Chelsea and Cole Palmer have just made Pep Guardiola point about Man City players perfectly

Pep Guardiola named a fringe player in his Champions League squad just to bump up the numbers. Even then, Manchester City were a couple of players short of their maximum limit.

But over at Chelsea, Guardiola's former assistant, Enzo Maresca, has had to carefully juggle his European squad knowing he had too many players for the 25-man limit. His solution: leave out Cole Palmer.

It is a bold call to omit your best player, the only forward in a sea of forwards consistently creating goals, but the decision was put down to 'load management'. Probably a clever call to manage all the egos in the squad, too.

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Chelsea's scattergun transfer policy has bamboozled the world of football, but in this situation it has its advantages. Chelsea are travelling to the far reaches of Europe in the Conference League, playing on Thursday nights and having to adapt to the Thursday-Sunday slog. Giving Palmer (and Wesley Fofana, Romeo Lavia and Ben Chilwell) some time off in between weekend games could be a wise move indeed to break up the tired legs and minds in Maresca's ranks.

A damning FIFPro report this week highlighted how many matchday squads players had been included in, using that metric as a more accurate judgement of workload than simply appearances.

Darren Burgess, FIFPRO adviser, said: “If you look at Phil Foden coming off the bench for seven minutes you think, ‘well that's not so much' but the game might be an 8pm European game or a midweek cup fixture. He's had to travel, potentially internationally, for that. Most of the time when you travel