PL squad list taken from their site. Maybe this is out of date?
We named 23 players. 4 goalkeepers. So 19 outfield players. Take off reguilon and Robson I get 17. Reguilon was only there as nobody else wanted him. I don’t even know who max Robson is but we are almost in February and he has played zero minutes in a season we have had an injury crisis.
So I’m not counting those two as senior outfield players Ange could rely upon. They were just names on a sheet of paper.
Each squad contains no more than 17 players who do not fulfil the "Home Grown Player" (HGP) criteria. The rest of the squad, up to a total of 25 players, must be "Home Grown".
25 Squad players (*Home grown)
1 Austin, Brandon Anthony*
2 Bentancur, Rodrigo
3 Bissouma, Yves
4 Davies, Benjamin Thomas*
5 De Andrade, Richarlison
6 Dragusin, Radu-Matei
7 Forster, Fraser Gerard*
8 Heung-Min, Son
9 Johnson, Brennan Price*
10 Kulusevski, Dejan
11 Maddison, James*
12 Porro Sauceda, Pedro Antonio
13 Reguilon Rodriguez, Sergio
14 Robson, Max*
15 Romero, Cristian Gabriel
16 Sarr, Pape Matar
17 Solanke-Mitchell, Dominic Ayodele*
18 Spence, Diop Djed*
19 Udogie, Iyenoma Destiny
20 Van De Ven, Micky
21 Vicario, Guglielmo
22 Werner, Timo
23 Whiteman, Alfie Malik*
And I don’t buy this project stuff.
Last season Ange was saying his aim this season was to challenge for the league.
This season he reiterated that prior to the Woolwich game.
Anything now stating hey we never wanted/planned to be near the top teams right now is pure revisionist talk.
“This is the project stage!!”
Someone is bullshitting. Maybe Ange is just a salesman for levy peddling cheap goods as something else. But I think he really thought we had enough about us.
There has never been a time we have had this few experienced senior players. It makes no sense in a season we knew we would play more games.
I’m wondering if Ange’s naivety at this level alongside the boards famous Penny pinching tactics have given us this perfect storm.
Our lack of homegrown club trained players is also killing us in Europe.
We can’t currently maximise the 25 man squad depth in that Comp. So we do have to be quite clever with who we loan / buy and leave off the EL squad.