Premier League: Why clubs are targeting EFL academy players

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.