Manchester United's £52 million signing of Lenny Yolo was a deal that stunned European football last week.
Most observers expected Lille's teenage defender to eventually go to Real Madrid, but United, promising a bigger return and a longer-term challenge, won the race to sign him.
It's the Premier League's biggest summer transfer and a huge show of faith in a young player, but it's no surprise that United have chosen to spend such a large sum in the market.
Ligue 1, the French top league where Yolo shot to fame last season, is the league in which the Premier League's 20 clubs have collectively spent more money than any other league overseas over the past decade.
Spending over the past decade had reached 1.81 billion pounds ($2.34 billion) by this summer and is likely to exceed 2 billion pounds in the next six weeks, with an unprecedented number of players expected to move from French clubs to the Premier League – more than 145 players.
Since 2014, no European league has received more of the Premier League's wealth through transfer fees than the French Premier League, but Spain's La Liga and Germany's Bundesliga are not far behind.
La Liga used to be the biggest spender among Premier League clubs, with the Spanish top flight handily capturing the majority of transfer revenue from the Premier League for a decade between 2004-05 and 2013-14, spending 27% more than the French.
The next decade also saw £1.76 billion spent on La Liga players, but other countries, notably Germany, have caught up: Bundesliga clubs sold players for a total of £1.72 billion between 2014-15 and 2023-24, with last summer's spending the biggest ever.
In a transfer window that saw RB Leipzig sell Josko Gvardiol to Manchester City, Kristoffer Nkunku to Chelsea and Dominik Szoboszlai to Liverpool, the Premier League spent a combined £378m on Bundesliga players. In fact, their cumulative total since 2018 is £1.26bn, just slightly more than League One in this short valuation period.
Serie A was the other market that caught the Premier League's attention last summer, with transfer fees reaching more than £300m, but it is the least popular of Europe's top five leagues, with revenues over 10 years of just £1.48bn.
Still, France remains the most popular shopping destination in four of the past nine seasons and still figures prominently in overall spending tables. And this summer's early moves, particularly from Yolo, suggest it's no passing fad.
Although Ligue 1 is considered to be lagging behind rival leagues such as La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A in UEFA's country coefficient rankings, it continues to act as Europe's main talent factory. According to the reliable website Transfermarkt, at least 10 players have been bought by Ligue 1 clubs in 19 of the last 20 years. For the 2022-23 season, that total is 22, with Premier League clubs spending more on Ligue 1 players (£312 million) than Ligue 1 clubs have spent (£153 million).
While there have been some costly failures, such as Arsenal's £72m signing of Nicolas Pepe (also from Lille) in 2019, there have been a string of successes in recent seasons, including Gabriel (Arsenal), Bruno Guimaraes (Newcastle United), William Saliba (who moved from Saint-Etienne to Arsenal in 2018 but has since spent three seasons on loan at Ligue 1 clubs) and former Lille player Amadou Onana, who moved from Everton to Aston Villa for £50m yesterday.
Bruno Guimaraes is thriving for Newcastle United (Daniel Pocket/Getty Images)
Athletic To find out why League One has become a shopping market for English clubs, we spoke to several people working in football. The respondents asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak or because of commercial confidentiality, but their answers were insightful.
One veteran Premier League player pointed to the physical and athletic qualities of League One and the potential for players to develop rapidly under England's elite coaching staff, while a veteran agent pointed to the value for money that League One has traditionally offered compared to data output. Players in the league tend to tick all the boxes when it comes to impressing at a level that demands technical proficiency.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when French football began to attract so much attention from Premier League clubs.
Perhaps it's the influence of Eric Cantona, Manchester United's intrepid No. 7 of the 1990s, or David Ginola, the brilliant winger at Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur, but more likely it's the deeper mark made on Arsenal by their French connections under manager Arsene Wenger.
There was Nicolas Anelka, Emmanuel Petit and Robert Pires, as well as Sylvain Wiltord and Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira, who both had brief spells in Serie A. Wenger bought technically superior, physically fit players at a much cheaper price than their English counterparts. In total, 28 French players were signed by Arsenal during Wenger's 22 years in charge.
Soon others followed his lead. It made sense to sign players from Ligue 1, French or not. Newcastle United signed five players from French clubs in the 2012-13 season alone, a season notable for being the first time a Premier League club spent more than £100 million on transfers from a single league. It was also the year Chelsea signed Eden Hazard from Lille, Olivier Giroud from Montpellier to Arsenal and Spurs signed Hugo Lloris from Lyon. All three big deals boosted the reputation of Ligue 1 targets.
Eden Hazard changed the game when he signed for Chelsea (William West/AFP via Getty Images)
French football generally features a younger player base, offering potential and promise to international signings. According to UEFA's annual report, The State of European Club Football, 39% of total playing time in France in the 2021-22 season was spent by players under the age of 23. This is the youngest profile among Europe's major leagues, well below the 26% played by under-24s in the Premier League and 20% in La Liga, where spending by English clubs has declined in recent years.
Only the other league actively targeted by English clubs in recent years, the Dutch Eredivisie, has a significantly younger age group than League One, with players under the age of 24 playing 47% of the time. Indeed, at the end of the evaluation period covered in UEFA's report, Premier League clubs had spent £240 million on players for the Dutch top flight for the 2022-23 season, including Anthony, Lisandro Martinez, Kody Gakpo and Noni Madueke.
The Premier League's financial strength is becoming increasingly difficult for European rivals to match, and Ligue 1, with its recent problems over TV rights, is more vulnerable. New domestic deals with DAZN and beIN Sports are said to be worth just £420 million per season, a pittance compared with the Premier League's total TV package of more than £3 billion per year. Ligue 1 broadcast rights have actually fallen in value since their peak in the 2016-20 season.
Clubs in Spain, Germany and Italy are feeling similar pressure, but to a lesser extent than in France. Selling players has become a fundamental part of their business model and few have done it better than Lille, who sold Yolo to Manchester United last week. Lille, who finished fourth in Ligue 1 last season, have sold players to Premier League clubs for £250m over the past five years, including Sven Botman, Carlos Bareba, Onana, Gabriel and Pepe.
Lille sold Nicolas Pepe to Arsenal for £72 million (Jeff Perchoud/AFP via Getty Images)
Lyon, another big name in French football, have been equally adept, with their revenues exceeding £200m since 2019, having sold players such as Lucas Paqueta (West Ham), Guimaraes (Newcastle) and Tanguy Ndombele (Tottenham) for huge profits.
Ligue 1 managed to generate net transfer spending of just under £30 million in last summer's transfer window, a feat surpassing Serie A and La Liga, but this was largely down to lavish spending by Paris Saint-Germain, who were permanently protected by the backing of the Qatar Sports Investment ownership group.
PSG remains the only French club in the top 10 of Deloitte's Football Money League, a list of the highest-earning European clubs. Marseille was 20th and Lyon 29th on the list for 2024, but the rest of Ligue 1 clubs, especially those not benefiting from the extra revenue from European football, could see their incomes transformed with a single sale. Offers from England are harder to turn down.
As a result, French football is at the centre of the development plans of several clubs: Chelsea's owners Bruco bought Strasbourg last year, while Liverpool's owners FSG were recently in talks to buy historically big club Bordeaux, currently struggling in the second division, before the talks collapsed last week. The same reasons for targeting French players in the transfer market underlie the motivation to acquire French club ownership.
It's no surprise, given how many players are moving from Ligue 1 to the Premier League: a total of 260 players are expected to move from the French top flight between 2004 and 2024, more than Spain (245), Italy (192) and Germany (171).
What was the average cost of signing a player from League One at that time? Just under £9 million.
While the Premier League is gaining wider attention and interest in Germany's Bundesliga has increased amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Ligue 1 remains the most fertile ground for finding new players – and Yolo is proof of that.
(Top photo: Lenny Yolo, Gabriel and William Saliba, all via Getty Images)
