Introducing the Premier League All-Hyphen Team

The recent news that Tottenham Hotspur youth academy grads Brooklyn Lyons-Foster and Malachi Fagan-Walcott got us here at Carty Free Towers thinking about stuff on a slow Thursday afternoon.

Specifically, have you noticed how many players there are in the Premier League with hyphenated last hames? There are a bunch! It’s been a trend of the past few generations where families are opting to hyphenate their names either when they get married, or hyphenate their kids names when they’re born.

Personally, and as you can imagine, I’m all in favor of this! But it got us thinking: can we make an entire Premier League team from just hyphenated players?

Turns out you can! But we did have to cheat a bit.

The Carty Free All-Hyphen Premier League Team

Bench: Maitland-Niles, Wan-Bissaka, Ait-Nouri, Loftus-Cheek, Smith-Rowe, Gibbs-White, El-Ghazi

Manager: Andre Villas-Boas

A couple of things to note. First, there are already some of you blazing to the comments to say WHAT ABOUT SON HEUNG-MIN AND HWANG HEE-CHAN? This team is hyphenated SURNAMES ONLY, it’s important to stick to principles. If we allowed first name hyphens, the team would be full of players like Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg or Ki-Jana Hoever, and it’s not the same thing, dang it.

Secondly, this is Premier League only, which meant we had to cheat twice to fill out this bracket. William Troost-Ekong is the only hyphenated natural center back that I could find in the PL, so we deputized Cameron Carter-Vickers, who is technically a Spurs player but is on loan at Celtic this season. Probably there’s another on-loan defender who belongs to a Premier League club but honestly I couldn’t be bothered to look that closely. Put your suggestion in the comments.

There also aren’t any squad keepers who have the hyphen, so I dipped into Tottenham’s youth academy to find Thimothee Lo-Tutala. It’s a tall order to start a Premier League match, but he’s promising, and I have faith in him.

So who did we miss? Anyone? Would you pull anyone from the bench to the starting lineup? Different formation? Where would this team finish in the league? Let’s have some fun on a quiet weeknight afternoon.