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Thomas Frank has left Mathys Tel out of his Tottenham squad for the league phase of the Champions League while he has been unable to find room in it for Dejan Kulusevski and Radu Dragusin – even though they could return from long-term injuries while there are still ties to play.
Frank has been in an impossible position because of how the profile of his players has jarred with Uefa’s regulations. Put simply, the head coach has too few homegrown squad members and too many who have come from elsewhere. He was always going to have to exclude six players from his 25-man “A” list.
The others to miss out are James Maddison, who will be unavailable for the entire league phase of the competition with an anterior cruciate ligament rupture, the new signing Kota Takai and Yves Bissouma, who is out of favour and linked with a move to Turkey, where the transfer window will remain open until Friday of next week.
It would have been a particularly difficult conversation for Frank to have had with Tel, who joined from Bayern Munich only in January, initially on loan – for which Spurs paid a fee of £8.7m. They paid a further £30m to make the deal permanent during the summer.
The 20-year-old winger appears to have been a casualty of the deadline day loan signing of Randal Kolo Muani from Paris Saint-Germain, another non-locally trained player, who has been named in the squad.
The Guardian reported last month that Kulusevski was expected to be out until around the turn of the year after undergoing knee surgery in mid-May. He promptly uploaded a video of himself training furiously on an exercise bike with the caption: “Your favourite player’s soon back.”
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Spurs are scheduled to play the sixth game of their Champions League campaign at home to Slavia Prague on 9 December, with the seventh and eighth against Borussia Dortmund (home) and Eintracht Frankfurt (away) on 20 and 28 January. Dragusin ruptured his ACL at the end of January and is expected to be out for another couple of months.
