When Manchester City paid £12.5m to sign Jeremy Monga from Leicester City last month, they were not alone in wanting one of English football’s most highly rated teenagers.

Arsenal also coveted the 17-year-old winger, but City won the battle for a player who joined Leicester aged eight and has already broken records in senior football.

Monga became Leicester’s second-youngest Premier League player in April 2025, aged 15 years and 271 days, before becoming their youngest league starter and surpassing Jude Bellingham as the Championship’s youngest goalscorer.

He represents the more established end of a wider battle for young domestic talent.

Premier League clubs are increasingly looking to EFL and Scottish academies for players who can be brought into their development structures, sometimes before they have established themselves in senior football.

The appeal is easy to understand.

Antoine Semenyo was rejected by several academies before Bristol City spotted him playing college football. After loans at Newport County and Sunderland, he established himself in the Championship before joining Bournemouth for about £10m, then Manchester City in a £64m move.

Ollie Watkins came through at Exeter City, Adam Wharton at Blackburn Rovers and Eberechi Eze – after being released by Arsenal – rebuilt his career at Millwall and QPR.

For recruitment departments, finding the next player capable of following a similar route can be enormously valuable.

Clubs trying to ‘jump the queue’

BBC Sport research has identified 14 players recruited from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies for Premier League development squads so far this summer.

That matches the 14 such transfers made across the whole of 2025-26. There were eight in 2024-25, 18 in 2023-24 and seven in 2022-23.

More striking is the profile of this summer’s recruits. Of the 14 identified, 11 are 18 years old. Last season only five of the 14 players in the equivalent sample were 18.

League One has also become fertile ground, providing seven of this summer’s 14 recruits, compared with just two last season.

Among the youngsters to have moved so far this summer are Blade Earley from Cambridge United to Aston Villa, Valentin Joseph from Blackburn Rovers to Brighton, George Munday from Cambridge United to Brighton, Harrison Bettoni from Wigan Athletic to Chelsea and Maxwell Adedeji from Leicester City to Tottenham.

Monga is not part of BBC Sport’s 14-player sample because he had already broken into Leicester’s first team. His fee, however, illustrates how quickly the equation can change once a teenager proves himself at senior level.

The 18-year-old sweet spot?

At 18, players have already received years of professional coaching but remain young enough to spend time in an under-21 or B-team environment before decisions are made over loans or first-team opportunities.

The financial outlay can also be relatively small. Nine of the 14 moves identified this summer are listed as free transfers, with the other five for undisclosed fees. Eight of last season’s 14 were also listed as free transfers.

For clubs accustomed to paying tens of millions for established first-team players, spreading comparatively modest sums across several promising teenagers offers obvious appeal. Only one needs to develop into a Premier League regular for the strategy to potentially generate significant value.

The economics of academy recruitment have also become a wider issue. The Premier League has approached the EFL over potentially capping compensation paid when young players move between academies.

Clubs losing youngsters can receive training compensation alongside future appearance-related payments and sell-on entitlements, while unresolved cases can be referred to the Professional Football Compensation Committee.

A market reshaped by Brexit

Another factor is Brexit.

Before freedom of movement ended, English clubs could scout a vast European market without having to consider whether EU players were eligible to work in the UK.

Analytics FC estimated in a 2022 report, external with immigration specialists Fragomen that about 60,000 professional players in Europe had potentially been available to British clubs before Brexit.

Under the Governing Body Endorsement system it estimated only about 5,000 would be likely to qualify for a permit – a reduction of roughly 92%.

The restrictions are especially relevant to younger players.

Liverpool’s Ifeanyi Ndukwe is a good example. The 18-year-old centre-back joined from Austria Vienna and impressed during pre-season but cannot play competitive matches for the Reds becausee he does not qualify for a work permit. A loan abroad is expected to help him build the experience required to become eligible.

A teenager already progressing through an English academy presents no equivalent immigration obstacle.

Brexit has also affected players moving the other way. Analytics FC found Premier League 2 produced more British transfers to EU clubs than any other English division before Brexit, but those moves had halved by 2021-22.

That does not prove Brexit directly caused Premier League clubs to target EFL academies, but it changed the environment in which young players are recruited and developed.

No single Premier League model

There is no uniform approach to youth development among Premier League clubs.

International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) figures for 2025-26 show club-trained players accounted for 16.2% of Manchester City’s Premier League minutes, followed by Chelsea on 15.5% and Brighton on 12.5%.

CIES defines a club-trained player as someone registered with their current club for at least three full seasons, or 36 months, between the ages of 15 and 21. That means an 18-year-old recruited from an EFL academy can still go on to qualify as club-trained if he spends the next three seasons with his new Premier League club.

At the other end of the scale, Tottenham’s club-trained players accounted for just 0.1% of league minutes, while Bournemouth, Brentford and Burnley were all at zero.

Recruiting from EFL and Scottish academies therefore offers another way of building that development pipeline.

Rather than relying solely on players who have been with a club since childhood, a Premier League side can identify somebody developed elsewhere, bring them into their under-21 structure at 17, 18 or 19 and take responsibility for the final stages of their development.

The numbers do not yet show a relentless increase. There were 18 such moves in 2023-24, meaning this summer’s 14 cannot be described as unprecedented.

But the concentration of 18-year-olds and League One players suggests clubs are becoming increasingly precise about the market they are targeting.

For EFL clubs, that raises questions over how long their best youngsters can realistically be retained.

For Premier League clubs, the calculation is different. The next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo may already be somewhere further down the pyramid. The challenge is finding them before everybody else does. (BBC)

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