Manchester City's Investment in Young Talent: The Case of Jeremy Monga

When Manchester City dropped £12.5m on Jeremy Monga from Leicester City last month, they weren’t just buying promise. They were winning a race.

Arsenal wanted him too. Plenty did. But City got there first, prising away a 17-year-old winger who had grown up in Leicester’s system from the age of eight and already rewritten parts of the record book.

In April 2025, Monga became Leicester’s second-youngest Premier League player at 15 years and 271 days. 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 prospect hidden in an academy. That is a teenager barging into senior football.

And yet, for all his hype, Monga is just the sharpest edge of a much broader trend.

A new battleground: EFL and Scotland

Premier League clubs have turned their gaze down the pyramid. The hunt is on in EFL and Scottish academies for teenagers who can be dropped into under-21 or B-team structures, polished, then launched.

The logic is brutal and simple.

Antoine Semenyo was turned away by several academies before Bristol City spotted him in college football. He went out on loan to Newport County and Sunderland, fought his way into the Championship, earned a £10m move to Bournemouth, then a £64m transfer to Manchester City.

Ollie Watkins emerged from Exeter City. Adam Wharton came through Blackburn Rovers. Eberechi Eze rebuilt his career at Millwall and QPR after Arsenal let him go. Each of them is now a reference point in every recruitment meeting lower down the leagues.

Find the next one, and the payoff is enormous.

According to BBC Sport research, 14 players have already been recruited this summer from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies into Premier League development squads. That total already matches the entire 2025-26 season. There were eight such moves in 2024-25, 18 in 2023-24 and seven in 2022-23.

The volume alone is notable. The profile of those players is even more telling.

Eighteen and on the move

Of the 14 identified this summer, 11 are 18 years old. Last season, only five of the 14 equivalent moves involved 18-year-olds.

League One has suddenly become a hotspot. Seven of this summer’s 14 recruits came from there, up from just two the season before.

The names are not yet headline fixtures, but they are already being treated as investments. Blade Earley has gone from Cambridge United to Aston Villa. Valentin Joseph has left Blackburn Rovers for Brighton. George Munday has joined Brighton from Cambridge United. Harrison Bettoni has moved from Wigan Athletic to Chelsea. Maxwell Adedeji has swapped Leicester City for Tottenham.

Monga sits slightly apart. He is not included in the BBC Sport 14-player sample because he had already broken into Leicester’s first team. His fee, though, underlines how quickly the numbers jump once a teenager proves himself at senior level.

At 18, these players have been coached for years in professional environments. They are still young enough to spend meaningful time in under-21 or B-team football while clubs decide whether to loan them out or push them towards the first team.

The cost? Often minimal.

Nine of the 14 moves identified this summer are listed as free transfers. The remaining five are undisclosed fees. Last season, eight of the 14 were also free.

For clubs used to wiring tens of millions for established starters, spreading smaller sums across several teenagers is an obvious play. If just one of them becomes a Premier League regular, the strategy can pay for itself several times over.

Money, rules and a shrinking market

The economics of academy recruitment are no longer a background issue. The Premier League has approached the EFL about potentially capping compensation when young players move between academies.

Right now, clubs losing youngsters can receive training compensation, future appearance-related payments and sell-on clauses. Disputes can go to the Professional Football Compensation Committee. Any cap would change the calculation for both buyers and sellers.

Then there is Brexit, which has redrawn the talent map.

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

Under the current Governing Body Endorsement system, Analytics FC estimated only about 5,000 of those would now likely qualify for a permit. That is a drop of roughly 92%.

The squeeze is felt most sharply with younger players.

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

A teenager already in an English academy faces none of those immigration hurdles.

Brexit has also slowed the flow in the opposite direction. Analytics FC found that, before Brexit, Premier League 2 produced more British transfers to EU clubs than any other English division. By 2021-22, those moves had halved.

It is not proof that Brexit directly forced Premier League clubs into EFL academies. But it has undeniably reshaped the environment in which young players are recruited and developed.

Different clubs, different philosophies

There is no single blueprint for youth development at the top.

Figures from the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) for 2025-26 show club-trained players accounted for 16.2% of Manchester City’s Premier League minutes. Chelsea followed on 15.5%, Brighton on 12.5%.

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 definition matters. An 18-year-old signed from an EFL academy can still count as club-trained if he stays three seasons.

At the other extreme, Tottenham’s club-trained players made up just 0.1% of their league minutes. Bournemouth, Brentford and Burnley recorded zero.

Recruiting from EFL and Scottish academies gives clubs another route into that pipeline. Instead of relying solely on boys who joined at nine or 10, a Premier League club can identify a 17-, 18- or 19-year-old developed elsewhere, bring him into the under-21s and take charge of the final, most delicate phase of his development.

The numbers do not yet show an unstoppable surge. There were 18 such moves in 2023-24, so this summer’s 14 cannot be painted as some wild outlier.

But look closer: the cluster of 18-year-olds, the tilt towards League One. That points to a market being targeted with growing precision, not just opportunism.

For EFL clubs, the question is stark. How long can they realistically hold on to their best youngsters once Premier League scouts start circling at 16, 17, 18?

For the top-flight giants, the equation is different. Somewhere down the pyramid, the next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo is already running at defenders, already standing out in front of a few thousand fans.

The race is on to find him before anyone else does.