The boy prophesied to be the next Frenkie de Jong made a mere 20 first-team appearances in the Eredivisie for Ajax before moving on to Newcastle United this summer. Sean Steur is 18. And once a credible Premier League club came calling, there was little the four-time European champions could do to hang on to a prodigy who would sooner play for the 1968-69 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup winners. Newcastle were willing to pay $27m (£20m) for him, or north of $1m per senior appearance.
De Jong, for what it’s worth, had been a regular in the Ajax first team for two years, before departing for Barcelona at age 22.
Rather than pass from Lille to one of France’s richest clubs, as a teenaged French-born standout would have done until recently, Ayyoub Bouaddi, Morocco’s 18-year-old World Cup sensation, bypassed this career step and hopped straight to Manchester City for $110m (£81.5m). Ibrahim Mbaye, who has played fewer than 1,000 Ligue 1 minutes for serial champions Paris Saint-Germain is off to Aston Villa, who paid $63m (£47m) for the 18-year-old winger.
The above signings notwithstanding, the Premier League’s transfer business has been remarkably insular this summer. Arsenal’s most expensive signing came from another Premier League team. So did Brighton’s. And Chelsea’s. And Crystal Palace’s. And Everton’s, Leeds’s, Manchester City’s, Nottingham Forest’s, Manchester United’s, and Tottenham’s. The latter two clubs, in fact, brought in all of their transfer or loan or free recruits from either current or freshly relegated Premier League teams.
And yet this incestuous transfer habit is also of a piece with the influx of teenagers.
If there’s a single conclusion one can draw from the last few transfer windows, it’s that the Premier League’s purchasing power is so much larger than everybody else’s that it is quietly but routinely vacuuming up the world’s best young players long before they hit their prime, just to see who pans out. The result: when those players mature, the market for them is largely contained to itself because so much of the top talent is already in England, where all the clubs that can afford them also are. You may as well shop locally when all the best products have been concentrated there for your convenience.
Besides, the league’s “profit and sustainability rules,” which have been replaced by the “squad cost ratio” regulations, encourage clubs to swap players at a high volume, only exacerbating this trend.
Crunching the numbers – with a solemn salute to the good people at Transfermarkt.com, who are doing the lord’s work in tracking all this stuff – it emerges that the Premier League has paid a transfer fee to sign teenagers to permanent transfers far more often than any of the other leagues in Europe’s traditional big five.
This may feel counterintuitive in the sense that England’s clubs are viewed as the apex predators in the market, picking off the best talent developed by others. But, increasingly, they are also bringing along the most promising young players themselves.
When the summer window closed on Tuesday, the Premier League’s 20 clubs had completed 16 permanent transfers for teenagers. This was actually down a tick from last season’s 22, or 2024-25’s tally of 27 – although there is, of course, another transfer window to come in the winter. That brought the five-year total of such recruits to 100, or an average of 20 per season.
By contrast, clubs in Spain’s La Liga have signed just 29 teenagers over that span, or 5.8 per season – highlighted this summer by Real Madrid winning the Yan Diomande sweepstakes. Ligue 1 clubs bought 47 teenagers over the past half decade, or 9.4 per season. There is a plausible explanation here, which might be that clubs from these two nations are committed to bringing through homegrown talent recruited at a younger age, rather than buying their future first-team talents. Yet Germany’s Bundesliga clubs, also renowned for incubating the stars of tomorrow, bought in more teenagers than either the French or the Spanish, at 62 over five years or 12.4 per season.
The only league to come close to the Premier League, in fact, was Italy’s Serie A, in a stereotype-inverting twist. Italian clubs bought 80 teenagers in five years, or 16 per season. But they mostly picked them up from a decidedly different segment of the market than Premier League clubs went shopping in.
In 2026-27, so far, the 16 teenagers signed in Serie A went for an average transfer fee of $8.2m (£6.1m), whereas the 16 that were England-bound fetched an average of $32m (£23.7m). This was also true in 2025-26, when the Italians spent $7.4m (£5.5m) on the typical teenager and the Premier League teams spent $21.8m (£16.1m). This was in part because Premier League teams were buying higher-profile players, but also because Italian teams – especially the middle class of clubs – have historically speculated on fairly cheap young players and collected them in bulk. They would, and often still do, pick them up by the handful in the equivalent of micro-transactions amounting to as little as $58,000 (£43,000).
In other words, Premier League clubs are buying equity in promising startups; their Serie A counterparts are betting on penny stocks. The former can simply afford to spend on a player who may well become a star in a few years for the same price as everybody else has available to lay out on their key recruits.
All of which goes some way towards explaining why the Premier League clubs no longer seem to go after the game’s true superstars playing abroad – why Vinícius Júnior never came to Arsenal this summer, aside from his apparent contract leverage ploy at Real Madrid. Rather, they seem to feel confident that all the talent they need is already available in their own back yards – with a proven track record in their league. They brought them there at a young age themselves, after all.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
