Euro Trip 2: The World Cruise

Andy Watson takes us behind the curtain of football migration, taking us on a journey that starts in faraway places and ends in the EFL — all you need to do is claim your seat on the plane.

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Ali Maxwell: “Andy Watson is an ESC & GBE expert. He has worked with Blackburn Rovers as a recruitment consultant and also works with football consultancy MRKT Insights. A great friend of NTT20, we’re delighted that Andy has written this piece for NTT20.COM — I firmly believe it is one of the best we’ve ever published.”

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Andy Watson

Like a sitcom in its later seasons, it’s time for another jolly boys outing, taking the show on the road for a holiday episode. Just wait until the first NTT20.COM clip show airs.

This time last year, Ali Maxwell and I sat down to discuss the EFL’s transfer activity, especially in foreign territories. Through the article, we defined what a GBE is and how that system applies to granting work permits to footballers who come to the UK from overseas.

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We also discussed ESC, which was a brand new concept for 2023, but as we will see, many EFL recruitment departments have taken a year to do their research and now filling those ESC slots has become as popular as Benidorm for an expat.

But what else has changed in the world of EFL recruitment over the past 12 months? Where have Championship scouts been jetting to observe their targets or initiate their deals? What impact has global recruitment had on the finances of the domestic game? Who has spent wisely and who has gone a bit mad? And exactly how, rather than why, have Grimsby signed a forward from Icelandic football?

Join us on our latest trip, expanding from a Euro Trip to a world cruise…

Passport Control – the gateway to the EFL

You know the drill. To get in or out of the country can feel like a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. You have your documents all in order, you know you haven’t done anything to upset anyone, but you’ve seen enough films to know that anything can go wrong with paperwork. It certainly happens in the EFL, too.

Well, fear not! Our version of EFL bureaucracy is going to entertain and inform, as we take a deep dive into the trends that have been established in recent seasons of recruitment.

Just before we launch into the beautiful figures, though, we have some housekeeping (typical bureaucracy). The figures in the data within this piece are generally taken from the font of football knowledge that is Transfermarkt.com, and used in the various models or diagrams after that. 

This means that:

• All currency is in Euros, not pound sterling;

• Only transfer fees that are published on Transfermarkt are used for fee-related calculations;

• Loans are included in the samples as transfers;

• Transfers that involve an English player returning to England from a foreign league are included in the data, but obviously don’t involve a work permit application, so while they will show in the various Bands, they would not count towards GBE or ESC calculations.

Championship History

The first thing to mention is that this was a historically significant window for the Championship. Total spending overtook last year’s total and, if we expect January to be relatively average in terms of spend, then 2024/25 is on course to be the highest spending year on fees since 2016/17.

This appears to have gone hand-in-hand with a much increased spend abroad. The domestic bias of the spending (i.e. the percentage of the total spend that was kept in the UK) was down at 38%. This is the second-lowest percentage we’ve seen, and it means that this season already holds the record for the most amount of money spent outside of the UK by Championship clubs.

There is a steady decline in the percentage of players bought by Championship clubs from the domestic market. This is very interesting, because only four seasons ago this mark was at a high of 90% at the time of the initial Brexit regulations and the tail-end of the pandemic.

So, what has changed, and why?

ESC transfers become a big thing

In comparing Summer 2024 to previous windows, one of the starkest findings is the increase in ESC slots being used.

ESC is still a new concept, having only been introduced to the UK transfer market ahead of the Summer 2023 window, and – as we often see in EFL recruitment – adaptations to the rules took a year or so to become widespread.

It’s an interesting quirk that it isn’t necessary to make public whether a transfer required a GBE or is using an ESC slot. Often, the phrase “pending work permit” or “pending international clearance” is a giveaway, but even this doesn't confirm the finer details. Therefore, we are using a little bit of our own knowledge of the regulations to try to work out which transfers fall under the appropriate term.

From our calculations, we think the number of ESC transfers in the Championship during Summer 2024 was around double the number used across the whole of the 2023/24 season.

The number of Championship clubs using at least one ESC slot following the conclusion of the Summer 2024 is almost total. Only Sheffield United don’t appear to have filled in that ESC form and submitted it to the FA, which begs the question: does Chris Wilder even own a passport? Or does being too far away from Yorkshire for an extended period of time cause him to begin a disintegration process? His managerial spell at Watford may suggest that is the case.

Foreign exchange bureaus are busy

Before we delve into the data around where these players have come from, we need a little reminder of how leagues are broken down by the FA into their various bandings.

There was only one change for 2024/25 as the A-League made its debut in the bandings, slotting into Band 5.

The Championship clubs have massively increased the overall number and the percentage of foreign recruitment and investment.

Purchases from Band 1 leagues (the top tiers in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) were at their highest ever in the summer, and this was also the case for Band 2 (the top flights in Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Turkey).

These are the leagues that have been open for recruitment since the Brexit regulations were passed, and, as I know from personal experience, this is the area in which a lot of time, research and expertise is deployed in Championship recruitment teams. The knowledge of these leagues is getting to levels as strong as the domestic leagues, and so confidence is increasing when it comes to committing more resources to signing players from Bands 1 and 2.

However, we are also seeing historic peaks for Band 4 and Band 6 transfers (Band 6 being the rest of the world not included in Bands 1 to 5). This is a direct result of the ESC changes discussed above, and Championship recruitment teams adapting to these new possibilities.

New signings queuing up at the non-EU passport desk

Band 4 to Band 6 leagues include a lot of divisions outside of Europe. If we remember the situation pre-Brexit, there was freedom of movement law within EU legislation that meant there were no real restrictions on the employment of EU nationals in the UK, meaning that, within football, it was very easy to recruit from anywhere on the continent.

The banding system does still slant towards Europe in many ways. The leagues in Bands 1 and 2, those easiest to recruit from, are all European. Band 3 is (Scotland apart) all North and South American leagues, with Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and USA – those markets are still rarely used by the EFL in general but, as is clear in the diagram above, there is a steadily increasing number of players being brought into the EFL from the Band 4-6 group.

Bands 4 and 5 include Japan, South Korea, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay and now Australia, alongside plenty of European divisions, with Band 6 covering everybody else. Though we know that Band 6 is fairly hard to recruit from in terms of GBE or ESC, many players either have international autopasses or qualify for an ESC through their continental or international exploits, or have UK citizenship via one means or another.

League One History

Hello, Birmingham City. The Blues have dropped into the third tier with their American ownership and absolutely blown a hole in the trends and history of the data for League One transfers.

You can see in the table above what an impact they have had. Average spend per season on transfer fees in League One had been between €4m and €8m; this summer, clubs spent €44m. Birmingham were responsible for €34.5m of this – so that still leaves a significant €9.5m spread among the other 23 clubs in League One.

While this does still represent a ridiculously one-sided market, with Birmingham representing almost 80% of total spend, the remaining figure does represent a record for money spent on fees in the third tier. Charlton, Bolton, Peterborough, Burton Albion, Bristol Rovers, Wrexham and Huddersfield all spent more than £500,000 on at least one player this summer, per Transfermarkt.

We have calculated that 10 ESC slots were used in the third tier, a league that allows the use of only two, so there have been a number of League One teams looking to use some overseas recruitment. More on them later.

This strategy is reflected a little in the percentage of domestic recruitment dipping into the low 90% mark. This illustrates how much of recruitment in the third tier is still reliant on good decision-making in the domestic market. Whether that is in choosing the best free agents, identifying the best talent from below or picking up the best English academy products, the vast majority of signings are still this type.

So, it will be interesting to see how League One’s new drive for foreign recruitment works, and whether more and more club owners and decision-makers in that division decide to dust off their passports for a cheeky foreign scouting jaunt.

League Two History

NB: Grimsby’s fee for Jason Dadí Svanthórsson is unknown, so does not show up in Domestic Spend Bias for 2024

The recruitment trends appear to be quite slow to filter down in the fourth tier, as we often see in other aspects of football such as tactical trends (you may recall Ali has written previously about this phenomenon).

By our calculations, only one incoming summer transfer required a work permit – more on this soon – which is the same as last season, when Alassana Jatta’s move from Viborg in Denmark to Notts County accounted for the ESC application. It also accounted for the sizeable cut in percentage of domestic spend that year, as any transfer that actually costs a fee has a big impact on League Two figures.

There has been no real change in domestic bias of players brought into League Two this summer. The figure remains between 97% and 99% of all recruited players being brought in from the UK leagues or the Republic of Ireland.

Long haul – why those air miles could be worth it

As we saw above, there has been a real spike in the number of imports from wayyyy overseas.

The importance of Band 4 and Band 5 leagues has increased significantly as a result of the ESC tweak to legislation. Both bandings were formerly just a waste of time and energy, with very few players capable of earning enough points to get a GBE. Now, these leagues are the latest go-to destination for hot new talent.

The majority of Band 4 leagues are European, with the Colombian top flight proving the only exception. Band 5 introduces a real global feel, with divisions from outside Europe representing five of the 12 leagues in that banding.

While imports directly from Chile remain very thin on the ground, an investigation into that would be for another time, because we have already seen that the hunt for talent directly from the J- and K-Leagues has been fierce. There is no news yet on anything concerning the L-League.

The dramatic increase in use of the Japanese market raises a number of questions.

It is early days in the relationship between the EFL and the Japanese player market, but there does seem to have been some clear success stories already – certainly enough for more clubs to scout J1 League and J2 League in the hope of improving their own squads.

So far, the fees that EFL clubs have spent in order to secure the services of Japanese players have been minimal. Indeed, with the early form they have shown in England, their current values far exceed the fees paid for them initially.

This potentially highlights some market value in Japan, which is like a flame to a whisper (the collective noun of moths!) of player-hungry, market value-raiding moths. It will be interesting to see how, if, and when Japanese clubs begin to protect their assets a bit more aggressively.

There are a few transfers to pick out, stowed in the long-haul section in the second tier’s transfer luggage.

At the beginning of the window, Burnley’s squad was pretty stacked in every position except one: left-back. Lucas Pires was brought in from Santos in Brazil, having spent the previous season on loan with Cadiz in Spain. His 28 appearances and 1500+ minutes in La Liga actually make Pires eligible for a GBE, so Burnley didn’t even need to rely on the ESC system to get the 23-year-old into their squad.

Millwall are often labelled as an archetypal sort of club who play a certain way and therefore may recruit a certain way. The truth is that they are traditionally quite inventive with sourcing talent. It’s the Lions who brought Tim Cahill, Kasey Keller and more recently Zian Flemming to English football. There was even the case of Russians Vasili Kulkov and Sergey Yuran arriving from Spartak Moscow in 1996, with some spicy results.

This summer, Millwall waited until the last minute before breaking their transfer record on Serbian teenager Mihailo Ivanovic. The 19-year-old arrives via the magic of ESC – senior appearances for Vojvodina took care of this – and takes up a slot which Millwall will hope they can convert into big performances and/or profit if Ivanovic can fulfill his potential.

Raphael Borges Rodrigues was an early move for Coventry, who took quick advantage of the addition of Australia to Band 5. The 20-year-old winger had played a number of matches for Macarthur in the A-League, and Coventry were sufficiently impressed to use one of their ESC slots on the Netherlands-born Socceroos youth international.

José Cordoba has just made his debut for Norwich. The Panamanian central defender was clearly identified by the smart recruitment team at Norwich as a potential long-term option, but Bulgarian sellers Levski Sofia play outside of the Band 1-5 bandings. Thankfully for Norwich, Cordoba is an international, and although Panama are outside the top 50 rankings on the FA’s list, he has 16 eligible appearances when only five are required.

Of course, the randomness isn’t contained to the second tier…

Even those with smaller budgets are shopping in the Duty Free

One of the most exciting themes of the 2024 transfer window in the EFL has been the number of clubs in the lower two divisions who’ve joined the foreign recruitment party.

Birmingham are the ring-leaders here and, of course, something of an anomaly. The Blues undertook a spending spree the likes of which have never been seen before at a third-tier level – but nonetheless, they didn’t have to be as expansive in their approach as they ended up being. Their willingness to shop far and wide for an assault on League One has to be lauded for its ambition, and judging by their start, it seems it could bear fruit immediately.

It would be fair to say that outside of Birmingham, most of the pre-Deadline Day business were reclamation jobs. Like an Argo-style embassy-backed mission to bring British players home, EFL clubs scoured the world looking for homesick individuals to help them in their mission to improve on the pitch. After all, it makes the work permit paperwork much easier.

Many of the players had track records in academy or lower-league football, whereas some just had the right passport, but the likes of Burton, Lincoln, Fleetwood, Chesterfield and Newport all put up ‘Welcome Home’ banners for their former exiles.

“Bring home something random for me”

However, I wanted to leave the last word for our risk-takers; our most surprising and, in some cases, confusing acquisitions. What is a holiday without coming home with some unusual trinket to adorn your mantelpiece?

We have to start with Crawley Town. We are very much aware of how much recruitment work Crawley had to get through this summer. The vast majority of their promotion-winning squad from League Two left, and so a whole new squad had to be recruited to try to compete in League One.

Crawley are on record as saying that their recruitment is largely model-based (i.e. data-based), and that has interesting effects on the varying pools of talent they’re willing to access through the model. Much of their success last season came through players who were either non-league pickups, such as Klaidi Lolos and Jay Williams, or further afield signings such as Jeremy Kelly from America’s lower tiers.

There has been a slight repeat of that formula this time around, but to even greater extremes. We simply couldn’t write this piece without discussing the signing of Benjamin Tanimu.

It is actually much easier to explain how Tanimu was eligible to come directly from the Tanzanian Premier League than it would be to explain why Crawley raced for Tanimu’s signature.

The 22-year-old hasn’t played outside Africa, so he was ineligible for any GBE or ESC criteria except for international recognition. He made his senior Nigeria debut in March, in a friendly, but he became eligible for an ESC after he played against South Africa in a World Cup qualifying match in June. Nigeria are ranked 34th in the FA’s most recent 24-month rankings, so just one senior competitive appearance was enough for an ESC slot.

Kaheim Dixon’s move to Charlton from Arnett Gardens in Jamaica is also a move that deserves investigation. The Addicks have tried to bolster Nathan Jones’ squad in many ways this summer, and fair play to them for shopping in the Caribbean – a very popular cruising destination but rarely used as a recruitment point for League One clubs, for sure.

In a similar way to the Tanimu transfer, international appearances played a key role for Dixon. He made his Jamaica debut only in March 2024 but has quickly amassed 10 caps, of which nine have been in competitive internationals. Jamaica are currently ranked outside the cumulative top 50 by the FA, but Dixon would have needed only five senior appearances for Jamaica to qualify for an ESC slot.

Peterborough, meanwhile, seem to have established a Swedish connection. The arrival of Oscar Wallin from Degerfors is an interesting one.

With Wallin officially coming from the second tier in Sweden, which obviously isn’t a Band 1-5 league, the key to this deal is the fact that Degerfors were a top-tier Swedish team last season. Therefore, Wallin fulfills the criteria for senior appearances in a Band 1-5 league in the last 36 months. Great work from the Posh recruitment team on that one.

Not only that, but they also tapped up Wallin – and Wallin’s dad – for info. The result: they snapped up Gustav Lindgren from the same club, and he will join Peterborough in January for a £500,000 fee.

Last, but certainly not least, the only League Two club to use an ESC slot in the summer was Grimsby Town. Whether or not it was down to the shared love of North Atlantic fishing, we can merely speculate, but Jason Dadí Svanthórsson was persuaded to trade the Besta deild karla and consistent UEFA football (Breidablik qualified for the Conference League group stages last season) for trips to Bromley and Harrogate.

Iceland’s top tier is not a Band 1-5 league, so how did Svanthórsson qualify? Well, Watson, the clue is in plain sight. One of the ESC criteria is for the player to have played at least once in continental competition, and Svanthórsson ticks big boxes here with appearances in the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League in the last 36 months. That should qualify him for League Two, goes the reasoning.

While all of these clubs should be congratulated for their creativity in recruitment, it is yet to be seen how successful these moves will be. However, it could open the door for more lower-tier EFL clubs to look further afield for talent.

The danger of overpacking

There may be people here among us who see weight allowances for checked luggage as some kind of challenge.

“20kg is it? Right, I'm aiming for 19.9…”

It can sometimes feel as though EFL owners or managers are trying the same tactic with their squads. Only 25 players can be registered, with extra homegrown talent as surplus, but we have seen bloated suitcases approaching the checkout in 2024 with decisions having to be made as to which players will be jettisoned like superfluous pants at check-in.

As well as the immediate futures of certain players, these methods also beg the question: what does it mean for the future if clubs are stacking their squads with foreign talent?

The ESC scheme is fascinating in that it allows for a wider vista for recruitment teams to take in, but too much use of the system would – will? – eventually create an issue.

ESC slots are given to EFL clubs dependent on fulfilling the condition of the percentage of minutes that the clubs are giving to English Qualified Players (EQP). In other words, in order to get the maximum number of slots to use on work permits, the previous season’s total percentage of minutes given to EQP has to hit a certain mark.

The vast majority of EFL clubs hit these marks, but many already don’t, and even more are close enough to the border for it to be a future concern.

After all, the use of these ESC slots is to bring in players who aren’t EQP. To get ESC players converted to a regular GBE work permit player, they have to play a certain percentage of minutes. If the ESC player doesn’t get converted, then that slot is still occupied for the next transfer window – but if they are converted and a slot opens up, that is another player coming into the first team who isn’t EQP.

It only takes a couple of cycles of this for a team who could expect the maximum number of ESC slots to then be under the threshold of EQP minutes required to get them, therefore limiting that club to domestic transfers or regular GBE transfers only.

There is a relatively complicated calculation system behind totalling the EQP minutes, and it is difficult to get exact figures for one club, let alone 72, but there are useful guides on Transfermarkt that do give us suggestions of which clubs could be struggling to stay within the minutes given to EQP.

Before readers of the clubs in colour (red = less than 25%; orange = less than 30%, light orange = less than 35%) begin to bang the door down, we have to realise one very important factor in the Transfermarkt calculations, which is that they aren’t designed for the actual legislation we are discussing here, though they are useful as a guide. There are, in fact, clauses and technicalities aplenty when it comes to calculating each club’s own EQP figure.

Nevertheless, it is noticeable that some of the clubs already close to losing their slots, or in the danger zone already, are those one would expect to be amongst the main candidates for using them. Watford and Norwich have recruited from abroad for a number of years; indeed, that’s what is landing them in this place where ESC slots could be denied to them.

There is something of a self-destructive loop, almost autophagous in its design, about the whole thing that is strangely compelling…