Football’s coming home: what Euro 24 tells us about football immigration

12 June 2024

As in every recent tournament we’ve seen viral memes of what England’s UEFA Euro 24 squad would look like without immigration. Without Harry Kane, Bukayo Saka, Kobbie Mainoo and their other teammates of immigrant ancestry, Jordan Pickford, Phil Foden and John Stones are left with a lot of ground to cover. And one could say the same for most of the participating teams.

It’s equally striking just how many footballers from the English Premier League we have seen playing in the other national teams in this summer’s competition. The astonishing numbers below 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 are representing their nations in the tournament in Germany. The England squad obviously has 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 are next: each have 11 Premier League players, followed by Belgium, with 10. Only three of the 24 competing nations don’t have a Premier League footballer in their squads.

Premier League champions Manchester City have the most footballers in the tournament: 14 representing seven different nations. Arsenal come a close second with 11 players in nine squads. There is only one 2024/25 Premier League team with nobody playing in the Euros, and that is newly promoted Ipswich Town.

Football global mobility winners

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 has studied 135 elite football leagues around the world and found that there are three top nations accounting for over 22.4 per cent of footballer exports last season. 1,338 players have 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 comes next, with 586 players now expats in other countries – up 141 from 445 in 2020.

Which are the top leagues for football immigration? Three are in the Mediterranean, followed by two in Great Britain. In 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, 65.89 per cent in the Scottish Premiership and 63.05 per cent in England’s Premier League.

Immigrant players play 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 is Colombia (11 per cent), Ukraine, for obvious reasons has the least in Europe (13.4 per cent of football played).

The football immigration behind England’s success

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 have been. But one thing is for sure, without immigration they would have been a lot more difficult.

As we will our team to every success, let’s also hope that our new crop of parliamentarians stop using immigration as a political football.