Indeed.
As someone said earlier. I think Chelsea cracked the code.
This. Excluding internationals, we could play 60 games over a season. There will be 10 outfield players and 5 subs per game, meaning there's 900 slots to fill over those 60 games. No player should be playing more than 40 games ideally, maybe 45 at a pinch. So we need 23 senior players minimum, which doesn't include the youngsters like O'Reilly, McAtee, etc.
Decent shout. 17/2 at Paddy Power
Think the penny may have dropped with Pep belatedly
Yes, that’s encouraging. Maybe even a hint to stop selling too many youngsters. The new DoF has a rep for spotting bargains. A change of policy looks likely.
In theory, that's fine, and for us who typically qualify for everything every season, it could work. But most teams are not in our shoes, and aren't guaranteed qualification to these extra competitions (and we're doing a good job of showing that our qualification is far from certain too). And that's the main issue with football nowadays generally. You don't know, for the next 5 years whether your players are going to be playing 40 or 65 games, so the only way to do it is to flog a small squad, or buy a huge squad and risk discontentment when half of them never get any games and it's impossible to give any youngsters game time. In the olden days, a decent cup run would give you a few extra games. Nowadays, mere qualification adds 25% more games onto your season.
