All 20 Premier League clubs recently ratified a rule to restrict the size of their squads and install a quota on the number of “home grown” players. Personally, I’m a little surprised that they agreed to restrict the squads to 25 players since the majority of clubs have used more than 25 players a season for the last 2 years.

Granted, the clubs will get to submit the lists twice a year – at the end of the summer & winter transfer windows – so they could theoretically use up to 50 players. However, it’s unlikely that there would be a massive number of changes between the second squad submission at the end of January and the original list submitted at the end of August.

I haven’t seen it stated anywhere, but I would assume that a player picking up a long term injury could be replaced on the squad list. It seems to work that way in every other competition where a squad list is required, so I can’t imagine it not being the case during the course of a Premiership season.

Aston Villa’s first team squad has 37 players right now. Obviously there could be some player movements in January ’10 and there will definitely be some ins and outs during the summer before these rule changes take effect. However, as it stands right now, there are 12 players who would have to be disqualified from being able to play Premiership football.

The other restriction being imposed is that a minimum of 8 “home grown” players must be included in the 25 man squad. “Home grown” player is defined as:-

one who, irrespective of his nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to the Football Association or the Football Association of Wales for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons or 36 months prior to his 21st birthday (or the end of the Season during which he turns 21).‬‪

The only other restriction, which intuitively seems like the flip side of the home grown requirement, is that there can only be 17 players who are over 21 and not home grown. The short story, again, as it stands right now, is that there are currently only 8 players at Villa who fit this description – Friedel, Beye, Bouma, Petrov, Carew, Cuellar, Salifou & Guzan.

So the good news is that there will be zero direct impact on the Villa squad as things currently stand. It will make the transfer window marginally more interesting as these requirements will become a factor complicating the annual merry-go-round that the majority of transfers are part of.

Does this vindicate MON’s apparent policy of buying British? Well, perhaps to a certain extent, but the quota of 8 home grown players really shouldn’t be that difficult to achieve. The Champions League already has this requirement, so aside from taking the longer term view of submitting a squad to deal with the rigours of the league, the top four should have this covered. Why do I care about them? Well, a Villa squad laden with so many home grown players may look like rich pickings.

It’s important to remember that players do not have to be English or Welsh to be home grown, as long as they have 3 seasons playing in either country by the time they’re 21 they’re good to go. You’d need to build a very strong argument to convince me that some clubs won’t respond to this by aggressively seeking to exploit the laws outside of England to pick up the foreign talent as early as possible.

Naturally, UEFA & FIFA are applauding these rule changes, hopefully they intend to be extra vigilant and willing to punish clubs who poach youngsters illegally, especially from abroad. Yes Chelsea, I’m looking at you! Be prepared for a lot of allegations, court cases and sanctions being made against clubs.

The long term view is that these rule changes are supposed to encourage an additional investment in youth, but I can’t see it being all rainbows and lollipops. The short term outlook will be less impressive for some players. As I mentioned above, as things stand at Villa, there would be 12 players told that they will not be in the squad and therefore unable to play Premiership football at least until the next list is submitted. That may well have been the reality anyway for some of the younger players, but at least they currently know that it’s not impossible for them to receive a call up, even just to the bench, however unlikely that may be.

It’s possible that this may encourage young players to go out on loan more I suppose, we’ll see if it pans out that way. Shane Lowry has just joined Plymouth for 3 months and Marc Albrighton may well be heading to Forrest for a month, so I’m not sure managers really need much encouragement to get their prospects some competitive experience.

The bottom line is that there is no direct impact to Villa from these changes. The biggest potential problems will be how other teams respond. It’s in our hands to negate that as a factor by qualifying for Champions League.

Then again, that’s got to be goal every season from now on or we’ll forever be fending off unwanted advances for our players, regardless of quotas or squads.

EDIT: There’s one passage from these rules that I was struggling to interpret and ended up ignoring completely. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite important and means I’ve not given an accurate description of how these rules will work. Here it is:-

Clubs will be able to supplement their squads with unlimited additional players under the age of 21 on 1st January in the year in which the season commences.

Seems simple enough, but I couldn’t quite reconcile it with the focus there’s been on a 25 man limit on the squad. It is simple though, it does exactly what it says on the can. Clubs can include as many players under the age of 21, regardless of whether they’d be home grown or not, in addition to the 25 man squad.

So I claimed above that the rule changes would effectively mean that 12 players currently at Villa would be told that they couldn’t play Premiership football. Well, as luck would have it, guess how many players in the current squad will be 21 or under on January 1st 2010? Yup, 12!!! Spooky, no?

So I guess the final analysis of how this rule will effect Aston Villa is that it won’t. A 1,000 word blog post to tell you that seems like a massive waste of time. If it makes you feel any better, it took me longer to write it than it took you to read it.

The point about how it may effect the other clubs still stands, but surely even Arsenal and Chelsea could meet these weak requirements?