Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

No one quite knows the best way to react to the new 25 rule, and looking at the official data to emerge from the EPL it is clear that the clubs have simply made occasional adjustments to their squads to fit the new rules.

What I haven’t seen elsewhere is an analysis of just what the clubs have done, and that’s what I have tried to prepare below.   The data comes from the official figures, but does involve some actual adding up by me.  If I have made a slip somewhere sorry in advance, and to the guy who writes in every now and then saying “if you are going to comment at least bother to get your facts right first,” I’d say, maybe you should look elsewhere for your data.

What I have done is present four columns showing what seem to me the most interesting figures.   But we would all recognise from the off that such data doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of players.  They are just figures which are, in my view, quite interesting in themselves.

The first column is obvious – the number of players the teams entered in their 25. I think there was a feeling at the off that everyone would put in 25 players – but in fact under half of the clubs nominated 25.   The biggest reason must be that doing this gives you less room for manoeuvre next time around.

The smallest squads are at Chelsea and Wigan, both with 19.

Next is the Home Grown rule but before I get to that, here’s the table in full.

The Home total is again simple: the number of players that are designated in the “home grown” rule. 8 of the 25 players must be homegrown, which implies a sliding scale.

• If the club nominates 25 players then 8 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 24 players then 7 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 23 players then 6 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 22 players then 5 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 21 players then 4 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 20 players then 3 must be home grown
• If the club nominates 19 players then 2 must be home grown

Chelsea with 19 players nominated and 4 home grown are thus ok, as are Arsenal with 20 squad members and 7 home grown.

This has led me to my own little invention – the “Spare” chart. Obviously if a team has nominated 25 players it has no spaces “spare”.   And one might think that a team that has nominated 24 has 1 space spare.

That is true, but if one also takes into account the number of home grown players, it could well be that the club could only nominate an extra player if that player is home grown – something that could be a severe restriction.  If we keep in mind the difficulty all clubs seemed to have this summer in doing transfers involving home grown players, then the situation in which a club is anxious to sign a high quality central defender could be made worse if the club now has to sign a high quality central defender who meets the home grown rule.

In other words I am saying that apart from putting a squad together, clubs need flexibility, in the sense that if something goes very wrong on the injury front the club can quickly move to bring in another player.

One way of doing this is through having a fully nominated 25 person squad, obviously. Another way is through having a high a “Spare” number as possible (meaning that one has a number of places available that can be filled by any player from anywhere in the world (subject to a work permit, if non-EU).  The final way to do this is to have a lot of youth players – and I will come to that at the moment.

The clubs with the highest number of spare places (as I have defined it above – places that could be filled by any player) are Liverpool and Wigan with six.  The lowest are all the nine clubs who have nominated 25 players – they have zero.  Chelsea, despite nominating only 19 players have only three spaces left that can be filled by players irrespective of their place of origin or past history.

Finally, the youth totals. As expected Arsenal have the most players in this section – 56 (not 57 as I said in an earlier article – there’s my maths going again).  Liverpool are second with 53, Man U have 47.

At the bottom end of the youth league Birmingham and Stoke have 25 players listed.

So what do we learn from all this?

First clubs are being cautious in filling up their 25 list.   In Arsenal’s case this is because they have at least six youngsters who will turn 21 by next season* and so even without any transfer work their 25 list would be full (although as at least one of them is home grown, that consideration does not apply).

Second, numbers are interesting, but not a guide to success.  Liverpool’s position looks excellent, but I don’t hear many people talking about their youth set up at the moment, nor extolling the quality of their 21 as they go through a period of being a selling club.

Third, Chelsea is a huge surprise (to me at least, but maybe I am just behind the game).  They must have some cracking players lined up in their youth section who are all homegrown, for them to be relaxed at the situation.  The only reason that they did not fill in the four open spaces they currently have must be to do with meeting the financial regulations of Uefa – and indeed maybe in year’s to come we’ll see this as the first impact of those regulations.

Finally I was surprised at how small Villa’s youth squad is.  Again numbers mean nothing if the quality is there, but 36 players in the youth sides does seem very much on the low side.

And even though I said finally there is one other thing that interested me. The official EPL site that has all the lists (although not the analysis that I’ve added here) lists all the players – first team and youth, and it is fascinating to read the full names of the players.  Perhaps it is just me, having been brought up in the era of players called  Joe Baker and Tony Adams, but it is interesting to see that we have in our squad guys named Johan Danon, Djourou-Gbadjere, Alexandre Dimitri Song Bilong, Chukwuemeka Ademola Amachi Aneke, and Jay-Aston Emmanuel-Thomas (who must be the first person to play for Arsenal with a double barrelled first name and surname).  I quite liked Nigel Paul Odfleld Spence-Neita, also on the Arsenal books.  Although none can quite compare with Magaye Serigne Falilou Dit Nelson Gueye of Everton.

I don’t mean there’s anything amiss with such names – in fact I really like the flourish and style that is shown there.  My registered name is Anthony Leonard Attwood – but I used Tony  to avoid my father (Arthur Charles Attwood) and I both having the same first and last initials.  All of which is of no significance at all really.

* I have one gap in my knowledge about the 25 rule. A new list has to be presented in January – but as fas as I can see that list takes the same as definition as the September 2010 list we have just seen.  In other words the player being under 21 is still measured as of January 1 2010.  To spell it out, a player who is 20 on January 1 2010 is still “under 21″ for the whole of this season, even if he was actually 21 on January 2nd 2010, and thus is 22 on January 2nd 2011.  So we will have 22 year olds counting as “under 21″.  Is that really right???