No, it's not the main thing. Nobody gives a shit about the League Cup and in fact it's a massive detriment that heavily impacts on the rest come January when you're playing two leg semis at Wembley, presumably still in the FA Cup and the league games. In 13/14 when we went to the semis we killed our squad by overplaying them in December/January, we had 17 games in 2 months and by the time early February game around and it was time to face a just winter breaked Barcelona we were dead on our feet. This is why outright Pellegrini will never win the Champions League because his idea of squad management is playing your best team in every game which batters our squad. Playing Sergio against Juventus, West Ham and in a fucking League Cup game when he's obviously unfit is yet another blunder in this department. No different from how he played Negredo in a League Cup game when were were 6-0 who then picked up a shoulder injury and never recovered his form. It's also why he did well at clubs like Villareal and Malaga who didn't have these fixtures to juggle.
But that's irregardless to the actual point. The actual point is that we're already starting to lose highly talented players because they can't even get a game during the League cup against Championship opposition. Sunderland are soon to be Championship opposition and we gave a £8m signing a debut who has already played numerous competitive league games, played Manu Garcia for 20 minutes then gave George Evans 3 minutes espite the game being won with 60 minutes to go. This is now the 8th consecutive year that we have failed to bring through any youth players into the squad so far. 8 years. Not one player.
We are the only team in the Champions League with 0 homegrown players, meaning we have an actual squad of 21 players unlike the 25 others have which again leads into the other problems
This is a pointless argument on here and I've been having it for years because people have no idea how good our youth players are. Unlike Nacho comes on and scores immediately and now gets posts saying he should play. Obviously he must have taken a major jump in talent in that last two weeks. People on here can't see the wood from the trees, so utterly petrified are they of our youth players that they automatically think that we'll get beat if we play them. Maffeo could walk into most Premier League sides tomorrow. He'd be the best player in any Championship side. Denayer is even better than that and is currently standing out at yet another Champions League club (after previously standing out at a different Champions League club) after we promised him first team football to get him to sign a contract then spunked £30m on a new centre back and fucked him off elsewhere. Think he's happy now? Think he's here for the long term?
I said two years ago that if you couldn't see that this was a developing problem you just weren't paying attention. Now we have 0 homegrown players, constantly knocked out of the February CL game, haven't integrated a new young player into the squad in 8 years and are pissing off most of the youth players who stand a chance to gain actual first team footballer here. If you still can't see it's a problem then it's wilful stupidity.
