Tottenham Hotspur are facing the prospect of having to leave a significant number of first-team players out of their Champions League squad in the coming season.
Qualification comes with the opportunity to play on club football’s grandest stage, and, crucially for a side who want to progress in the competition and remain in it for seasons to come, a huge cash injection to strengthen further via the transfer market. However, it also necessitates an increased focus on how their current ranks are constructed due to homegrown player rules.
The Premier League requires that its participating clubs’ squads “must contain no more than 17 players who do not fulfil the ‘homegrown player’ criteria”. According to the league’s rulebook, a homegrown player is “a player who, irrespective of 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, before his 21st birthday (or the end of the season during which he turns 21)”.
Tottenham have eight fully fledged first-team players who fulfil this classification (Brandon Austin, Kevin Danso, Ben Davies, Archie Gray, Brennan Johnson, James Maddison, Dominic Solanke and Djed Spence), and also several academy graduates and homegrown talents who may remain with the squad for the season, so they are currently on target.
However, UEFA’s ‘locally trained’ rules will be much trickier to navigate.
As for last season’s Europa League, which they won to secure this Champions League spot, Tottenham will submit two lists: List A (the main squad) and List B (players born on or after January 1, 2004, who have been eligible to play for the club for an uninterrupted period of two years since turning 15).
The overall number of players (25) they include on List A is the same as for the Premier League, but the makeup of it will be markedly different. This is due to UEFA having a separate distinction between ‘association-trained’ and ‘locally trained’ players. In other words, where the Premier League does not pay attention to which English or Welsh team(s) developed a given player, UEFA necessitates that at least four of the eight association-trained players must have spent at least three entire seasons, or 36 months, between the ages of 15 and 21 at the club they’re currently with.
A quick glance at the eight senior players who qualify as homegrown demonstrates the pressing nature of the matter. Currently, only third-choice goalkeeper Austin is ‘locally trained’ compliant, and if Spurs do not address the issue, UEFA rules state they will have to leave three registration slots in their squad open for the coming season, reducing their total number of players from 25 to 22.
The situation has not been helped by Tottenham’s transfer activity.
Alfie Whiteman, a boyhood Spurs fan and an academy graduate, helped bolster their locally trained figures last season and earned a Europa League winner’s medal despite not playing in any of the games, but he has since been released. In his place, the club are likely to promote Antonin Kinsky to their European squad, having left him out of their Europa League group soon after signing him in January. Though this summer’s signings so far will improve Tottenham’s depth and quality, Mohammed Kudus, Mathys Tel and Kota Takai will never be eligible to fill homegrown status in the Premier League or UEFA competitions.
The proposed signing of Morgan Gibbs-White from Nottingham Forest would be another addition to the association-trained contingent but not the ‘locally trained’ group. The need to strengthen a squad that new head coach Thomas Frank has declared should compete on all four fronts in the coming season must be balanced with UEFA’s squad-registration requirements, and there is some concern over the club’s ability to solve that puzzle.
Developing first-team-ready players through the academy is the optimal way out of this situation, as it requires no transfer fees and exposes young talent to elite football early in their development cycle. While it is largely dependent on the quality of those emerging from your youth setup, fellow Champions League qualifiers Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal are in good positions from a club-trained perspective, with the likes of Phil Foden, Curtis Jones and Bukayo Saka now seasoned operators in Europe’s premier competition.
Given Austin is likely to sit behind Guglielmo Vicario and Kinsky on the goalkeeping depth chart, Spurs are currently without a club-trained player in the squad who is expected to make a meaningful impact on the Champions League in the coming season.
Another avenue is to re-sign club-trained players who had moved on.
Arsenal moved for Wolverhampton Wanderers’ backup goalkeeper Dan Bentley last year as they sought to address their own homegrown concerns (which have since been addressed through the emergence of Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly), but fell short of the asking price for their former academy player.
Tottenham academy graduate Kyle Walker-Peters was available as a free agent earlier this summer after leaving Southampton at the end of his contract and could have provided full-back cover on either side, but he has now joined West Ham United — possibly an opportunity missed. Though Noni Madueke, Arsenal’s recent signing from Chelsea, spent four years at Spurs’ academy to the age of 16, he would not have been eligible for a club-trained or association-trained slot as he spent the majority of the eligibility period in the Netherlands with PSV.
Others who fit this bill include Oliver Skipp, Harry Winks, Nabil Bentaleb, Dennis Cirkin, Troy Parrott and a slew of centre-backs, such as Japhet Tanganga, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Milos Veljkovic. In any other circumstances, it is unlikely that any of these will head up Hotspur Way this summer, not least because Tottenham are very well-stocked in central defence.
Oh, and then there’s Harry Kane…
Finding a way to manage the present while preventing any opportunity for Tottenham’s exciting young talents to demonstrate their qualities in the Champions League is another awkward quandary. If they were to return for Winks or Skipp, for example, how would that affect Lucas Bergvall or Archie Gray in midfield? On the same token, might a move for Carter-Vickers or Veljkovic harm Takai or Luka Vuskovic’s prospects of making the cut? With such a bloated first-team group already, it seems inevitable that quality players will be left disappointed when the club submit their final squad to UEFA after the summer transfer window closes on September 1.
As it stands, Frank will have to leave out nine first-team players. Takai, Manor Solomon, Bryan Gil, Yang Min-hyeok, Radu Dragusin (who suffered an ACL knee injury in February so will miss the new season’s opening months), Davies and Ashley Phillips (the latter two are association-trained) appear most likely to miss out at this point, but that’s only seven. And that’s before Gibbs-White, or any other potential incomings, necessitate more exclusions.
Fortunately, the long-term future looks brighter for Tottenham.
From 2026-27, Bergvall and Gray will be eligible to be registered in List B. The following season, they will become club-trained. The same will eventually apply to 18-year-old Vuskovic, should he remain at Spurs for three seasons or more.
But while their recent policy of attracting talented youngsters to their part of north London should bear fruit eventually, it won’t help them navigate this situation at present.
For now, Tottenham’s new-look boardroom has the unenviable task of addressing a pressing issue that could otherwise have a significant impact on the ability of Frank’s team to perform at their best in the Champions League next season.
(Top photo: John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)