Most football teams have a squad of about 25 players but only 11 of these can start a game and so the team that a manager picks for a match is known as the starting XI. The phrase is sometimes written simply as XI in the media – in Latin, the symbol X refers to ten and I to the number 1; so XI means eleven. The phrase starting XI can be interchanged with the word ‘team’, as in the starting XI for Saturday’s game was named by the manager the day before.
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