I'm just wondering why England deviates from most of the world (France has 5 on the bench too, right?) And I'm wondering if there is any talk of going to 18. Part of my thinking comes from Championship Manager. (Don't laugh.) When I'm playing a league with 7 bench players, I generally use one spot for a young player who has played well in the reserves, and I'll put him in if the game is out of hand. It's a good way to test youngsters, and to get them to improve. But with only 5 bench players, you can't waste a spot like that. I don't know whether or not Real Life managers think the same way, but I don't see why they would not. With the talk about how young English talent isn't getting a chance to develop because the stakes are too high, and teams will bring in veterans from other nations, I was wondering if anyone had made the connection between the lack of bench spots, and the lack of opportunities for youngsters to play.
You could have 50 substitute places and it still wouldn't make any difference as only 3 can come on. I'd favour making the number of substitutes lower and limiting the number of players a club can have, so players deemed not good enough to make the cut have to drop down a division (or maybe just to a lesser EPL club) and get experience that way. I could be wrong, but I'm sure 20 years ago if a player wasn't in the first team by 20 he'd be off. Now players up to 25 or so are happy to play in the reserves, picking a bigger pay cheque than they'd get in Div 1. e.g. Upson from Arsenal was on loan at Reading for 3 months and even as a reserve team player was picking up twice the salary of the highest paid Reading player.
Re: Re: Any move to change gameday rosters from 16 to 18? ???? There are always games that are 3-1 in the 86th minute. If you have an 18 year old on the bench, you can put him in there for the last 5-7 minutes of the game. Or games that are 3-0 in the 72nd minute. That's gonna be especially true for a club the last part of the season, if they're mid-table with little at risk. The idea of limiting the number of registered players a club can have is a good one, a pretty direct solution, but I see two problems. 1. Would that be legal? Maybe I'm too much of an American (fannies ), but that's the first thing that pops into my head. Our leagues here are centralized, they are franchises of a single thing, so that thing can set rules for everybody. English clubs aren't like that. Maybe I'm projecting American litigiousness onto England, but I would think that ManU would say, hey, you can't limit the number of employees for an LLC like us. You can't restrict the number of cashiers at Harrod's, can you? 2. The big clubs will argue that such a rule would put them at a disadvantage in European competitions.