Well, technically a new high.
A picture paints a thousand words, or 447 numbers, anyway. We don’t have any great affinity for Chelsea but a 5-1 win was the least they deserved after Manchester City committed this offence.
A mean average number of just over 40.5, and a median of 51. Adding insult to injury is the fact two of three 1-11 numbers are grossly out of place – the right- and left-backs wearing 5 and 11 respectively. Of the numbers from 31-47, City have only allocated 42 (Yaya Touré), so this could have been made slightly less worse.
Not much else to say, other than to hope that the FA might insist that teams go back to 1-11 rather than us having to put up with this shit.
7 Comments
Mind you, it’s still nowhere near as ridiculous as Mexico… yet…
I don’t mind the youth players having squad numbers, it’s just that going up to 77 when you have 48 players registered smacks of redundancy to me.
The Ronaldinho and Shevchenko examples you give are contrived but at least there’s some kind of reasoning and meaning behind them (being both players’ years of birth). If numbers are to go that high, I’d prefer them to have significance rather Man City’s scattergun approach.
I quite like the fact that some clubs give all their players squad numbers (even if theyre not published resulting in a few in the 70s). Arsenal do likewise and Celtic did (and maybe still do). Rangers did when they were in the SPL.
And I much prefer exotic numbers as a result of the above, as opposed to ‘RONALDINHO 80’, ‘SHEVCHENKO 76’ and such.
I had a feeling this would come up…
It got worse with the substitutions – Barker (62) on for Celina (59) and more egregiously Humphreys (77 – SEVENTY SEVEN!!!) replacing Fernando (6).
Manchester City currently have 48 players on their books with squad numbers – it would be so much better if the Premier League forced teams to number their declared 25-man squads 1-25 and the under-21s from 26 with no gaps. The only exceptions would be for retired numbers and retired for a good reason, none of this “no.12 reserved for our fans as the 12th man” crap.
It’s a conundrum, Harry. Half an explanation here: https://squadnumbers.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/319/
And we comment on, rather than celebrate, squad numbers.
Why would a blog celebrating squad numbers wish for a return to boring old 1-11?