With the Covid-19 pandemic having brought a halt to almost all sport around the world, fans are begging for any kind of live event to get their teeth into while spending almost all their time at home.
The 2020 NFL Draft promises, then, to garner even more interest this week as the top college American football prospects are signed by the top professional league's 32 teams from Thursday through to Saturday.
However, what if soccer introduced a similar process for top clubs to select the best young players each year? How would it look, and could it give some of Europe's fallen giants the opportunity to rise again?
Goal has chosen to conduct such an experiment, using the recently revealed NxGn list of the 50 best teenage male footballers on the planet as the '2020 Draft Class', meaning the likes of Mason Greenwood, Gabriel Martinelli, Ansu Fati and winner Rodrygo are all up for grabs.
So how does our draft work? Here are the rules:
- Goal has selected 15 of Europe's biggest clubs to take part in the draft, with those selected regarded as the frontrunners to form a 'European Super League' should that ever come to pass.
- Clubs will select in reverse order of strength, based on their ELO rating, which calculates a team's ranking using historic results (full details here). The draft will consist of two rounds, meaning 30 players will be drafted.
- Unlike in the NFL and other North American sports drafts, there will be no trades made at any point.
- The draft is theoretically taking place ahead of the 2020-21 season. As such, clubs should consider all out-of-contract players as having left to become free agents, while players whose loan deals expire at the end of the current campaign have returned to their parent clubs.
- Players within the draft should also be considered as being unattached rather than part of squads.
So with that all hopefully explained, clubs must now consider where the major gaps are in their squad and which players can fill them. Let the 2020 Goal Draft begin!