We do tend to enjoy squad-number changes that involve a player moving from one 1-11 number to another.
The main reason for this is that, generally, it will involve taking on a new number that better suits the player’s position.
We like such examples of care and attention to detail, like George McCartney, then of West Ham United, in the summer of 2007, which represents today’s date.
With midfielder Carl Fletcher’s departure after 2006 having left the number 6 at Upton Park vacant, it was assigned to left-back McCartney when he joined from Sunderland in October of that year.
Incidentally, with another defender, Christian Dailly, wearing 7, their squad list might have been confused for the classic Italian ‘block’ system.
McCartney dropped from 27 to 3 at the Black Cats in 2003 and, when his rival for the left-back spot, Paul Konchesky, left in July 2007, the Northern Irishman halved his number. That in turn allowed Matthew Upson, newly signed from Birmingham City, to take 6 – though only for a season as the club would retire it in honour of Bobby Moore in 2008, the same year that McCartney returned to Sunderland, re-taking 3 there.
After a short spell at Leeds, he would round off his career back at West Ham, though, and back in their number 3.
The ‘other’ kind of intra-1-11 switch tends to involve a player moving in order to accommodate the request of a new arrival and that played a part in a current Premier League player’s move last summer.
While Tottenham Hotspur’s Radu Drăgușin is a centre-back, the fact that he is Romanian means that his move from 6 to 3 can also qualify as being positionally-appropriate – in eastern Europe, taking cues from the great Hungary side of the 1950s, it was often the case that 3 would be a centre-back, alongside 5 or 6, with 4 left-back.
That said, Drăgușin would probably have stuck with 6 but for the arrival of João Palhinha on loan from Bayern Munich.
The Portuguese midfielder has always had a 6 in his number – he wore 26 for Fulham and 16 for Bayern – and Drăgușin’s move was announced about an hour before Palhinha’s signing was confirmed, so we take it that were some back-channel communications.
Even with Tottenham swapping a centre-back for a midfielder at 6, the trend among Premier League clubs is for the tradition of a stopper wearing the number. At the beginning of the season, 19 clubs had it allocated – West Ham the exception and 11 were centre-backs (though two of those, Marc Guéhi and Jamaal Lascelles, having since left Crystal Palace and Newcastle United respectively) and five were midfielders.
The remaining three – Julio Soler of Bournemouth, Liverpool’s Milos Kerkez and the suitably-monikered David Møller Wolfe of Wolverhamption Wanderers – are left-backs or left wing-backs and so the likeliest for any moves from 6 to 3 in the near future.
