Is this the last season in which Arsenal will buy any player who is above 21yrs of age? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

Is this the last season in which Arsenal will buy any player who is above 21yrs of age??

by Dark Prince

Now on the last day of the transfer window, lots of questions have arisen on how many more players Lord Arsène Wenger will be buying. But we have to remember that we have a new 25 limit squad rule from this season.

Yeah sure, many will rightly say that we have enough places to buy another 2-3 players. But are we missing something?? Lets check out…

Lets look at the new rule (yeah, we’ve gone through this many times but there’s still some points to be made…)

By 1 September every club will have to name a first-team squad of no more than 25, of which a maximum of 17 may not be homegrown players.

Well, I’m not going into the aspects of the number of ‘Homegrown’ players we have because I assure you that we have enough of them.

The complex part is what seems to be the simple part…  In addition to this squad of 25 players, each club may use as many under-21 players as they wish. The player must have been born on or after January 1, 1989 to be classed as ‘Under-21′ for this season.

Now we have lots of under-21s, dont we? And yeah, we don’t have to include them in the 25 man squad this season.  This is where we come to the bit quite a few people are overlooking…

Here’s our first team players along with their birth dates. The breakdown is as follows-

1) Manuel Almunia (May 19, 1977) 2) Abou Diaby (May 11, 1986) 3) Bacary Sagna (February 14, 1983) 4) Cesc Fabregas (May 4, 1987) 5) Thomas Vermaelen (November 14, 1985) 6) Laurent Koscielny (September 10, 1985) 7) Tomas Rosicky (October 4, 1980) 8) Samir Nasri (June 26, 1987) 9) Robin van Persie (August 6, 1983) 10) Carlos Vela (March 1, 1989)* 11) Theo Walcott (March 16, 1989)* 12) Denilson (February 16, 1988) 13) Aaron Ramsey (December 26, 1990)* 14) Alex Song (September 9, 1987) 15) Jack Wilshere (January 1, 1992)* 16) Johan Djourou (January 18, 1987) 17) Lukasz Fabianski (April 18, 1985) 18) Gael Clichy (July 26, 1985) 19) Andrey Arshavin (May 29, 1981) 20) Vito Mannone (March 2, 1988) 21) Emmanuel Eboue (June 4, 1983) 22) Kieran Gibbs (September 26, 1989)* 23) Marouane Chamakh (January 10, 1984) 24) Armand Traore (October 8, 1989)* 25) Nicklas Bendtner (January 16, 1988) 26) Wojciech Szczesny (April 18, 1990)*

27) Sebastien Squillaci (August 11, 1980)

* = Under-21 for season 2010/11

Well, we look very well settled for this season with this squad. Some (including me) may argue that we need a new goalkeeper. But keeping that aside, if we look at our squad, we’ve got 7 players who are under-21s and rest 20 players are 21 or above. So we do have 5 spots left to fill…or do we??

Now I can say that maybe apart from Cesc, everyone else will be a part of our team for the next season as well. So, If we look closely, we can see that four of our under-21s, namely, Vela, Walcott, Gibbs, Traore, will no longer be classified as under-21s from next season since for a player to be under-21 for next season, he has to be born on or after January 1, 1990.

This means, we’ll already have 24 players who are 21yrs of age or above next season. Which means, we wont have much room to manoeuvre next season, something which Lord Wenger must have anticipated already. Thus signing another player now is more undesirable. And we now know the reason why Lord Wenger isn’t happy with the new squad rules.

It is highly debatable whether Cesc would be staying with us next year.  Suppose he does leave, that would still leave us with only 2 places left next season. But does it mean we would still buy players next season???

I think probably no, and the reason being the same that we have so many youngsters who would be 21yrs by the following 2012-13 season. The likes of Ramsey, Szczesny, Eastmond, Lansbury, Nordtveit, JET, Barazite, will have to be included in the 25 man squad or else they’ll have to play for the reserves all year.

Most of us can again debate whether we can loan out some of these players, but surely not every one of them.  So by the time, we reach 2012-13 season (2 years in the future), our squad will be jam-packed because except for maybe Almunia and/or Cesc, everyone else present in our current team will be surely there after 2 years and we’ll have almost a dozen newly 21yr olds waiting to get added in the first team squad.

Now I have not even included many other players of our current/reserve/youth team because some of them will still be under-21s after 2yrs, namely Afobe, Wellington Silva, Watt, Sunu and Wilshere (can you believe it?) and some others I believe they might not make it, i.e they might be sold.

So how does this affect trading of Arsenal in next few years??

There is strong probability that Arsenal will mostly sell in the coming years. Well, then surely Arsenal will be called a ‘Selling’ club. That does not mean we wont buy at all. We will bring in lots of youngsters. All of them falling in the under 21 category so that we have a continuous flow of talent and quality players from the highly successful youth academy into the 1st team year after year.

I don’t think we would be in any need to buy any players above 21yrs of age after this season. We have future world class goalkeepers in Szczesny and Mannone. We have future world class strikers like Afobe and Wellington Silva. We have future world class midfielders like JET, Lansbury and Frimpong. Our future defense is also starting to look good with Nordtveit. So the question arises – Is this the last season in which Arsenal will buy any player who is above 21yrs of age??

I wont be surprised if it is.

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