The most important EFL trends
Day 8 of the 12 Days of GBE Expert Hub Content
“This has blown the whole thing wide open.”
If it hasn’t become obvious in the first seven articles on this platform, The GBE Expert Hub team are huge fans of EFL football. Some of the team support clubs in the EFL, others work with EFL clubs, but all of us recognise the importance of the three EFL divisions in sustaining the lifeblood of the game that we all love in the UK.
This is why, when we investigate trends, or look into how things are changing in the football landscape, that it is important that we look as deeply into the EFL as we do the Premier League. Yesterday’s article was all about how the transfer market in the Premier League has changed over time, and, especially, what has happened since Brexit with the GBE regulations and ESC clauses coming into force.
Today we take a look at how the EFL has dealt with the changes and what the current landscape is.
As I briefly touched on yesterday, the EFL is a global power that shouldn't be ignored. The Championship was the 7th highest spending league in the world in the summer window just gone, and League One, with some help which we will touch on later, was 21st.
This made England the highest spending top tier, second tier, and third tier in world football.
In global terms, the EFL is often seen as the gateway to a potential Premier League move, which is totally legitimate, the Premier League does recruit from the Championship on a regular basis, and of course, promotion into the top tier is a real possibility.
However, the EFL deserves respect of its own. The investment in the leagues is substantial, and with that money has come an increased level of quality and spectacle. The competitive nature of the leagues makes every pound spent valuable as well, so recruitment needs to be well thought out and strategic.
We saw yesterday that the average age of Premier League signings is getting younger.
In the EFL there is a concentration around 24 years of age across all three divisions. League Two signings seem to tend to be a little older, their average has been the highest in each of the last six seasons.
However, one trend that cannot be ignored is the amount of money that is being spent per player, especially in the Championship.
This trend perhaps looks a little more alarming because of the slight depression in activity during the COVID pandemic. We will see in the forthcoming Championship specific section what effect Brexit and COVID had on the league's recruitment, but as we can see in the chart above, spend per player is at a record high.
Theories that may contribute to this include the use of parachute payments by the relegated Premier League clubs, and the amount of money that those same clubs are able to raise through their own sales as well.
The quality of the players in the league is increasing, which means that the quality of the players required to move the needle for teams has also had to increase, and quality always costs.
The Championship has also seen a rich seam of investment at ownership level, especially over recent years. This obviously helps budgets in most cases, at least at first, and will contribute to the trend.
How has the introduction of GBE affected recruitment in the EFL Championship?
Let's take a deeper dive into the second tier.
Tracking the spending and importing over the last decade we can observe a couple of interesting trends.
It is really noticeable to see the dip in overall spend between 2020-2022. This is, of course, completely understandable given the uncertainty in the whole world at that time. It is always difficult to disentangle Brexit from COVID in this situation, but it is interesting to see the slow start that GBE applications had in 2021 compared to how many were processed in the subsequent years.
The interesting thing to note on the right hand side of the graphic is the ratio of domestic transfers and spending, and the clear trend displayed in the last few years of a lower share of domestic transfers. Indeed, it would appear that post-Brexit (the orange shaded area) there has actually been more of an appetite for shopping in foreign markets.
The summer window just gone saw less than half of all fees spent outside of the UK. The last time this happened was in 2022-23 when Vincent Kompany's Burnley spent heavily in Belgium and Hull City invested in Turkey. Very festive.
The GBE Expert Hub has worked out how many of the transfers were GBE and where the recruited players came from in terms of their leagues and, therefore, bandings.
This is broken down in the graphic below.
In comparison to what we saw with the Premier League yesterday there is a big difference in the Championship.
Band 2 leagues (Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands and Turkey) have been very popular shopping areas, whereas Band 1 purchases have been much rarer.
The introduction of the ESC regulations ahead of the summer 2023 window has also had a huge impact on the Championship.
Isolating the GBE & ESC data and, again, using the knowledge of The GBE Expert Hub to know which deals have gone through which route, we are able to see that foreign recruitment has been turbo charged by the introduction of ESC.
The story of League One and League Two
As can be seen in the graphics below, the lower two tiers of the EFL structure have traditionally been heavily domestic in terms of their recruitment. At least, until this summer!
Birmingham City's takeover and subsequent relegation transformed the way that League One looked in the summer window just gone.
The investment in the playing staff has been substantial, and has been wide ranging in terms of bringing in players from Europe as well as big domestic purchases such as Jay Stansfield. It is the fee paid for Stansfield that has made a huge difference to the bottom line in terms of the amount of money spent in League One this season in comparison to previous years, but plenty of other League One clubs joined in the fun.
Almost half of the clubs in the league paid a fee over half a million for a player in the summer.
ESC is beginning to be used in League One as well. By our reckoning, 10 transfers from the summer were ESC reliant. If we see that those transfers have been successful then surely more and more clubs will look to recruit down this route.
The GBE Expert Hub are prepared for this and already have contacts in key markets. There are plenty of niche markets that interesting players reside in where it is difficult to build a recruitment system for. If there is any help that we can give to any club in this regard then feel free to reach out to us.
League Two is currently still 97-99% domestic based in terms of the transfers that they conduct.
Even still, purchases such as Alassana Jatta and Grimsby's acquisition of Jason Dadi Svanthorsson on an ESC, the only one used in League Two this summer, demonstrate that the potential is there for this route to be used even in the fourth tier.
The above list is an interesting snapshot of where we are at in Leaague One and League Two with GBE & ESC transfers.
There is a real mixture of those fairly well known markets, i.e. Netherlands, and then some that might look like bigger risks. If those risks can be mitigated with good research and experience, then there are lots of potential value investments out there.
A lower league EFL club that is able to crack the ESC system has a real chance at giving themselves a competitive advantage and creating a point of difference between themselves and their rivals.
Andy Watson - GBE & ESC Expert is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.