April 4 – When it comes to buying in first team talent, Chelsea tops the table for foreign signings with 75% of its players coming from outside of England. The next highest club in the Big 5 leagues is Ligue 1’s Monaco with 73% followed by Manchester City with 69.2% and Italy’s Lazio with 67.9%.
The figures from the CIES Football Observatory show that England’s Premier League relies on buying in 43% of its playing stock from outside of England.
This compares to 37.4% in Spain’s La Liga, 36% in Germany’s Bundesliga, 34.7% in Italy’s Serie A and 31.2% in France’s Ligue 1.
In total, 23 teams big-5 league teams out of 98 recruited at least 50% of their first team players from outside their national boundaries: eight in England, five in both Spain and Italy, three in Germany and two in France.
In Spain Sevilla recruited most foreign players with 64.3% with Real Madrid in second spot with 60.9%. In contrast Barcelona only had 36% of its first team squad arriving from outside of Spain.
In Germany Bayern Munich led the Bundesliga with 54.2% of the first team squad being foreign imports. Paris St Germain were in second place in France with 62.5%.
At the other end of the table, Sassulo in Serie A have no foreign imports while Athletic Bilbao in La Liga have just 4%. Premier League Bournemouth are bottom of the English table with 11.1% while Darmstadt are bottom of the Bundesliga with 11.5% and Caen hold up the Ligue 1 table with 12%
See the full tables at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2015/144/en/
Source: CIES Football Observatory
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