Manchester City Wins Race for Jeremy Monga: Premier League's New Youth Strategy
When Manchester City wired £12.5m to Leicester City for Jeremy Monga last month, they were not simply buying a prospect. They were winning a race.
Arsenal wanted him. Others were watching. But City got there first for a teenager who had been at Leicester since the age of eight and has already rewritten parts of the record book.
At 15 years and 271 days, Monga became Leicester's second-youngest Premier League player in April 2025. He then went on to become their youngest league starter and overtook Jude Bellingham as the Championship's youngest goalscorer. Those are not the numbers of a project. They are the markers of a player already elbowing his way into senior football.
And yet, in the wider market, Monga is only the sharp end of a much broader shift.
Premier League turns to the pyramid
Top-flight clubs have started to look down the divisions with a different kind of hunger. EFL and Scottish academies are no longer just safety nets for released youngsters; they are active hunting grounds for the next breakout star, often before those players have even tasted proper senior football.
The logic is clear.
Antoine Semenyo bounced around the system, rejected by several academies before Bristol City found him in college football. Loans at Newport County and Sunderland toughened him up, the Championship showcased him, Bournemouth paid around £10m, and Manchester City eventually arrived with £64m. That is the sort of journey recruitment chiefs now want to get ahead of.
Ollie Watkins came through at Exeter City. Adam Wharton at Blackburn Rovers. Eberechi Eze rebuilt his career at Millwall and QPR after Arsenal let him go. Each one is a reminder: there is serious talent outside the Premier League’s own academy walls.
So clubs have started to go shopping earlier.
BBC Sport research has already identified 14 players this summer who have been lifted from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies straight into Premier League development squads. That tally already matches the total for the whole of 2025-26. There were eight such moves in 2024-25, 18 in 2023-24 and seven in 2022-23.
The volume matters. The profile matters more.
Of those 14 recruits this summer, 11 are 18 years old. Last season, only five of the 14 were 18. League One, often dismissed as a holding pen, has suddenly become rich territory: seven of this summer’s 14 recruits have come from the third tier, compared with just two last season.
Names are starting to stack up. Blade Earley has left Cambridge United for Aston Villa. Valentin Joseph has gone from Blackburn Rovers to Brighton, with George Munday making the same jump from Cambridge to the south coast. Harrison Bettoni has swapped Wigan Athletic for Chelsea. Maxwell Adedeji has moved from Leicester City to Tottenham.
Monga does not even appear in that 14-player sample, simply because he had already broken into Leicester’s first team. His £12.5m fee shows how quickly the numbers change once a teenager proves himself in senior football.
Why 18 is the sweet spot
The trend around age is no accident.
By 18, these players have absorbed years of professional coaching. They understand structure, tactics, the daily grind. But they are still young enough to spend time in under-21 or B teams while clubs decide whether to loan them out or push them towards the first team.
The financial risk is modest. Of the 14 moves identified this summer, nine are listed as free transfers and the other five as undisclosed fees. Last season, eight of the 14 were also free.
For clubs used to paying tens of millions for established starters, spreading smaller amounts across a cluster of high-upside teenagers makes obvious sense. One success story can pay for the entire strategy.
That calculation sits inside a bigger debate: the cost of youth development itself.
The Premier League has approached the EFL about potentially capping compensation when young players move between academies. At present, clubs losing youngsters can receive training compensation, appearance-related add-ons and sell-on clauses, with disputes going to the Professional Football Compensation Committee.
If that system changes, the balance of power and reward in the talent pipeline shifts with it.
Brexit closes one door, opens another
There is also a political shadow over all of this.
Before Brexit, English clubs could scour Europe without worrying about whether EU players met work-permit requirements. Analytics FC, working with immigration specialists Fragomen in 2022, estimated 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 calculated that only about 5,000 of those would likely qualify for a permit. A drop of roughly 92%.
The pinch is sharpest at youth level.
Liverpool’s Ifeanyi Ndukwe is a case study. The 18-year-old centre-back arrived from Austria Vienna and impressed in pre-season. But he cannot play competitive games for Liverpool because he does not yet qualify for a work permit. A loan abroad is expected so he can build the experience needed to meet the criteria.
An 18-year-old already in an English academy does not come with that barrier. No paperwork gamble. No waiting.
Brexit has also slowed 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.
That does not prove that Brexit directly forced Premier League clubs towards EFL academies, but it has reshaped the landscape in which decisions on young players are made.
Different clubs, different philosophies
Not every Premier League club views youth the same way.
International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) figures for 2025-26 show how varied the approaches are. Club-trained players accounted for 16.2% of Manchester City’s Premier League minutes, 15.5% at Chelsea and 12.5% at Brighton.
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. An 18-year-old signed from an EFL academy can still qualify as club-trained if he spends the next three seasons there.
At the other extreme, Tottenham’s club-trained players contributed just 0.1% of league minutes. Bournemouth, Brentford and Burnley were all at zero.
For those clubs, recruiting from EFL and Scottish academies offers another way to build a development pipeline without relying solely on players who have been in-house since childhood. They can identify a teenager at 17, 18 or 19, plug him into the under-21 set-up and take charge of the final stages of his development.
The numbers do not yet scream revolution. There were 18 such academy-to-development moves in 2023-24, so this summer’s 14 cannot be dressed up as unprecedented.
But the pattern is sharpening. More 18-year-olds. More from League One. More precision about where the value lies.
A new tension in the talent market
For EFL clubs, the implications are uncomfortable. How long can they realistically hold on to their best teenagers when Premier League sides are circling earlier and earlier, armed with resources and the promise of a direct line to the top?
For the elite, the equation is colder, more strategic. The next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo might already be training on a modest pitch somewhere in League One or the Championship, waiting for someone to believe early and pay small.
The race now is not just to find them. It is to get there before everyone else does.
