25-man Squad Update – August 2015

Prior to the past few seasons I have written about how our 25-man squad is shaping up in line with the ‘home grown’ rule. I wrote an update in July, and am regularly asked to update further, so here’s how our squad is looking.

To summarise the rule again, we are able to name a 25-man squad if eight of the players are ‘home grown’. We could name fewer than eight home grown players, but would need to also name fewer than 25 players in our squad – for example, if we only have seven home grown players, we can name a 24-man squad, 6/23, 5/22, etc. A home grown player is defined as follows:

… one who, irrespective of his nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to the Football Association or the Welsh Football Association for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons or 36 months prior to his 21st birthday (or the end of the season during which he turns 21).

We do not need to name players who are under 21 on our squad list; for the 2015/16 campaign, players considered ‘under 21’ will have been born on or after 1st January 1994.

Since the beginning of last season we have lost one ‘home grown’ player (Kyle Naughton) from our squad list. We have also sold Grant Hall and Ryan Fredericks, who were on loan last season, and can expect to lose at least one more (Aaron Lennon). We have added Kieran Trippier, who is home grown, but also three non-home grown players in Toby Alderweireld, Kevin Wimmer and Clinton Njie. Dele Alli falls into the under-21 category.

Also, since last season, Harry Kane has passed the age threshold and will need to be named in the squad, whereas last year he was simply included in our list of under-21 players.

As it stands, our ‘named’ 25-man squad would consist of the following (* = home grown player):

Hugo Lloris
Michel Vorm

Kyle Walker*
Danny Rose*
Kieran Trippier*
Ben Davies*
DeAndre Yedlin

Jan Vertonghen
Toby Alderweireld
Kevin Wimmer
Federico Fazio

Ryan Mason*
Mousa Dembélé
Tom Carroll*

Christian Eriksen
Nacer Chadli
Erik Lamela
Andros Townsend*
Alex Pritchard *
Aaron Lennon*

Harry Kane*
Clinton Njie
Emmanuel Adebayor

We are then able to select any players who were born on or after January 1994 without needing to register them. This means that any of the following (plus the other first and second year academy scholars) would be available for selection. NB: I have presented them in age order.

Eric Dier
Shaq Coulthirst (on loan at Wigan Athletic)
Kenny McEvoy
Nabil Bentaleb
Grant Ward (on loan at Rotherham)
Dominic Ball (on loan at Rangers)
Luke McGee
Milos Veljkovic
Harry Winks
Connor Ogilvie (on loan at Stevenage)
Nathan Oduwa (on loan at Rangers)
Emmanuel Sonupe
Dele Alli
William Miller
Joe Pritchard
Harry Voss
Anton Walkes
Luke Amos
Anthony Georgiou
Cy Goddard
Kyle Walker-Peters
Joshua Onomah
Shayon Harrison
Cameron Carter-Vickers
Ismail Azzaoui

Since my last update we have sold Vlad Chiricheș, Benjamin Stambouli, Roberto Soldado, Grant Hall and Ryan Fredericks. This means that we have only 23 players that would need to be included in our squad list. I still expect Emmanuel Adebayor and Aaron Lennon to leave, and there are rumours that we might also sell Federico Fazio and Andros Townsend, and loan out DeAndre Yedlin. We have ten homegrown players (including Lennon and Townsend) and that means that we could currently sign three non-homegrown players who are over 21 and would still be able to name all of our players on our squad list. 

This is a very healthy situation to be in leading up to the end of the transfer window – we can make two further signings without worrying about having to ‘make space’ for them. Our squad is so streamlined now that we will not be caught in a situation where players are frozen out of the Premier League squad due to numbers.