Manchester City's Strategic Signing of Jeremy Monga

Manchester City’s £12.5m move for Jeremy Monga was not just another big club picking off a lower-league gem. It was a statement in a race that is getting younger, sharper and far more calculated.

Arsenal wanted him too. They pushed for the 17-year-old winger who had grown up in Leicester City’s system from the age of eight and was already rewriting record books. City won that fight – and they paid a fee that shows how brutal the market becomes once a teenager proves he can handle senior football.

Monga made his Premier League debut for Leicester in April 2025 at just 15 years and 271 days, becoming the club’s second-youngest top-flight player. He then went one better, starting in the league as their youngest ever and overtaking Jude Bellingham as the youngest goalscorer in Championship history.

That kind of trajectory used to be the exception. Now it’s the battleground.

A new talent map

Premier League clubs are scouring EFL and Scottish academies with a level of intensity that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. They are not always waiting for a first-team breakthrough either. Increasingly, they want players just before that moment.

The logic is obvious. Antoine Semenyo was turned away by several academies before Bristol City spotted him in college football. He went on loan to Newport County and Sunderland, fought his way into the Championship, then earned a move to Bournemouth for around £10m. From there, Manchester City came calling with £64m.

Ollie Watkins climbed through Exeter City. Adam Wharton emerged at Blackburn Rovers. Eberechi Eze, released by Arsenal, rebuilt himself at Millwall and QPR. These are not fairy tales now; they are recruitment templates.

Find the next one early, and the payoff can be enormous.

BBC Sport research has tracked 14 players this summer who have moved from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies into Premier League development squads. That total already equals the number of such transfers across the whole of 2025-26. In 2024-25 there were eight. In 2023-24 there were 18. In 2022-23, only seven.

The raw number alone doesn’t tell the full story. The profile does.

Of the 14 identified this summer, 11 are 18 years old. Last season, only five of the 14 were 18. League One has turned into a key hunting ground too, supplying seven of this summer’s 14 recruits, compared with just two the previous year.

This is no random trawl. It’s targeted.

Names behind the numbers

The list of movers is already growing.

• Blade Earley has gone from Cambridge United to Aston Villa.
• Valentin Joseph has left Blackburn Rovers for Brighton, while Brighton have also taken George Munday from Cambridge United.
• Chelsea have moved for Harrison Bettoni from Wigan Athletic.
• Tottenham have picked up Maxwell Adedeji from Leicester City.

Monga, curiously, doesn’t even appear in that 14-player sample. He had already crossed the threshold into Leicester’s first team, which puts him in a different category. His £12.5m fee underlines the point: once a teenager proves himself at senior level, the cost spikes dramatically.

So clubs are trying to strike earlier.

At 18, a player has already had years of professional coaching. Yet he is still young enough to spend meaningful time in an under-21 or B-team environment before a decision is made: loan, integrate, or move on.

From a financial angle, the risk looks manageable. Of the 14 moves this summer, nine are listed as free transfers, the other five as undisclosed fees. Last season, eight of the 14 were also free.

For clubs used to wiring tens of millions for ready-made starters, spreading smaller sums across a cluster of teenagers has an obvious attraction. Only one needs to grow into a Premier League regular for the model to pay out handsomely.

Money, rules and the Brexit squeeze

The economics of academy recruitment are no longer a background issue. They sit right at the heart of the debate.

The Premier League has approached the EFL over potentially capping compensation when young players move between academies. At present, selling clubs can receive training compensation, appearance-related add-ons and sell-on clauses. If the two sides can’t agree, cases can go to the Professional Football Compensation Committee.

Then there is Brexit, which has quietly reshaped the market.

Before freedom of movement ended, English clubs could sweep across Europe without worrying about work permits for EU players. A 2022 report by Analytics FC, produced with immigration specialists Fragomen, estimated that around 60,000 professional players in Europe were potentially available to British clubs pre-Brexit.

Under the current Governing Body Endorsement rules, the same analysis suggested only about 5,000 would likely qualify for a permit – a drop of roughly 92%.

The squeeze hits younger players hardest.

Liverpool’s Ifeanyi Ndukwe is a case in point. The 18-year-old centre-back joined from Austria Vienna and impressed in pre-season, but he cannot play competitive games for the club because he does not yet qualify for a work permit. A loan abroad is expected to help him build the experience needed to become eligible.

A teenager coming through an English academy carries none of that immigration risk.

Brexit has also dulled the flow in the opposite direction. Analytics FC found that Premier League 2 produced more British transfers to EU clubs than any other English division before Brexit. By 2021-22, those moves had halved.

The cause-and-effect line is not simple. This doesn’t prove Brexit alone pushed Premier League clubs towards EFL academies. But it has changed the landscape in which every youth recruitment decision is made.

Different clubs, different philosophies

There is no single blueprint for how Premier League sides treat youth development.

Figures from the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) for 2025-26 show club-trained players making up 16.2% of Manchester City’s Premier League minutes. Chelsea sit at 15.5%. Brighton are at 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 taken from an EFL academy can still end up classed as club-trained if he spends the next three seasons there.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tottenham’s club-trained players accounted for just 0.1% of league minutes. Bournemouth, Brentford and Burnley recorded zero.

For clubs with low homegrown minutes, raiding EFL and Scottish academies offers another way to build a development pipeline without waiting a decade for eight-year-olds to grow up.

A Premier League side can now spot a player honed elsewhere, bring him into their under-21 structure at 17, 18 or 19, and take charge of the final, decisive stretch of his development.

The next Semenyo – and the cost of missing him

The trend is not a straight line. There were 18 such academy-to-development-squad moves in 2023-24. This summer’s 14 cannot be painted as an explosion.

But the pattern inside that number is telling: more 18-year-olds, more players from League One, more precision about where value is likely to be found.

For EFL clubs, that raises a harsh question: how long can they realistically keep their best prospects before the Premier League comes calling with a package that is hard to refuse?

For Premier League recruitment teams, the equation is simpler but no less ruthless. Somewhere down the pyramid, the next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo is already taking shape.

The only question is who finds him first.