League tier of English-eligible players in 2024/25 and 2025/26
5 moved up a tier and 3 moved down between 2024/25 and 2025/26; the top-9 leagues held 38 players, from 37.
How to read it: the left column is last season’s rung for every player in the pool, the right column this season’s; each ribbon is the players who went from one to the other, its width their number. Green ribbons climb, orange come down, teal are new to the pool, grey are no longer in a covered league. Hover a ribbon for the names.
Premier League
111→96
191 809 → 167 437 minutes
stepping-stone league
4→0
7 920 → 0 minutes
top-9 league
37→38
57 574 → 65 004 minutes
other covered league
3→10
3 164 → 13 770 minutes
Players of the pool in each tier, 2024/25 → 2025/26, with the minutes they played there: 155 players last season, 144 this season, outfield players with at least 450 minutes, one row per player (the destinations page counts one row per position group, so a player with two positions counts twice there).
Moved up a tier 5
Jarell QuansahENG-Premier League → GER-Bundesliga
Jamie VardyENG-Premier League → ITA-Serie A
Marcus RashfordENG-Premier League → ESP-La Liga
Trent Alexander-ArnoldENG-Premier League → ESP-La Liga
Jack HarrisonENG-Premier League → ITA-Serie A
Moved down a tier 3
Jordan HendersonNED-Eredivisie → ENG-Premier League
Conor GallagherESP-La Liga → ENG-Premier League
Jamie GittensGER-Bundesliga → ENG-Premier League
New to the pool 39
Luke ShawENG-Premier League
Jayden BogleENG-Premier League
Jaidon AnthonyENG-Premier League
Kiernan Dewsbury-HallENG-Premier League
Tyler MortonFRA-Ligue 1
Tyrhys DolanESP-La Liga
and 33 more
No longer in a covered league 50
Levi ColwillENG-Premier League
Jonjoe KennyGER-2. Bundesliga
Taylor Harwood-BellisENG-Premier League
Marc BolaTUR-Süper Lig
Leif DavisENG-Premier League
Derry MurkinGER-2. Bundesliga
and 44 more
“No longer in a covered league” means exactly that: retired, injured for the season, or playing in a league this report does not fetch. The data cannot tell those apart and this page does not guess. “New to the pool” likewise mixes debutants with players returning from leagues outside the set.
How we know
As an analytics question In numbers: every English-eligible player with at least 450 minutes in 2024/25 or 2025/26, placed on the pathway’s tier ladder in each season, and the move between the two.
What we did We took each player’s main league last season and this season, sorted the leagues into the four tiers the atlas uses everywhere — home league, other covered league, stepping stone (the German second tier), top nine — and counted who moved up, who moved down, who appeared and who is no longer in any league we can see.
Sources Season feature tables for both seasons; a player’s league is the one he played most minutes in; 450-minute floor in a season to count as present in it; rungs as defined in the pathways chapter.
What this means
Between the two seasons 5 players moved up a tier, 3 moved down, 39 are new to the pool and 50 are no longer in a covered league. These are counts of one season-to-season change; without earlier seasons there is no baseline for how many moves a typical year shows, so the balance of ups and downs is not a trend.
What this does not show
Why a player moved, whether a move down was a loan or an injury, and players outside the covered leagues.
Data snapshot: FBref tables fetched 14 September 2026, snapshot commit ef7dbd4 · code: src/season_changes.py · status: exploratory, not pre-registered · all limitations
Explore the data
Trajectories
Trajectories 2024/25 → 2025/26 (English-eligible, ≥ 900 minutes in both seasons)
Season-over-season change in goals + assists per 90, league-adjusted. A move counts as up or down beyond ± 0.05; for scale, the standard deviation of this one-season change across the 73 English-eligible players with both seasons is 0.10. Everything inside the band is listed as stable.
Ruben Loftus-Cheek
Curtis Jones
Adam Smith
Reece James