The Business of Football: How many players do you need to win a World Cup anyway?
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but the Premier League and English Football Association are having another club vs country row. The latest flare-up in this forever war is significant for two reasons. The first is its timing and the second is the likely solution, which some English Football League clubs believe is to gang up on them. Let’s deal with the timing first. On Friday, Thomas Tuchel announced a 35-man England squad that did not have room for Trent Alexander-Arnold and half a dozen other guys who would have been picked by Tuchel’s predecessors Graham Taylor, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle or Kevin Keegan if they had been available in the 1990s. And it is also only a week after 16-year-old Max Dowman became the youngest goalscorer in Premier League history on a weekend when fellow English teenagers Josh King, Rio Ngumoha and Chris Rigg started for their clubs in football’s richest domestic league. …”
NY Times/The Athletic (Video)