Manchester City's £12.5m Signing of Jeremy Monga and the EFL Talent Grab

Manchester City did not just buy a prospect when they dropped £12.5m on Jeremy Monga last month. They won a race.

Arsenal wanted him. Others were watching. But City moved fastest for a 17-year-old winger who had been in Leicester City’s system since the age of eight and was already rewriting age records in senior football.

In April 2025, Monga became Leicester’s second-youngest Premier League player at 15 years and 271 days. He then went one better in the Championship, becoming their youngest league starter and overtaking Jude Bellingham as the youngest goalscorer in that division.

He is the headline act of a much broader story: a Premier League land grab for teenage talent already hardened by the EFL and Scottish academies.

The new gold rush: EFL kids, Premier League finishing schools

Top-flight clubs are scouring lower-league and Scottish systems with a sharper focus than ever, lifting players into their development squads before they have fully broken through in senior football.

The logic is obvious.

Antoine Semenyo’s journey is the template every recruitment department now keeps in mind. Turned away by several academies, he was finally picked up by Bristol City after being spotted in college football. A couple of loans at Newport County and Sunderland, a breakthrough in the Championship, a £10m move to Bournemouth and then a £64m transfer to Manchester City. That is the dream outcome.

Ollie Watkins came through at Exeter City. Adam Wharton developed at Blackburn Rovers. Eberechi Eze rebuilt himself at Millwall and QPR after being released by Arsenal. Each one is a reminder that elite talent often grows far from the Premier League’s own academies.

Find the next one early, and the upside is enormous.

Research by BBC Sport has tracked 14 players this summer who have been lifted from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies into Premier League development squads. That already equals the total for the whole of the 2025-26 season. There were eight such transfers in 2024-25, 18 in 2023-24 and seven in 2022-23.

The raw numbers matter less than the profile. That is where the shift really shows.

Of the 14 players identified this summer, 11 are 18 years old. Last season, only five of 14 in the equivalent sample were 18. Clubs are zoning in on a very specific age: old enough to be polished, young enough to be moulded.

League One has turned into a particularly rich seam. It has supplied seven of this summer’s 14 recruits, up from just two last season.

• Blade Earley has gone from Cambridge United to Aston Villa.
• Valentin Joseph and George Munday have left Blackburn Rovers and Cambridge United respectively for Brighton.
• Harrison Bettoni has moved from Wigan Athletic to Chelsea.
• Maxwell Adedeji has swapped Leicester City for Tottenham.

Monga sits slightly apart from that group. He is not in BBC Sport’s 14-player sample because he had already broken into Leicester’s first team. His £12.5m fee, though, underlines how quickly the market changes once a teenager proves he can handle senior football.

Small fees, big upside

Recruitment chiefs know exactly what they are buying at 18.

By that stage, players have received years of professional coaching. They understand structure, systems, the daily grind. Yet they are still young enough to spend a season or two in under-21 or B-team football while clubs decide whether to loan them out or fast-track them into the first team.

The cost is often tiny by Premier League standards. Of the 14 moves identified this summer, nine are listed as free transfers and the other five as undisclosed fees. Last season, eight of 14 were also free.

For clubs used to paying tens of millions for established starters, spreading far smaller sums across several teenagers is a simple calculation. If even one of them becomes a regular Premier League player, the strategy can pay for itself several times over.

That is feeding into a bigger argument: what should young talent actually be worth?

The Premier League has approached the EFL about potentially capping the compensation paid when youngsters move between academies. At present, selling clubs can receive training compensation, appearance-related add-ons and sell-on clauses. If they cannot agree, cases can go to the Professional Football Compensation Committee.

Lower-league clubs are desperate to protect their investments. Top-flight sides are just as determined to keep costs under control.

Brexit slams one door, opens another

Then there is the geopolitical twist.

Before Brexit, English clubs could scour a vast European market without worrying about work permits for EU players. Analytics FC, working with immigration specialists Fragomen, estimated in 2022 that around 60,000 professional players in Europe were potentially available to British clubs before freedom of movement ended.

Under the current Governing Body Endorsement rules, they reckoned only about 5,000 of those would now qualify for a work permit. A drop of roughly 92%.

That hits younger players hardest.

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

A teenager already in an English academy faces no such barrier. No paperwork drama. No uncertainty.

Brexit has also complicated moves 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.

None of this proves Brexit directly forced Premier League clubs to raid EFL academies. But it has reshaped the landscape in which those decisions are made.

Different clubs, different philosophies

Not every Premier League club treats youth the same way.

Figures from the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) for the 2025-26 season show how stark the contrasts can be. Club-trained players accounted for 16.2% of Manchester City’s Premier League minutes, 15.5% of Chelsea’s and 12.5% of Brighton’s.

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 signed from an EFL academy can still qualify as club-trained if he spends the next three seasons with his new club.

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

For clubs in that bracket, raiding EFL and Scottish academies offers another way to build a development pipeline without having to rely solely on players they have nurtured since childhood. They can identify a teenager shaped elsewhere, bring him into an under-21 structure at 17, 18 or 19, and take charge of the final, most valuable stretch of his development.

The pattern is not yet a straight upward line. There were 18 such academy-to-development-squad moves in 2023-24, so this summer’s 14 cannot be framed as an explosion.

But the concentration of 18-year-olds and the heavy involvement of League One do point to a market that is becoming more targeted, more precise, more ruthless.

For EFL clubs, the question is stark: how long can they realistically keep hold of their best kids?

For Premier League sides, the equation is different. Somewhere down the pyramid, the next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo is already playing. The money, the data and the scouting networks are all hunting the same thing now.

The only thing that matters is who finds him first.