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Football London
Football London
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Rob Guest

Champions League group stage draw: The one issue not facing Mauricio Pochettino this year

Mauricio Pochettino and his Tottenham team will discover their opponents in the group stage of the Champions League later today.

Fresh from drawing Colchester United in the third round of the Carabao Cup, the draw for Europe's elite competition takes place at 5pm in Monaco.

Spurs will be in pot two of the draw having missed out on the top pot following their Champions League final defeat against Liverpool at the start of June.

That means they will definitely come up against one of Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain or Zenit St Petersburg from pot one as they cannot be paired against fellow English teams Chelsea, Liverpool and Man City.

The manager will then need to submit his squad for the competition over the coming days and it is something that has proved problematic over the past couple of years.

UEFA have rules in place regarding who exactly can be named in a team's 25-man senior squad and they stipulate that no more than 17 non-locally trained players can be included.

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This has been a bit of an issue for Pochettino as Eric Dier and Ben Davies are classed as 'foreign' players as they spent their academy years in Portugal and Wales respectively.

Spurs' large number of non-locally trained players in recent seasons has seen the likes of Erik Lamela, Vincent Janssen and Georges-Kevin Nkoduou all miss the cut, with Pochettino believed to be devastated at having to leave Juan Foyth out following Lucas Moura's arrival in 2018.

However, the manager will not be forced to leave anybody out this year and naming a squad should be relatively straightforward.

The departures of Janssen and Nkoudou have certainly helped Pochettino out, while Victor Wanyama looks set to seal a move to Club Brugge very soon after falling down the pecking order in N17 over the past two years due to his injury issues.

Spurs have also been boosted by the news that Foyth can also be included on the club's B list and not part of the 17 non-locally players as he joined the club in August 2017 and was born on January 12, 1998.

A player may be registered on the B List if he is born on or after 1 January 1997 and has been eligible to play for the club for any uninterrupted period of two years since his 15th birthday by the time he is registered with UEFA.

See below for the non-locally players set to be named in Spurs' Champions League squad for the 2019/20 season.

Non-locally trained players

Hugo Lloris

Paulo Gazzaniga

Serge Aurier

Toby Alderweireld

Jan Vertonghen

Davinson Sanchez

Juan Foyth*

Ben Davies

Eric Dier

Moussa Sissoko

Tanguy Ndombele

Christian Eriksen

Erik Lamela

Giovani Lo Celso

Son Heung-min

Lucas Moura

*Now on the club's B list for the Champions League

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