Manchester City's Strategic Investment in Youth: The Case of Jeremy Monga
When Manchester City put £12.5m on the table for Jeremy Monga last month, they were not just buying a teenager. They were planting a flag in a rapidly changing talent market.
Arsenal wanted him too. Plenty did. But City won the race for a 17-year-old winger who had been Leicester City’s jewel since he walked through their doors at eight years old and then tore up age records the moment he touched senior football.
In April 2025, Monga became Leicester’s second-youngest Premier League player at 15 years and 271 days. He then went one better, becoming their youngest league starter and overtaking Jude Bellingham as the Championship’s youngest goalscorer. Those are not academy whispers. Those are hard, public markers of a player who has already stepped into the real thing.
And crucially, he sits at the more advanced end of a much bigger story.
The new battleground: EFL and Scotland
Premier League clubs have turned their eyes down the pyramid. Not just for bargain first-team signings, but for teenagers they can drop straight into under-21 or B-team structures and shape themselves.
The logic is obvious.
Antoine Semenyo was bounced around and rejected by several academies before Bristol City spotted him in college football. After loans at Newport County and Sunderland, he made himself a Championship regular, earned a move to Bournemouth for around £10m, then a £64m transfer to Manchester City.
Ollie Watkins honed his game at Exeter City. Adam Wharton emerged from Blackburn Rovers. Eberechi Eze rebuilt his career at Millwall and QPR after Arsenal let him go. These are not outliers any more; they are templates.
Recruitment departments are under pressure to find the next one.
BBC Sport research shows 14 players have already been recruited this summer from EFL or Scottish Premiership academies into Premier League development squads. That figure already equals the total for the whole of 2025-26. There were eight such deals in 2024-25, 18 in 2023-24 and seven in 2022-23.
The raw number is one thing. The profile is another.
Of those 14 this summer, 11 are 18 years old. Last season, only five of the 14 in the equivalent sample were 18. League One has also become a key hunting ground, supplying seven of this summer’s 14 recruits, up from just two the previous year.
Names are already moving. Blade Earley has gone from Cambridge United to Aston Villa. Valentin Joseph and George Munday have both left Blackburn Rovers and Cambridge United respectively for Brighton. Harrison Bettoni has moved from Wigan Athletic to Chelsea. Maxwell Adedeji has swapped Leicester City for Tottenham.
Monga does not appear in that 14-player sample. He had already crossed the threshold into Leicester’s first team, and his £12.5m fee shows how quickly the numbers change once a teenager proves he can handle senior football.
Why 18 is the sweet spot
At 18, a player has usually had years of professional coaching. He understands structure, intensity, and expectation. Yet he is still young enough to spend one, two, even three seasons in an under-21 or B-team setting while a club decides whether to loan him out or fast-track him into the first team.
Financially, the risk is small compared with established stars. Of the 14 moves identified this summer, nine are listed as free transfers. The other five are undisclosed. Eight of last season’s 14 were also free.
For clubs used to spending tens of millions on finished products, spreading smaller sums across a cluster of high-upside teenagers makes brutal sense. If even one of them becomes a Premier League regular, the entire strategy can pay for itself and more.
But this is not just about clever scouting. It is about the economics of youth development.
The Premier League has approached the EFL about potentially capping the compensation paid when young players move between academies. At present, clubs losing youngsters can receive training compensation, appearance-related add-ons and sell-on clauses. If they cannot agree, disputes go to the Professional Football Compensation Committee.
That backdrop matters when a 17- or 18-year-old moves for free or a modest fee, only to be worth many times more a few years later.
Brexit and the shrinking talent pool
There is another force at play: Brexit.
Before freedom of movement ended, English clubs could scour a vast European market without worrying whether EU players could work in the UK. Analytics FC, working with immigration specialists Fragomen, estimated in 2022 that around 60,000 professional players in Europe were potentially available to British clubs before Brexit.
Under the current Governing Body Endorsement system, they estimated only about 5,000 of those would now likely qualify for a work permit. A drop of roughly 92%.
That squeeze is felt most sharply with younger players.
Take Liverpool’s Ifeanyi Ndukwe. The 18-year-old centre-back joined from Austria Vienna and caught the eye in pre-season. Yet he cannot play competitive matches for Liverpool because he does not meet work permit requirements. The expectation is a loan abroad to build the experience needed to qualify.
An 18-year-old already in an English academy has no such immigration barrier. He is simply easier to use.
Brexit has also slowed traffic in the other direction. Analytics FC found that Premier League 2 used to produce more British transfers to EU clubs than any other English division. By 2021-22, those moves had halved.
None of this proves that Brexit alone pushed Premier League clubs towards EFL academies. But it has reshaped the landscape in which young players are recruited, moved and developed.
Different clubs, different philosophies
There is no single model for youth development in the Premier League.
Figures from the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) for 2025-26 show that 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 means an 18-year-old arriving from an EFL academy can still become “club-trained” if he spends the next three seasons there.
At the other end of the spectrum, Tottenham’s club-trained players made up just 0.1% of their league minutes. Bournemouth, Brentford and Burnley were all on zero.
Recruiting from EFL and Scottish academies offers a way to build that club-trained core without relying solely on boys who have worn the badge since primary school. A Premier League side can identify a standout 17-, 18- or 19-year-old elsewhere, bring him into their under-21 group and take charge of the final, decisive stretch 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 are not unprecedented. But the clustering of 18-year-olds and the heavy focus on League One suggest clubs are sharpening their sights on a very specific slice of the market.
For EFL clubs, that poses a harsh question: how long can they realistically hold on to their best teenagers?
For Premier League clubs, the calculation is colder. Somewhere in League One, the Championship or the Scottish Premiership, the next Watkins, Eze, Wharton or Semenyo is already playing. The race is not just to find him.
It is to get there before everyone else.
