The 2025-26 season is barely two months old, but a record 33 English players have appeared in the top leagues of France, Italy, Germany and Spain. It is the most ever in one campaign and evidence of a growing trend, which can be traced back eight years.
In 2017, a decade-long absence of English players in the Bundesliga ended when Reece Oxford, Ryan Kent, Kaylen Hinds and — most famously — Jadon Sancho made moves to top-tier German sides. Mandela Egbo, once a Crystal Palace academy player who switched to Borussia Monchengladbach in his late teens, broke through to their first team that season. Kent, at 20, was the oldest of the quintet.
The past few years have seen senior English internationals Marcus Rashford (Manchester United), Conor Gallagher (Chelsea) and Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool) go from their boyhood clubs to Spain’s La Liga. Harry Kane joined Bayern Munich after nearly two decades at Tottenham Hotspur — another player choosing to spend their peak years outside of England.
Primarily, though, this is about young players, who, upon graduating from academies, find first-team opportunities limited and head for continental Europe.
Jadon Sancho after scoring for Dortmund in 2018 (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
Premier League champions Liverpool said goodbye to Jarell Quansah in July and Tyler Morton the month after, as they moved to Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen and French side Lyon respectively. Carney Chukwuemeka, a talented attacking midfielder who left Aston Villa for Chelsea in 2022, made his February loan to Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund permanent in the summer. CJ Egan-Riley, part of the victorious England side at the Under-21 European Championship in June, rejected a contract offer at Burnley to join France’s Marseille.
Centre-back Charlie Cresswell and winger Jonathan Rowe are different examples. Another two members of Lee Carsley’s tournament-winning England squad in Slovakia this summer — Rowe scored the winner in the final — they left Championship clubs Leeds United and Norwich City in 2024 for the French top flight with Toulouse and Marseille respectively.
The numbers are stark.
In six of the past seven seasons, the number of Englishmen playing in major leagues on the continent has risen. From a combined minutes perspective, they featured 15 times as much in 2024-25 compared to the 2017-18 campaign.
Historically, there have been some Englishmen to be found in Europe’s other major leagues: Steve McManaman, Michael Owen, Jonathan Woodgate and David Beckham played for Real Madrid in the early and mid-2000s. Jermaine Pennant spent a year at another Spanish side, Real Zaragoza. Beckham, Joey Barton (Marseille) and Joe Cole (Lille) all had a season in France’s Ligue 1 in the 2010s, with the former ending his playing career at Paris Saint-Germain, after a six-season spell at LA Galaxy in MLS which was interspersed with two loans to Italy’s Milan.
Ultimately, though, between the 2000-01 and 2016-17 seasons, the number of English players in La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 could be counted on one hand.
Sancho rejected a contract offer at Manchester City to join Dortmund in 2017. He never made a senior appearance for City after moving north from Watford aged 14. In 2018, upon signing a contract extension, he told the club website: “I am very glad that I decided to change to Dortmund because everything turned out to be true: this city lives football like no other, and (here) young players are given opportunities.”
A number of other English players have since walked the same path to that part of north-west Germany: Jude Bellingham and now his brother Jobe, Jamie Gittens, Chukwuemeka. Along with Sancho, all are, in different ways, expressive and highly technical footballers who felt they could thrive at a European-level club in a league that’s big on transitional play. “(It) was about the youngsters here getting opportunities,” Sancho said in 2019.
Pathways, promises and potential are always the primary motivations.
Tammy Abraham departing Chelsea for Italy’s Roma was a prime example. A graduate of the Londoners’ academy, he had three spells out on loan, including a 25-goal season in the 2018-19 Championship with Aston Villa, signing for them at age 20. He then scored 15 league goals in 2019-20 to help Chelsea finish fourth. No player has scored that many non-penalty goals for the club in a season since.
In 2020-21 though, a term which ended with Chelsea winning the Champions League, Abraham found himself down the pecking order after Thomas Tuchel replaced Frank Lampard as manager in the January.
Tammy Abraham enjoyed huge success with Roma in his first season (Jeroen Meuwsen/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
“I can understand that he wants more minutes,” Tuchel told the media in August 2021. “So the decision will be: how do we plan, what are Tammy’s plans, does he fight his way back into the team from the position where he ended last season or does he want to change club to have the chance of being a regular starter?”
Abraham only played seven times under Tuchel, partly due to an ankle injury, and was not named in the matchday squads for that season’s FA Cup and Champions League finals. He left Chelsea less than three months after they won European club football’s biggest prize.
Thirty-seven goals in four seasons with Roma (including 27 in all competitions in his debut campaign) saw Abraham reignited under former Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho. A cruel list of injuries — including nine months out in 2023-24 following anterior cruciate ligament surgery — have reduced his game time and potency in what should be peak years. Still a Roma player but now on loan at Besiktas in Turkey, it is hard not to feel like Abraham’s career path ought to have turned out differently.
The Premier League is eating itself slightly as a breeding ground for English talent.
The Elite Player Performance Plan of 2012 brought unprecedented international success by restructuring academies, increasing funding and improving coaching while formalising sports science, analysis and other holistic development.
Since 2017, age-group England teams have won six global and continental titles. The nation’s women won the Euros on home soil in 2022 and retained their crown this summer. England’s senior men’s side had their best-ever run across four major tournaments, twice getting to the European Championship final and making a World Cup semi-final. This was reflected at club level too, with all-English men’s Champions League finals in 2019 and 2021.
“We’ve got over a third of the world’s top 250 players playing in the Premier League each year, and the bar keeps getting higher,” Neil Saunders, the league’s director of football, told The Athletic in May. “It’s incumbent on us (the Premier League) and everybody working in player development to try to keep pace with that, because it’s only going to be the most elite that step onto that pitch in the Premier League.
“We want to make sure there’s a fair share of homegrown players that are able to do that.”
This summer’s transfer window was a record-setting one, with Premier League teams spending more than £3billion — seven of the 20 clubs paid the highest fee in their history — as the division outspent Europe’s other four major leagues combined. Pathways for young English players are increasingly threatened, even in the post-Brexit era, where recruitment of academy footballers from abroad is restricted. Still, the perception of reduced opportunities, as much as the reality, can be enough for a talented academy graduate to go elsewhere.
Depending on which figures you look at, the picture that appears is different.
The past two completed seasons have had two of the three highest rates of Premier League debuts by homegrown players (those trained at that club for at least three years when aged 15 to 21) since 2012.
Debuts, though, can end up as token gestures, and the number of games started by English players aged 23 or younger in the Premier League has dropped in the past three seasons compared to the previous three-year period, 2019-20 through 2021-22, when there was a resurgence to levels not seen since the late 2000s.
Angel Gomes only made 10 senior appearances and three starts for Manchester United, after joining them aged six and progressing through the ranks to captain their under-21s side. A technically brilliant but diminutive central midfielder with a playing profile that is considered rare, the 5ft 6in (168cm) Gomes became a key player at Lille in his five seasons there (he joined them in 2020) and won his first senior England caps before leaving this summer for Champions League football with Marseille.
“It’s a big gamble leaving United, leaving my home in Manchester, going into the unknown,” Gomes told The Athletic in July 2023. “I felt like I took a thousand steps backwards, but it’s all coming to fruition. Through the journey, I knew eventually I’d be able to create a pathway to be in this position that I’m in.”
Total minutes for English youngsters are also trending downwards, with more substitute appearances and fewer playing the full 90 minutes. In these opening weeks of the 2025-26 campaign, just 5.6 per cent of the minutes have gone to English players aged 23 or younger, which may end up being an early-season concern, but is on track to be the lowest in competition history.
There is a chicken-and-egg scenario here. The number of minutes played by English players (and young ones) is kept low by the increased volume of those moving abroad, while the decline in match time can be cited as evidence of reduced opportunities.
With the growing exodus, there is abundant proof that English players can have successful careers on the continent, with plenty of European clubs prepared to operate as stepping stones.
Tyrhys Dolan, once a Manchester City academy player, developed into a well-rounded winger over five years in the English second tier with Blackburn Rovers before a free-agent transfer to Spain this summer. “Espanyol was a no-brainer,” he told The Guardian this month, explaining his move to La Liga. “I don’t know how many have made that step from the Championship.”
Tyrhys Dolan on the attack for Espanyol (Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“I feel like I’ve matured a lot out there, in everyday life, and it’s made me more independent,” Cresswell said during this summer’s Under-21 Euros. Now into his second season at Toulouse, Cresswell played the third-most league minutes for the club in his first one.
The 23-year-old spent over a decade at Leeds, including a season-long loan in the Championship with Millwall, and has a growing reputation as an outstanding traditional centre-back.
“I wanted to live that dream. I wanted to play for Leeds, but these things happen,” he told The Athletic in May. “I know not many English players tend to go outside of England, so it was a challenge, but once I settled in, I realised it’s actually sound.”
Toulouse scouts flagged Cresswell initially for his impressive statistics, another reminder that talent identification has changed player pathways too — Premier League clubs now have access to global markets, while less-well-off European sides can spot English youngsters with potential sooner.
The trend shows no signs of stopping. Providing that sufficient opportunities are there within England, it should be a point of pride for the Premier League that its academies are developing these technically and tactically intelligent players.
Gittens, now at Chelsea, along with Jeremie Frimpong (Liverpool) and Viktor Gyokeres (Arsenal) are all examples of players who were at Premier League academies but launched their careers at European clubs before returning to England’s top tier.
“We had Jude Bellingham win player of the season in La Liga, Harry Kane being the top scorer in the Bundesliga,” Saunders said of 2023-24, along with Phil Foden and Cole Palmer winning the Premier League player and young player of the season awards — a quartet of academy graduates with various English clubs.
That was reflected in Thomas Tuchel’s October squad for England’s friendly against Wales and a World Cup qualifier versus Latvia, with four of the 24-man squad playing outside the Premier League.
Those within the game have to make sure that this is about increased opportunity for English youngsters, and not a talent drain resulting from blocked pathways.
European football has never looked so English.
(Top photo: Jobe Bellingham is now playing for Dortmund; Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
