A New Nostalgia: the EFL’s overseas signings

Clubs have brought in players from leagues in 29 different countries this summer – and it’s bloody exciting

Aug 02, 2024

The 2024/25 EFL season has me thinking about the 1990s… and I’m happier about it than this photo implies.

All summer, NTT20.COM has been providing twice-weekly bulletins on every transfer in our beloved Football League, analysing or at least outlining the team’s incoming player. Others have done the heavy lifting while I take a more managerial, stand-back-point-and-nod sort of role, but I’ve written a few profiles as well. And there are far more I haven’t written because I value honesty and my opening sentence would be, “I don’t know who this is.”

More and more EFL clubs are signing players from abroad – not just abroad but really far abroad – and I absolutely love it. The mystery surrounding some of these players has given me a certain specific thrill that I haven’t felt since I was a child in and of the ’90s. I know I shouldn’t be fussed by private firms constructing units for the new season with parts made from foreign labour, imported for discount rates, but hell, I’m a romantic.

I genuinely am a huge fan of this development, and not just from an objective standpoint. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s good for lower-league clubs in a difficult financial environment to spread their scouting wings and diversify, building networks, planning sustainably, prioritising sell-on value and all that jazz. Subjectively, and the reason I bring up the 1990s, I like it as a portal to another time, when we didn’t know everything there was to know about a player before they kicked a ball in this country.

Personally, the names always fascinated me. I was drawn towards players whose names I couldn’t pronounce. On the face of it, there’d be no reason for a primary-school-aged football fan in the UK to be interested in an Eastern European goalkeeper with a bowl haircut, but his name was Pavel Srnicek and where are the vowels there? Tell me your secrets, you alluring beast. Peter Ndlovu? Pontus Kåmark? Sirs, you have intrigued me. It’s a world far removed from today, in which children will happily rave about Kylian Mbappé’s stats and copy Cristiano Ronaldo’s siuuu celebration, wearing an Al-Nassr shirt. The past is a foreign country, and it has a great national team.

In fact – if you’ll excuse me one more paragraph of navel-gazing nostalgia – national teams were our best source of information about these players. In a pre-internet age with minimal TV coverage of European leagues, World Cups gave us a glimpse into other countries’ talents. Then came the influx of overseas signings into English football during the late 1990s and 2000s, flattening the peaks and troughs of ‘will this guy I don’t know be any good?’, and after that we became internet explorers while football’s global licensing deals exploded, allowing us to become early experts on Everton’s new centre-back. The exotic ‘newness’ died. Our palettes became tainted.

Crucially, however, that was always the Premier League’s world. It was still relatively rare for imports to join Football League clubs, especially those in the third or fourth tier. The make-up of EFL squads naturally evolved a bit over time but it’s only now, in 2024, that the pace of change has become supercharged.

From the start of this transfer window up to the end of July, EFL clubs had signed players from leagues in 29 different nations beyond English football’s borders. Not player nationalities, but the clubs where they were playing: 29 countries represented, across all six continents (sit down, Antarctica, nobody invited you). In all, 75 of the EFL’s 475 transfers have come from clubs outside the English pyramid; half of them in the Championship, with imports representing well over a third of that division’s incomings, but plenty in Leagues One and Two as well.

Because this isn’t the Premier League, these players aren’t all arriving from the Bundesliga, Serie A nor other divisions we can watch on TV for just £8,001 per month. They’ve been scooped up from the Allsvenskan, the J.League, and the Eerste Divisie – leagues we consume, if at all, through text more than video. The EFL is now a world buffet. Asian players, from Hiroshima and Gwangju. North Americans, from LA and Ohio; South Georgia and North Carolina; Ogdenville and North Haverbrook. And more continental Europeans than you can shake a French stick at.

For me, that adds a tingle of intrigue. I’m used to recognising the player holding up his new club’s shirt. I don’t like to brag but I could probably name at least seven footballers on the continent. I did not know who Ivan Inzoudine is, nor what convinced Burton Albion that the 27-year-old full-back (thanks, NTT20.COM!) is ready to trade French semi-professional football for League One. But I look forward to finding out, just as I did in the ’90s. I only wish we could return to those photo shoots, when exotic foreign signings were officially unveiled according to national stereotypes – Benito Carbone and Paolo Di Canio pretending to eat uncooked pizza, sexy David Ginola posing topless, Uwe Rosler wearing a T-shirt with the words, ‘Rosler’s grandad bombed Old Trafford’... on second thoughts, perhaps not.

We do live in the internet age, of course, so the likes of Swansea’s Eom Ji-sung or Grimsby’s Jason Daði Svanþórsson – following that well-trodden path from Breidablik to Cleethorpes – aren’t shrouded in the same total secrecy as those imports from 30 years ago. There are clips to watch, amateur scouting reports to read and foreign newspaper articles to Google Translate. “An offensive side midfielder,” you say? We have needed one of those. Salford City picked up Robbie Cleary from Canada’s regionalised third tier and he remains an enigma to almost everyone, possibly including Salford themselves given he had to explain who he is in the club’s press release, yet even he was treated to a sort of TikTok unveiling by an Ammies fan who’d seen his clips on Instagram.

(That isn’t to decry amateur scouts – far from it, because they’re often excellent. The problem comes only when you’re being talked down to by somebody who’s pretending they know more than you do. I strongly believe there’s nothing wrong with an expert saying, “I don’t know” on occasion, as long as they’re keen to learn. NTT20.COM’s transfer bulletins don’t emerge from innate knowledge of every footballer on Earth – we research who’s new to us. You didn’t come here for a treatise on journalism, though, so back to it.)

But even if you do read up about your new signing, or watch their highlights reels, it’s not quite the same, is it? You’re at least one stage removed from seeing the real thing, in person, not pixels. It’s like signing a young player on Football Manager whose face is greyed out: you’ve scouted him, so his attributes, strengths and weaknesses are all laid out in front of you, but there’s still this tantalising air of mystery.

We should also remember, as I often don’t, that match-going supporters aren’t all data nerds who live on the internet; many fans will know nothing of the latest overseas player to wear the shirt, beyond his name and perhaps some info from the club, until they see him in person. And how exciting is that? Depending on who you support, your hopes for the season will vary but likely range within a third of a division, let’s say – for one fanbase it’ll be automatic promotion but play-offs at worst; for another, a play-offs push or automatics at best; alternatively, it’ll be pure survival, but gusting towards mid-table mediocrity with a fair wind. Almost nobody goes into a season unsure whether their team will finish 1st or 24th. This new guy, though… he could be anything.

That’s what the start of a new football season is about – not just blind hope, though there is that, but potential. When you attend your new signing’s debut and they’re checking their studs in preparing to come on, then whether you know a bit about their playing style or nothing at all bar their name, you’re at a moment in time with near-limitless possibilities. Maybe this’ll be the first in a series of disappointments. Or maybe you’re present for the first goal scored by a future club legend. These could be the good old days. A new nostalgia.

At last, that feeling is permeating throughout the whole of the English pyramid, as EFL clubs join EPL clubs in throwing open their borders. As good as it is for the clubs, it’s even better for their supporters, who can see a world of potential in these strangers from a foreign land, and regain a little bit of something lost: the thrill of the unknown.

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