Culture
How France became the Premier League's biggest shopping market
Manchester United’s £52million signing of Leny Yoro was a deal to make European football sit up and take note last week.
Most observers had expected Lille’s teenage defender to end up at Real Madrid, but along came United, offering greater returns and long-term challenges, to win the race for his signature.
It is the biggest transfer of the Premier League’s summer and a sizeable show of faith in one so young. The market in which United chose to invest such a significant sum, however, should not come as a surprise.
Ligue 1, the French top division where Yoro shot to prominence last season, is where the Premier League’s 20 clubs have collectively spent more than any other overseas league in the past decade.
The outlay stood at £1.81billion ($2.34bn) in the previous 10 years ahead of this summer and, in all probability, will soar past the £2bn mark in the next six weeks. The weight of numbers making the move to the Premier League from French clubs — 145 players and counting — is also unsurpassed.
No other European league has received more of the Premier League’s riches through transfer fees than France’s top division since 2014, although Spain’s La Liga and Germany’s Bundesliga are not far behind.
La Liga used to be where Premier League clubs spent most of their money. In the 10 years between 2004-05 and 2013-14, it was Spain’s top division that comfortably drew in most transfer income from the Premier League, with 27 per cent more spent there than in France.
The following decade still saw another £1.76bn spent on La Liga players, but others, most strikingly Germany, have caught up. Bundesliga clubs sold players for a sum totalling £1.72billion between 2014-15 and 2023-24 and last summer was the highest outlay on record.
In a transfer window that saw RB Leipzig sell Josko Gvardiol to Manchester City, Christopher Nkunku to Chelsea and Dominik Szoboszlai to Liverpool, the Premier League collectively spent £378million on Bundesliga players. The running total since 2018, in fact, stands at £1.26billion, marginally ahead of Ligue 1 over that shorter period of assessment.
Serie A was another market to catch Premier League eyes last summer, collecting over £300million in transfer fees, but of the big five European leagues, it remains the least favoured, with a 10-year return of £1.48bn.
For all that, France still stands apart in the overall spending table, having been the most popular place to shop in four of the last nine seasons. And the early moves of this summer, most notably Yoro, would indicate it is anything but a passing fad.
For all it is considered to lag behind rival leagues such as La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A, trailing in UEFA’s national coefficient rankings, Ligue 1 continues to act as Europe’s chief talent factory. In 19 of the past 20 years, according to the respected website Transfermarkt, there have been at least 10 players bought from Ligue 1 clubs. In 2022-23, that total was 22, with Premier League clubs spending more (£312million) on Ligue 1 players than Ligue 1 clubs did (£153m).
There have been some costly mistakes, such as Arsenal’s £72m deal to sign Nicolas Pepe — also from Lille — in 2019, but in recent seasons there has been a spate of success stories, with Gabriel (Arsenal), Bruno Guimaraes (Newcastle United), William Saliba (signed by Arsenal from St Etienne in 2018 but who spent the next three seasons on loan at Ligue 1 clubs) and former Lille player Amadou Onana, who swapped Everton for Aston Villa in a £50million move yesterday, all thriving.
Bruno Guimaraes has been a hit at Newcastle United (Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
The Athletic spoke to a number of figures working in football to gauge why Ligue 1 had become the shopping market of choice for English clubs. Those who responded asked to do so anonymously, either because they did not have permission to talk or because of commercial sensitivity, but their answers were revealing.
One senior Premier League figure pointed towards the physicality and athleticism of Ligue 1 and the potential for signings to be developed at pace under better coaching in England. A senior agent, meanwhile, cited the value for money that Ligue 1 has traditionally offered when measured up against data output. Players there tend to tick all sorts of boxes when impressing at a level that demands technical proficiency.
It is hard to pinpoint a precise moment when French football began to command so much attention from Premier League clubs.
Perhaps it was the impact of Eric Cantona, Manchester United’s swashbuckling No 7 from the 1990s, or David Ginola, the dazzling winger with Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur, but more likely it was the deeper marks left on Arsenal by their French connection under Arsene Wenger.
As well as Nicolas Anelka, Emmanuel Petit and Robert Pires, there was Sylvain Wiltord and — via brief spells in Serie A — Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira. Wenger found technically astute, physically strong players for prices far lower than their equivalents in English football. A total of 28 French players signed for Arsenal during Wenger’s 22 years in charge of Arsenal.
Others soon followed where he had led. Signing players from Ligue 1 — French or otherwise — made sense. Newcastle United signed five players from French clubs in 2012-13 alone, a season notable for becoming the first where Premier League clubs spent in excess of £100million on imports from a single league. It was the year Chelsea signed Eden Hazard from Lille, Olivier Giroud left Montpellier to join Arsenal, and Spurs landed Hugo Lloris from Lyon — three big deals but each strengthening the perceived pedigree of Ligue 1 targets.
Eden Hazard was a gamechanger when he signed for Chelsea (William West/AFP via Getty Images)
French football typically fields younger players, too, offering that potential and promise to suitors from overseas. UEFA’s annual report, The European Club Footballing Landscape, found that 39 per cent of all total domestic minutes played came from players aged 23 or under in France during the 2021-22 season. That made it the youngest profile of the big European leagues, way below the 26 per cent of the Premier League minutes played by under-24s and 20 per cent of La Liga, where spending from English clubs has tailed off in recent years.
Only the Netherlands’ Eredivisie, another league targeted heavily by English clubs in recent seasons, had a comfortably younger demographic than Ligue 1, with 47 per cent of minutes being played by under-24s. At the end of that assessment period covered in UEFA’s report, in fact, Premier League clubs spent £240m on players from the Dutch top flight in 2022-23, including Antony, Lisandro Martinez, Cody Gakpo and Noni Madueke.
The Premier League’s financial might grows harder for European rivals to fight against and it is Ligue 1, with its modern challenges over TV rights, that has become more vulnerable. A newly-struck domestic deal with DAZN and beIN Sports is said to be worth just £420million per season, a figure dwarfed by the Premier League’s total TV packages worth over £3bn annually. The rights for Ligue 1 since their peak in the 2016-20 cycle have actually declined in value.
Spanish, German and Italian clubs feel the same pressures, but nothing like those in France. Selling players has become a fundamental part of the business model and few do it better than Lille, who sold Yoro to Manchester United last week. The last five years have seen Lille, who finished fourth in Ligue 1 last season, sell £250million of players to Premier League clubs, including Sven Botman, Carlos Baleba, Onana, Gabriel and Pepe.
Lille sold Nicolas Pepe to Arsenal for £72m (Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images)
Lyon, another of French football’s bigger names, have been equally as adept. Their returns have also topped £200m since 2019, with the likes of Lucas Paqueta (to West Ham), Guimaraes (Newcastle) and Tanguy Ndombele (Tottenham) sold on for huge profits.
Ligue 1 still managed to post a net transfer spend of just under £30m in last summer’s transfer window, a feat beyond Serie A and La Liga, but that owed plenty to the lavish spending of Paris Saint-Germain, forever insulated by the backing of their Qatar Sports Investment ownership group.
PSG continue to be the only French club to make the top 10 of Deloitte’s Football Money League, a list of European clubs generating the greatest revenues. Marseille came 20th in the 2024 list, with Lyon 29th, but the rest of Ligue 1, especially those not benefiting from the extra revenue provided by European football, can see incomes transformed by a single sale. It is harder to say no to English overtures.
French football, as a result, has been at the heart of multi-club development plans. Chelsea’s owners BlueCo bought Strasbourg last year and Liverpool owners FSG were also in recent discussions to buy Bordeaux, a historically big club currently languishing in the second tier, before talks collapsed last week. The same reasons for targeting French players in the transfer market underpin the motivation for taking ownership of its clubs.
Little wonder, when so many have made the switch from Ligue 1 to Premier League. A total of 260 players were signed from the French top division between 2004 and 2024, a figure higher than Spain (245), Italy (192) and Germany (171).
The average cost of a signing from Ligue 1 in that time? Just under £9m.
The Premier League’s focus is broadening, with Germany’s Bundesliga gaining increased interest in the Covid-19 years, but Ligue 1 remains the most fertile ground to find a new recruit. Yoro is timely proof of that.
(Top photos: Leny Yoro, Gabriel and William Saliba; all Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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