It is clear to all concerned that Manchester City have been in trouble.
Short of physicality, short of recovery pace, short of fit and available centre-backs, City’s leadership were forced into the January transfer market.
Uzbekistan international Abdukodir Khusanov, who has joined City from Ligue 1 club Lens in a deal worth €40million (£33.7m; $40.8m) plus bonuses, is their solution.
Moves like these are rare. The last time City signed a first-team player in the winter window to immediately enter their squad was Aymeric Laporte for €65million in 2017.
City’s move for Khusanov is a necessity and once more an English club has sought a Ligue 1 defender when desperately searching for upgrades.
“France has more need of me than I have need of France,” Napoleon Bonaparte once famously said, but the opposite is true for the Premier League.
Over the last three seasons, top-flight clubs in England have committed more than £500million ($608m) on defensive players from Ligue 1. The table below, displaying centre-backs signed, illustrates that dominance over other leagues.
The tally includes Manchester United’s Leny Yoro (Lille, £54m), West Ham United’s Jean-Clair Todibo (Nice, a loan with an obligation to buy for £34.2m), and Newcastle United’s Sven Botman (Lille, £35m). They are just three of the eight defenders who have joined from Ligue 1 in deals worth more than €30million.
Defensive midfielders such as Manuel Ugarte, Lesley Ugochukwu and Carlos Baleba supplement those numbers. In total, 13 Premier League sides have signed a defensive player from Ligue 1 since 2022.
It is, by a distance, the most popular league for defensive recruitment — which may come as a surprise.
Of Europe’s top five leagues — the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 — the French top division is widely considered the fifth-strongest. With the Premier League at the opposite end of that spectrum, why is Ligue 1 seen as such a fertile recruiting ground?
Ligue 1’s focus on youth
Branding itself as ‘the league of talents’ might read as self-aggrandising — but it is accurate.
France’s roots in youth development can be traced to the 1970s and the Institut National de Football in Vichy, their first national centre for talented youngsters, which was eventually relocated to Clairefontaine.
With an average age of 26.2, Ligue 1 is the youngest of Europe’s top five leagues. According to the CIES Football Observatory, 13.2 per cent of minutes in France’s top flight are given to club-trained players. La Liga (21 per cent) is the only one of Europe’s top five leagues to give more minutes to homegrown talents.
These homegrown talents are predominantly young prospects. Since the start of 2019-20, Ligue 1 has given 72 per cent more minutes to defenders under 22 than the Premier League and 65 per cent more than La Liga.
From a young age, Ligue 1 defenders begin to adapt to the increased physical loading and more ruthless tactical demands of first-team football. This is a marked departure from the Premier League.
In England’s top division, according to data published by CIES in 2020, 54 per cent of debutants were bought from elsewhere, with only 29 per cent promoted from a club’s youth/reserve ranks. In Ligue 1, 48 per cent of players make their debuts after emerging through that club’s academy.
With centre-backs typically peaking later than other outfield positions and many Premier League teams focusing their recruitment on young players with room to grow, the pool of possible centre-back signings is simply greater in Ligue 1.
At the same time, England’s top clubs have struggled to produce centre-backs over recent decades, instead relying on expensive imports or signing the most talented prospects from further down the pyramid.
Though there is an emerging generation of physically dominant, tactically accomplished and tactically versatile defenders emerging — Levi Colwill (Chelsea), Jarrad Branthwaite (Everton, via Carlisle United), and Jarell Quansah (Liverpool) — Ligue 1 has produced these players for decades and have been willing to play them.
It was telling that when Arsenal signed William Saliba as an 18-year-old in 2019, he was sent on three loan spells in Ligue 1 (with Saint-Etienne, Nice, and Marseille) to receive game time in a physically challenging league. He only returned to Arsenal after the 2021-22 season, having won Ligue 1’s young player of the year award.
Ligue 1’s access to unique player markets
Another aspect is the identity of those players.
There are players from 76 different nations playing in Ligue 1 in 2024-25, including from Madagascar, Malta and Martinique. For comparison, there are 61 in the Premier League and 58 in the Bundesliga.
It shows the diversity of the French league. Khusanov, who will become the first Uzbek to play in the Premier League, is the perfect example.
Ligue 1 has always accessed a greater variety of player markets. Some of this is financial — more on this later — with French clubs generally poorer than their rivals and forced to look further afield for cheaper deals. This was the case for Khusanov, who was signed from Belarusian club Energetik-BGU for €100,000 in 2023.
But Ligue 1 clubs tap into this vast network for historical and cultural reasons, too. France’s colonial past means large swathes of Africa are Francophone, giving French teams a natural advantage when setting up scouting networks.
With no other major league predominantly French-speaking, Ligue 1 has a headstart on recruiting talented players from the Francophone world, including from talent-rich areas of north and west Africa.
“In France, we have the Cotonou Agreement,” says Viktor Bezhani, head of recruitment for Ligue 1 side Toulouse FC. Previously, he worked as a scout in the Premier League for Brentford and Leicester City. “In many countries, such as Italy, Germany, and England, players under 18 cannot move there. But in France, because of the language, because of the agreement, they will not count as foreigners. Players can come in and it’s much easier to recruit. It means French academies are probably ahead of 95 per cent of teams from other countries.”
The first time Premier League clubs will be exposed to many talented players is when they appear in Ligue 1 — and with French clubs well-positioned to take advantage of the global player market, those individuals are often of a disproportionately higher quality.
One good example is the relationship between Metz and Generation Foot, the Senegalese academy that produced Sadio Mane, Tottenham Hotspur’s Pape Matar Sarr, Marseille’s Ismaila Sarr and former Bayern Munich right-back Bouna Sarr.
Acceptance of selling model
Last summer, Ligue 1 clubs spent €730m on players — less than one-third of the Premier League’s €2.32bn.
Though that is more than La Liga and the Bundesliga, Ligue 1’s numbers are heavily distorted by Paris Saint-Germain — remove them and they comfortably spend the least of Europe’s top five leagues.
There is an essential difference here compared to the Premier League. In France, every club (except for PSG) recognises that their business model relies on player sales — even historic sides, such as Marseille and Lyon, who have suffered significant losses in recent years.
Lille, for example, have effectively financed the club by selling defensive players: Yoro, Botman, Baleba, Gabriel, Amadou Onana and Boubakary Soumare have left since 2020, fetching more than €200m.
In contrast, at least eight Premier League clubs do not see themselves as selling sides — the traditional ‘Big Six’, plus Aston Villa and Newcastle United.
Newcastle United signed Sven Botman from Lille for £31.8million plus add-ons in 2022 (George Wood/Getty Images)
In Ligue 1, any player is available for the right price. French clubs cannot afford to compete with Premier League clubs financially. This is especially significant with wages — when homegrown Ligue 1 players reach a level where they are ready to sign their ‘second contract’ (the first significantly lucrative deal of their career), many will invariably choose the Premier League.
While La Liga, the Bundesliga, and Serie A have a reasonably wealthy sub-elite outside the superclubs, who can afford to offer some players significant wages, French clubs lack that flexibility.
They survive by buying cheap, playing quickly and selling sharpish — a model dependent on Premier League clubs signing these players. That also affects their willingness to play young talent.
“The Premier League is by far the highest-level league in the world and a defender might not be afforded the time to make mistakes and recover,” says Bezhani. “One example is Christian Mawissa, who was in our academy here. He played one season in our first team and we sold him to Monaco.
“When you look at his performances for us, there were what you’d call growing pains. He’s improving, but it can sometimes be painful for you as a team because he might make some mistakes. But we understood and had the patience that he’d keep growing, the mistakes would keep reducing, and his value would go higher and higher.
“A lot of teams depend on transfers and because of that, they’ll provide those chances.”
A league of desirable playstyles
Ligue 1’s access to unique markets and their clubs’ willingness to sell help explain why Premier League clubs buy from France — but why are defensive players particularly in demand?
When spending such large sums of money on players, clubs tailor their scouting to account for the relative strengths and weaknesses of the league. Sometimes, this means they will be more likely to sign players from a competition with similarities to their own — it offers reassurance they can perform in a different country.
French football’s focus on youth development has created players who possess traits that are highly desirable to Premier League sides.
Gerard Houllier’s arrival as France’s national technical director in 1988 ushered in a focus on technical and tactical mastery, which explains why so many French centre-backs, even from a young age, look so assured in build-up and at breaking lines, while being physically dominant, too. It is worth breaking down each of those.
Centre-back is a unique position in that it requires a baseline of basic strength to make it in the Premier League. Teams in other divisions, such as La Liga, are typically less direct in possession, so do not place as much importance on physical strength in their defenders. That leads to doubts over whether imports can survive the physical level of the Premier League.
For players emerging from Ligue 1, those doubts are less frequent. Todibo, Botman, Axel Disasi and Benoit Badiashile showcase the physicality that some defenders from France develop at a young age. Khusanov is being signed, in part, because his physicality exceeds City’s own youth-team graduates, such as Jahmai Simpson-Pusey.
Benoit Badiashile had already earned a senior France call-up before joining Chelsea from Monaco for around £33.7m in 2023 (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Manchester United’s Yoro, despite his physical slightness, has already shown an excellent ability to leverage his body in one-on-one duels.
“When I was in England, we saw that Ligue 1 was a very physical league, alongside the Bundesliga, it was probably the most physical league outside of the Premier League,” explains Bezhani. “One thing that you realise with the Premier League when you scout these other top five leagues is that the intensity doesn’t drop after the 70th minute. With every other league, it does, because they’re a little more tactical. In France, you have a lot of young players and they push the pace as much as they can.
“Just before I joined Leicester, we recruited Wesley Fofana. He’d just broken in with Saint-Etienne, but we saw a physical specimen, someone that had a lot of pace, was very good in the air, took a lot of risks, and had a decent enough tactical understanding.
“There was a game against PSG which was make or break — we had to buy him or not because after that point, it would be even more expensive. And in that game, he did really well against Mbappe, against Neymar. That’s a good example.”
Tactical trends also play a role, with the game shifting to suit the natural traits of athletic defenders.
“Quite a lot of teams now do not play a low block,” Bezhani adds. “It’ll be a combination of a mid-block or high block. Elite teams like Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, and Tottenham especially. But to play this high line, you need physical players who can run, can cover long distances, and can repeat those high-intensity sprints. When you look at central defenders coming from France, they usually have that element.
“I remember watching the Under-21 European Championship in Italy, England versus France. England had the ball on the right side of the pitch, level with the edge of the centre circle in their own half, and France’s back line were level with the edge of the centre circle on the other side. It was absurd. There were 15 or 20 metres between them.
“This was an England team with James Maddison, Phil Foden, Dominic Solanke… but you had Ibrahima Konate and Dayot Upamecano just waiting for that ball to be played through so they could chase it. Because they were so strong and physical, they did not get exposed.”
Assured that Ligue 1 signings meet the physical baseline for recruitment, this allows Premier League sides to focus on what they offer technically.
English clubs are looking for centre-backs with broad passing ranges and composure on the ball to play out from the back, overcoming the league’s propensity to press high.
In recent seasons, Ligue 1 teams have been particularly willing to give their defenders significant roles in build-up. According to Opta, Ligue 1 teams average just over 400 passes in their own half per game — the highest among Europe’s top five leagues.
When these players arrive in the Premier League, they are not suddenly asked to play significantly different roles. Many are signed predominantly because of their composure in possession, such as Nayef Aguerd, who joined West Ham from Rennes in 2022.
Yoro and Botman are also comfortable in possession, despite their greatest strengths lying elsewhere.
“Because these players already have the physical element, it’s drilled into them to learn more about the tactical part,” says Bezhani. “That can be individual or team tactics — how to build up in possession, understanding one-vs-ones — because you know the physical aspect is already covered.”
Football is also a human market of bias and expectation. In recent seasons, several expensive defensive signings from Ligue 1 have signed and prospered. The alternative — such as unsuccessful strikers from the Serie A — linger and create doubts.
Every successful arrival is proof of concept and the Premier League’s reliance on Ligue 1 is likely to stay.
GO DEEPER
The raw potential of Abdukodir Khusanov signals the start of Manchester City’s rebuild
(Top photos: Getty Images)
