After revisiting how the new Premier League “Home Grown Rule” impacts Aston Villa and confirming that we’re comfortably able to comply with the rules, I couldn’t shake my curiosity about Man City. After all, they must be among the worst offenders in terms of the number of foreign players and I keep hearing about how many they’ll have to offload, right?

Well, unless my understanding of the rules is way off, I didn’t find them to be in bad shape at all. That’s as things stand today of course, there’s a lot of transfer window left, but they’ll have a pretty good idea who they’ll be willing to sacrifice if they bring in new players that take them outside the scope of the rules.

Quick recap of the rules for the purpose of this analysis: clubs can use as many players under the age of 21 on January 1st 2010 as they like, regardless of nationality. Clubs must name a squad of up to 25 players who are aged 21 or over on January 1st and within that squad, no more than 17 are allowed to be not “Home Grown”. Logically, that means that a squad of 25 will contain at least 8 home grown players, but it’s frequently misunderstood that clubs have to name 8 home grown players. They do not.

I’ve gone through the Man City squad as listed on their official website (their player section, in keeping with the rest of the website, is excellent by the way) and classified each player into one of 3 groups as shown in the table below; Under 21 (yellow), Over 21 – Not Home Grown (Red) and Over 21 – Home Grown (Green).

The only exception in this table is Gunnar Nielsen. You’ll remember him I’m sure, he was the goalkeeper who was deemed not good enough for the Premiership just before our visit to Eastlands and City were given special permission to sign a keeper on emergency loan to replace him. He’s just signed an extension to his contract and will be going to Tranmere on a season long loan.

As you’ll see from the table (you can click for a full sized version), City currently list 6 players who are under 21. They have 31 players who are over 21; 16 are not home grown and 15 are home grown. Therefore, they’re inside the maximum number of players who are not home grown and over the minimum required number of home grown players. They simply have 6 more than the maximum 25 players aged over 21.

City could easily let some of their younger players such as Logan, Etuhu, Johnson, Caicedo and Jô go out on long term loans or restrict them to domestic and European cup competitions. (The Europa League has similar 25-man squad rules, but there’s no reason why the two squad lists have to be identical). With Gonzales likely to be 4th choice keeper, he’ll probably be used in the reserves only.

There’s six players off the list right there, leaving a 25 man squad of 13 not home grown and 12 home grown players. Well within the rules.

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the situation is extremely fluid, more players will be arriving at and departing from Eastlands. The point though, as it stands, is that City most certainly do not have to “offload” a dozen or so players to meet the requirements of the new home grown rule, which is the claim I keep bumping into lately.