Freed Roger wrote: Does EFL have a quota % of English players per team?
Yes, but there are ways to get around them, they aren't super well defined.
Freed Roger wrote:Is there an easy primer on how players from different leagues (non-EFL) get moved? When Man U gets a player from a La Liga team, is it just a deal between the player and Man U, or is La Liga somehow bought out.?
You asked the right kind of question on a day where I have nothing to do at work. Strap yourself in. I'll go ahead an embolden and underline the short answer so you don't have to read the rest if you don't want to.
Clubs aren't franchises, they're a long way from their origins, but they're still technically independent clubs. Much like very early baseball teams (during roughly the same time period of like 1860-1900), they were formed around jobs, mostly. Arsenal for example were dudes who worked at the royal arsenal in london. When they (don't ask me who "they" are) formed the Football Association, which is now the governing body of English soccer, they codified the rules for the first time. Originally the game called football evolved out of PE classes at public schools. The school called Rugby invented a version of football where you could pick the ball up and pass it laterally or backwards. To distinguish the two main forms of football, everyone called that version Rugby, after the school where it was invented, and the other form of football (the one we know today) "Association Footbal." Aka soccer: a
SOCC(ER)iation. Eventually they just stopped calling it soccer when the sport of rugby evolved to be so different from football that they just called one football and the other rugby.
While all this evolution is happening, the game moved out of the school yard and into the aforementioned after work leagues. Crucial to the evolution of both baseball and soccer was the labor union movement. The labor unions gave us weekends and regular working hours. This allowed for more time that needed to be passed outside of work and the pastimes of modern sport exploded. The formation of leagues happened well after the establishment of clubs and international exhibitions (england v scotland was the first). So the football association created leagues but because the
clubs were formed independently and prior to the leagues they play in today and are not league franchises. They're totally independent entities so the fees associated with the transfer of a player's negotiation rights and contract are directly from club to club. So if Man United buys Christian Pulisic from Borussia Dortmund this summer for $60,000,000, my beloved son, Christian, gets 10% of that, his agent gets 10% of that 10% (10% is a common figure but actual percentages are part of the contract negotiations) and Borussia Dortmund gets the rest. They can pocket it or use it to reinvest in other players or their development infastructure.
So the reason I type all of that out isn't just because it's absolutely dead at work and I have nothing better to do. It's also to explain why player movement is so different. Like baseball, free agency came much later. They had their version of Curt Flood in a belgian dude named
Jean-Marc Bosman. Before that though, club owners had exclusive rights to players and could buy and sell their rights as they pleased. Unlike baseball though, there are many, many professional soccer leagues so the players didn't just move from team to team, they moved from league to league, often to different countries with different football associations. Real Madrid is Real Madrid because they found legendary players outside of Spain. Their scounting in Argentina specifically is like the original moneyball. They brought in players no one had ever heard of like Alfredo diStefano in the late 50's and created a dynasty that carries on today.
Because of those differences (not franchises, less ownership collusion and player movement to different leagues), player trades do happen, but very rarely. I'm sure there's been a more recent one, but the highest profile one that I can remember was when Inter Milan sent Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Barcelona for Samuel E'to and cash considerations. Those trades are rare and the easiest way to move players is to just sell their contract rights outright. I think another, less discussed reason they "sell" players rather than trade them is the graft that exists in the agent game. If you trade a player straight up, no money changes hands. If you sell a player for $100,000,000, then their agent pockets their 10% fee of that, which is considerable. Agents have a ton of sway, especially with the multitude of options for their clients. Rather than 32 franchises that can pay their client, there are literally hundreds of clubs that could pay them, so they have more options to maneuver and cut deals. Because of that they prefer those deals to involve money rather than exchanging players, so they can take their cut. Imagine if Scott Boras could bid hundreds of clubs against each other.