It’s been striking just how many footballers from the English Premier League we spotted playing in this summer’s UEFA Euro competition. Among Spain’s champions celebrating yesterday were Player of the Tournament Man City’s Rodri, Chelsea’s Marc Cucurella, and Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya. The astonishing numbers of prem players in the tournament are a testament to the development of the global transfer markets plus just how successful the Premier League is.
According to the Premier League, a total of 104 players currently gracing the league represented their nations in the tournament in Germany. The England squad obviously had the most Premier League players. All but two of Gareth Southgate's squad are on the 2024/25 books of Premier League clubs. Portugal and Denmark were next: each with 11 Premier League players, followed by Belgium, with 10. Only three of the 24 competing nations had no Premier League footballers in their squads.
Premier League champions Manchester City had the most footballers in the tournament: 14 representing seven different nations. Arsenal came a close second with 11 players in nine squads. There was only one 2024/25 Premier League team with nobody playing in the Euros, and that is newly promoted Ipswich Town.
Football immigration trends
The International Centre for Sports Studies Football Observatory follows the global mobility of footballers, providing a fascinating current snapshot of the latest footballer immigration trends.
The Football Observatory found that immigrant footballers played 63.05 per cent of all footballing minutes this season in England’s Premier League. Surveying 135 elite football leagues around the world, there were only four leagues where expat players played a bigger role - three in the Mediterranean, followed by another in Great Britain.
Among the top leagues with the most football immigration, immigrant footballers accounted for 78.33 per cent of minutes played in the Cyprus First Division; 71.11 per cent of football played in Turkey’s Süper Lig, 70.56 per cent of play in Greece’s Super Lig 1 and 65.89 per cent in the Scottish Premiership.
Expat players played just 43.42 per cent of football in the Netherlands Eredivisie and account for 39.1 per cent of minutes played in La Liga in Spain, incidentally, which is around the average amount for the football leagues studied.
The country with least immigrants playing topflight football was yesterday’s Copa America finalist Colombia (11 per cent). Argentina who won the cup for the sixteenth time is the fourth lowest with just 13.75 per cent of play in its Primera División by immigrant footballers. Ukraine, understandably, had the lowest immigrant contribution in Europe (13.37 per cent of football played in its top league).
The big football exporters
There were three top nations which together accounted for over 22.4 per cent of footballer exports last season. 1,338 players emigrated from five-times World Cup champions Brazil, followed by the last two World Cup winners: 1,091 from France and 995 players from Argentina. This, the Football Observatory insists is a testament to the established football development systems in these countries, as well as growing international transfer networks.
The greatest increase in footballer emigration from May 2020 to May 2024 occurred in the winners of the last two World Cups: 274 more players from France and an increase of 220 footballers leaving Argentina. England came third, with 586 players now expats in other countries – up 141 from 445 in 2020. This is a great sign of the growing strength of talent development and the transfer business in the UK.
The migration behind Euro success
As in every recent tournament you may have seen viral memes of how small England’s current UEFA Euro 24 squad would look without immigration. The same can be said for many of the other national teams too. Immigration has enriched the Premier League unfathomably. Despite the pandemic, despite Brexit’s end to free movement between the UK and Europe making it harder to source players under the age of 18, the Premier League continues to break transfer records and attract the best footballing talent from around the world.
According to Transfermarkt, the Premier League is by far the biggest soccer stage in the world, commanding a £9.71 billion market value from its 20 clubs, with the next most valuable, Spain’s La Liga worth £4.2 billion.
What any of this tells us about the path to the Euro final, I’m not sure. You will have drawn your own conclusions about how tough or easy England and Spain’s routes to the final were. But one thing is for sure, without the global mobility of footballers adding to the experience and coaching players are exposed to they would have been a lot more difficult.
More UK immigration press, media & news