Wrexham have a number of offers lodged with clubs, some of which have been agreed but are waiting on the selling club to sign replacement players, as Richard Sutcliffe revealed in The Athletic this week.

While the public focus is on incomings as the first significant deadline day Wrexham have taken part in for years approaches, behind the scenes outgoings are equally important. Wrexham have a registration issue which will require some last minute juggling on deadline day.

The EFL’s registration regulations are somewhat more complex than the National League’s. However, those regulations don’t really pose a challenge to Phil Parkinson: it’s just that he’ll have to play the numbers game on Friday to balance the books to the EFL’s satisfaction.

A simple breakdown of the parameters he must work within are as follows:

• You can register up to 22 players
• Goalkeepers and Under 21 players don’t need to be registered
• At least 8 players must be Home Grown
• At least one player in the matchday squad must be Club Developed

For quick reference, here’s how our squad fits into those categories:

Remember, of course, that some players will fit into more than one category: our Under-21s all count as Club Developed, and all Club Developed players are Home Grown.

Obviously, looking at the squad, fulfilling the Home Grown stipulation will not be an issue, so the three players who don’t have that status – James McClean and Eoghan O’Connell, who started out in Ireland, and Jacob Mendy, whose formative years were in Spain – won’t have to worry about their eligibility.

Likewise, the Club Developed player regulation shouldn’t be an issue. We’ve got Jake Bickerstaff, Jordan Davies (above) and Max Cleworth in the squad, which has naturally been enough in recent years: over the last 3 seasons, there have only been 5 games in which none of them weren’t in the match day squad, and in each of those instances Bickerstaff was fit and available, so we could have complied if we’d had to. Anyway, the punishment for failing to name a Club Developed player is only that you have to field one substitute less, which isn’t the biggest problem.

The decisions Parkinson will have to make revolve around the limit of 22 registered players. As the graphic shows, we’ve got 24 players who’ll need to be registered already, and that’s without us signing any more players.

We can reduce that number already, as we’ll be very unlikely to register Dave Jones. He made an emergency appearance last season in the FA Trophy, but that was surely a one-off.

Further alterations are less clear-cut, and are complicated by Jake Bickerstaff’s impressive start to the season. The plan was to loan him out, and it may well still be, but he has clearly staked a claim for being considered part of the first team squad: at the moment he’s ahead of Sam Dalby and Billy Waters in the pecking order, after all.

It’s a tricky conundrum for Parkinson, and a consequence of his successful policy of bringing in players who are experienced and able to make an instant impact. We’ve now reached the point where some of those players might have to leave as new options come in. Thankfully, Parkinson has already proven himself to be a safe pair of hands in the transfer market.