As many people will be aware the FA have decided that the national team is an embarrassment and that more should be done to improve the quality of English players. This is logical, the next step is not. They have decided that the best way to improve players is forcing a club to put some ‘home-grown’ players into the squad. This is a fantastic idea but no one told them that forcing a team to name average English players in a squad will do no good at all.

To avoid any racial/nationalistic problems they cannot go by nationality, so the ‘home-grown’ rule means any player who spent three seasons under the age of 21 registered at an English or Welsh club. However, you do not have to spend a second in the UK. Arsenal could have signed a Chilean 18 year old, sent him on loan for three years in Spain to gain a work permit and then put them in the squad as home-grown. By my calculations the following players count as ‘home-grown’:

Fabregas
Denilson
Clichy
Song
Djourou
Vela
Bendtner
Walcott
Diaby - It is unclear whether he counts because he came in the January transfer period so spent two and a half seasons in England before his 21st birthday

The Arsenal squad size is not very big but will be limited to 17 ‘foreign players’. Including Diaby, because he is borderline, it means we have 12 players over 21 who did not have three years at an English club.

The ruling also states that you can have as many under-21 players as you want whether they are English, French or even North Korean escapees which means that at the moment the likes of Ramsey, Gibbs and Wilshere are not a problem.

It was seen as a rule that would hurt Arsenal because the club apparently has no English players but it would turn out that it has absolutely no effect on us this season. Wenger could go and buy five foreign players tomorrow and the squad would still meet the necessary criteria. The likes of Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool are the teams with big groups of foreign players who may need to ship players off. The real danger is that this new rule is obviously going to be tinkered with and has opened the door to shrinking the number of foreign players. Next season they might cut it down to allowing 15 foreign players and then down again to 12. It is a slippery slope.

The immediate future looks good for Arsenal because we have strong young backup. If and when we have an injury crisis we can bring in the likes of Wilshere, Emmanuel-Thomas, Eastmond and Frimpong whereas other clubs would have to bring in quota fillers who will be an instant weakness.