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By Tony Attwood
The story in eras gone by is simple: if a player does well in the World Cup it reflects on his country. If a player does badly, it reflects on his team. If a player gets injured, we all suffer next season.
England have taken four players out of Arsenal’s control for this summer: Eze, Madueke, Rice and Saka.
Spain has the second most Arsenal players this time out with three: Raya, Merino and Zubimendi having been whisked away. Brazil comes second with two players: Gabriel and Gabriel Martinelli.
Then, looking at the countries that have one player each, we have Martin Odegaard with Norway, Kai Havertz with Germany, Leanrdo Trossard with Belgium, William Saliba with France, and Viktor Gyokeres playing for Sweden. Also missing will be Piero Hincapie with Ecuador and Jurrien Timber with the Netherlands. I think that makes 16 players.
Of course, the great problem with internationals is that international managers can on occasion, continue to put a player on the pitch even though he is injured, knowing that the manager is merely concerned with this one match, and has no thought of what comes next. The player is then shunted back to his club with the note “have him ready for next time.”
Yet the clubs that pay the players their salaries are forced to accept this dominance and have no idea what shape their squad will be in come the end of the tournament on 19 July. Arsenal play Manchester City in the Community Shield on 16 August, four weeks later to the day than the last WC games. This means that any Arsenal player who reaches the later stages of the World Cup will be back in training but not ready to play.
Indeed, with the Premier League season starting on 22 August and players being guaranteed three weeks off during the summer, there is a problem in having players fit to play. But medical reports suggest clearly that Premier League players require between four and six weeks of pre-season training to prepare themselves for a match. Just for the record, 22 August is 89 days after the end of the 2025/26 season and 33 days (four and a half weeks) after the World Cup final
Inevitably, therefore, players in the World Cup will get less than this, which is why some players who are with countries that are very unlikely to make it much beyond the group stage tend to have higher transfer valuations because they are less likely to be injured or on post-international leave at the start of the season.
A little closer is the release of the fixtures for the next season – these come out on Friday, June 19 at 10 am, fractionally over a month before the season itself starts. In the coming season, the top five clubs will go into the Champions League, the sixth-placed club and the FA Cup winner get the Europa League, and the League Cup winner has the pleasure of the Conference League.
However, there are always some overlaps as clubs tend to win more than one trophy, so in case you are interested, here is the run down for the coming season.
In the Champions League, along with Arsenal (obviously) there are the two Manchesters, Aston Villa and Liverpool.
In the Europa League, there is Bournemouth (I think in their first European adventure) and Sunderland, who qualify because Manchester City won the FA Cup. In the conference, we find Brighton for similar cup-shifting reasons. Crystal Palace also play in the Conference League – I think that makes nine English clubs in Europe, which at 45% of the clubs in the league is quite probably a record.
However, although we regularly talk about the 25-man squad, there are some other regulations that affect who counts as one of the 25, and indeed, last season Arsenal did not have a 25-man squad at any time during the campaign. First, there’s the home-grown rule, which means a player must have been registered with the FAs of Wales or England for three full seasons prior to turning 21. It does not relate to the player’s nationality. There can only be a maximum of 17 non-HGs in the squad.
Players under the age of 21 do not count towards the 25-player limit. Clubs can field an unlimited number of U21 players in a season, which is something that has helped Arsenal over the years, and probably will continue to do so.
