With more than 17 non-homegrown players to choose from, Arsenal had to drop some of their players from their Europa League team
The Gunners have recruited well in this transfer window, but they were also unable to sell some of their players.
This means that Mikel Arteta has been left with a bigger squad than he would have wanted to work with.
The Spaniard faced his first big test of who is really important to him when he had to name his Europa League squad for the season.
UEFA rule states that only 17 non-homegrown players will be allowed in the team for the season and the Gunners had 19 players to choose from.
At the end of the day, they decided to exclude Mesut Ozil and Sokratis Papastathopoulos.
Edu has revealed that it wasn’t an easy decision to make, but the Gunners did it the right way by sitting down with the affected players to explain the manager’s decision to them.
“We needed to manage the number of foreign players in the squad because we are only allowed to have 17 on our list,” Edu said as quoted by Mirror Football.
“I talked to Mikel [Arteta] about the players who were probably going to be left out and we discussed how to treat that challenging situation.
“The way we did it was to sit down with the players concerned and to be open with them and I also spoke to their agents.
“The only way to do that was face-to-face and to clearly explain why Mikel has made that decision. And I think we did it quite well.”
