker with relentless goal involvement from a wider, deeper starting point — one of the defining creators of the era despite rarely wearing the traditional shirt. Portugal's Bruno Fernandes plays a similar modern hybrid, a driving attacking midfielder who supplies the final ball and arrives to finish moves himself. None of these three fits the old picture of a static number 10, yet each does the number 10's job. The shift matters for anyone trying to read these players, because a deep-lying creator's influence shows up in progressive passes and build-up involvement long before it ever reaches the assist column.
The role keeps renewing itself. Norway's Martin Ødegaard has grown into a classic between-the-lines playmaker for club and country, the kind of patient creator the game was thought to be squeezing out. Germany has produced two of the most exciting young talents in the mould, Florian Wirtz and Jamal Musiala, both capable of receiving in tight areas and gliding through them. England's Phil Foden is another modern creator who can play as a central 10 or drift in from the flank, and his compatriot Jude Bellingham represents a different strain again — an advanced midfielder who arrives in the box to score as often as he creates, stretching the definition of the role toward the goal.
What unites this generation is versatility. Where the old 10 had one job and one zone, the new one is expected to create, score, press, and shift between positions within a match. The shirt may be worn less often than it once was, but the qualities behind it — vision, control in tight space, and the appetite to demand the ball at the hardest moments — are as prized as ever.
For all the variety, today's number 10 players tend to fall into a few recognisable types:
The names change with each generation, but these strands keep reappearing.
Modern creators are measured with data the old masters never faced. A contemporary 10 is read through key passes, expected assists, shot-creating actions, progressive passes, and his own expected goals from the chances he reaches — numbers that describe what the role always did, but in a form that can be compared across leagues and eras. Platforms such as RubiScore aggregate these creative metrics match by match, so the players doing the 10's job can be tracked wherever they line up and whatever number they wear.
That is the thread running from Pelé to the newest names: different players, different eras, one shared responsibility for making a team's football happen. The creative output that reveals who is truly playing the role today — across every position the modern 10 has scattered into — is published season by season at rubiscore.com.