Mourinho confirms that Fernando Torres will remain with the Chelsea squad

Chelsea have to sell a player or leave him out of the squad due to the FA's roster regulations, something that we already knew. Jose Mourinho sat down with Sky Sports to discuss the situation, and confirmed that the departing player will not be Fernando Torres:

"No. Three strikers is fundamental in a squad and we have three strikers; Fernando, Didier and Diego so one of them is not (going) for sure"

While it's a bit disappointing that the club will be rolling with Torres in the squad again, it's perfectly logical that Mourinho wouldn't want to create a situation where he doesn't have adequate cover up front just to get the roster to 17. There are plenty of other areas of the squad that can be trimmed in order to reduce that number by one, most obviously either in the backup midfield or goalkeeper areas.

Mourinho also touched on the need to get more homegrown talent in the squad, in order to avoid this issue in the future:

"We have a good squad. The perfect squad would be with this 18 players, not 17 or 16, but rules are rules and we are working hard, even here, for not to have these kind of problems in the future."

"(We want) to have more English players in our squad which we are going to have in the future but in this moment we are still in the middle of this process. So at the moment we have to make a decision about one player not to be on that list."

Mourinho isn't talking about hitting the market to buy homegrown stars from other clubs, but instead is talking about youngsters like Lewis Baker, Andreas Christensen, and Nathan Ake who are on the brink of the first team. That said, there's a world class homegrown midfielder playing in Italy that would make a fine addition to the current squad, and we should have plenty of money to make an approach for that player if we really want to have the perfect squad this season.

Regardless, unless Chelsea surprise everyone and buy a new striker in the next few weeks, it's probably time to stop dreaming about Fernando Torres playing somewhere else.