No modern transfer saga is complete without an article about the player’s ‘dream shirt number’, where the research amounts to checking Transfermarkt – a fine resource but not without inaccuracies – to see what he has worn in the past and if that number is free at the potential new club.
The recent case of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool’s former number 66, brought an extra layer, given that La Liga doesn’t allow senior players to wear numbers higher than 25. A philosophical question: if a hundred articles cite “a little-known rule”, when does it become well-known?
It’s a prime example of the quantity of number-related articles going up – which is good – while the quality goes down – which, obviously, isn’t. So many of the pieces available to read are merely copycatting another in the battle for clicks rather than putting in the hard yards to make something genuinely informative.
But back to Madrid.
There is something to it, of course; David Alaba couldn’t continue wearing 27 after his move from Bayern Munich, for example. But, to the best of our knowledge, none of those articles pointed out how TAA *could* wear 66 in his first few games for Madrid.
The England international was signed before the end of his contract in order to play in the Club World Cup, in which clubs can submit squads of between 26 and 35 players. While most major international tournaments limit the numbering to the squad size – and very early iterations of the club version did – Fifa allow players at the CWC to wear between 1 and 99, as long as that was what they had in the most recent club season.
Obviously, Alexander-Arnold falls outside those stipulations and, given that the Madrid squad will be bigger than that for next season’s league, there will be some changes afoot in late summer anyway.
We’re not saying he definitely will wear 66 – but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.
