Alfie May Wins PFA League One Player of the Year
Alfie May has been voted the PFA League One Player of the Year after a stand-out season for Charlton Athletic.
May won the Golden Boot in the third tier after netting 23 times for the Reds. The 31-year-old was a model of consistency throughout the season and also bagged the PFA League One Fans’ Player of the Month award in October after scoring seven in six games.
The forward was alongside a number of top players on the PFA membership’s Top Six shortlist to claim the prize, including Harrison Burrows, Colby Bishop, Ephron Mason-Clark, Marlon Pack and Nathaniel Mendez-Laing.
Birmingham City have long since been installed as pre-season favourites for promotion from League One – even before this summer’s comparatively lavish spending spree at St Andrew’s@Knighthead Park.
It certainly helps fuel the early August optimism that one of those nine signings – 31-year-old Alfie May – is a striker with such a proven track record at third-tier level.
May will go into Saturday teatime’s 29,000 sold-out St Andrew’s opener against Reading – new boss Chris Davies’s first competitive game in charge – on the back of a pre-season run of five goals in six matches.
May was League One’s top scorer last season, with 23 for Charlton Athletic, hit 20 the season before for Cheltenham Town in a relegation-bound team – and also hit 23 for the Robins in 2021-22, as well as scoring 13 times in their League Two promotion-winning campaign the year before.
It all adds up to a career haul of 119 goals for a player who did not kick a ball in the English Football League until he was 23 – he was involved in framing windows rather than transfer windows.
“The first goal is always the important one,” said May, like any true goal poacher. “You chip off and people say it’s only pre-season, but I like to score. It’s a good feeling.
“I still think I’m 26 or 27. It’s my game. It’s what I like to do . . . running around harassing defenders and keepers and seeing if they’ve got a mistake in them.
“It’s my job and that’s what’s probably got me a lot of goals. Otherwise I’d have carried on being a timber framer.”
Gravesend-born May’s main job in his late teens and early 20s, when most young hopefuls are trying to make their way in the game, was being part of the family timber-framing business in Kent, whilst he supplemented his earnings scoring goals in non-league with the likes of Bromley and Farnborough.
But Darren Ferguson took a chance with him at Doncaster Rovers in January 2017 – and, although his goal tally of 23 goals in 115 games was comparatively meagre to what he has done since, it got the ball rolling.
“I loved my job working with my brother and my family,” he said. “It’s a family-run business.
Alfie May’s Football League debut came at the of 23 with Doncaster Rovers in January 2017
“I went for a couple of trials when I was 21 and I didn’t get them. But, when I was 23 I got a trial at Doncaster and my brother just sat me down and told me I needed to start making a decision and that I couldn’t just keep going for trials and not succeeding.
“He was supporting me all the way, don’t get me wrong. Luckily enough, Darren Ferguson was the man who gave me that chance and opportunity.
“Now I’m sat here going into the new season with ambitions of promotion and going to the next level. But it’s not going to be easy. As a group we know that.
“Everybody fights. They want to stay in this league. You can go to a bottom-of-the-league team, they get an early goal and then they’re hard to break down.
