Author’s Note: I started work on this article about 7 months ago and shelved it for a while. But the start of the current CPL season got me thinking about the topic again so I wanted to put the article out there. As such, it does not include any data from the 2024 CPL season. Despite this, I think the points made within stand.

When the Canadian Premier League launched in 2019, nobody really knew what sort of level the league would be at. This was evident in some of the foreign signings made in that first season. Sometimes, to amuse myself, I will still go back and watch Cavalry’s 8-0 thrashing of Valour in which Belgian goalkeeper Mathias Jannssens and English centre-back Adam Mitter turned in an absolute disaster class. To try and combat some of the poor foreign recruitment, In 2020 the Canadian Premier League partnered with data and analytics company 21st Group to improve their recruitment of foreign players.

A centralised scouting agency for the league is not the most romantic notion but it’s not like some of the CPL teams didn’t need the help. The aims of the partnership with 21st Group were, to quote one of their managing directors, to give CPL teams “a competitive edge in terms of a global pool of talent that it can recruit from… that will increase the league’s overall quality of play, and entertainment value for the fans, as well as help teams get more bang for the buck with from their internationals.” The current status of this relationship isn’t 100% clear.

I have seen tweets that suggest it has ended or at least 21st group is less influential than they once were but language on the group’s website seems to suggest the relationship is ongoing. But the point is that the CPL clearly decided that something needed to change in terms of their club’s foreign recruitment after that first season. Four seasons (three normal ones) later I thought it might be a good time to review the state of the CPL’s foreign recruitment. In this article, I will look at what has gone well, and what has not, as well as speculate about where things might go in the future. 

Methodology: 

This article looks at signings that took up an international slot from 2020 to the present. The main measure of “success” I will be using is the percentage of available minutes played. You would hope that if you are importing a player from abroad rather than signing a Canadian, that player would at least be good enough to get on the pitch regularly. This measure is obviously not perfect. It assumes that CPL managers always make optimal decisions about who to put on the field which is not necessarily true. But for the most part, I think we can trust that anyone who has risen to become a head coach in the CPL knows a lot about soccer and is a pretty good judge of talent. 

I only counted players who played at least 90 minutes for their respective clubs (i.e., teams and the league aren’t getting dinged for players who were signed but weren’t able to take the field because of a visa issue or something). I also did my best to account for injuries, though injury data on Transfermarkt is not always accurate. 

I also want to be clear that this is only a snapshot of things so far. The CPL is still a young league and the number of signings being analyzed is still relatively small. I still think enough trends have emerged that we can start to make some informed inferences but things could change significantly in a year or two. 

Where do the Best Players Come From?

This is the question that got me interested in this subject. I wanted to understand what markets the CPL was most effectively mining for talent. A few leagues stand out as having been particularly good hunting grounds. 

Players signed from the Australian A-League have played the highest percentage of minutes available to them at a whopping 72%. Five A-League players have made the switch to CPL, mostly younger players in search of regular minutes. Each of them has established themselves as a regular for their respective teams, even Gael Sandoval who returned to Mexico played quite a lot when he was available.

Next up are the various leagues that make up the Spanish 3rd tier. Eight players, almost all of whom played for Atletico Ottawa, have played 56% of the minutes available to them. These players are not as pivotal to their teams as the Australian imports have been but the Spanish 3rd tier seems to be a reliable source of solid CPL players. 

Rounding out the top three is the Dutch second tier. Six players have played 52% of the minutes available to them. Almost all of these players were very young when they arrived and needed some time to adapt. So the 52% figure probably sells their success a bit short as many of them are now more regular players than when they first arrived. 

To get a bigger sample size I also looked at some leagues which naturally grouped together. The most successful “group” of leagues was the second and 3rd tiers of Sweden and Norway. Players signed from these leagues played 60% of the minutes available to them. 

Another common hunting ground, with mixed results, was European first divisions ranked 30 or lower in the UEFA coefficient. Players from these leagues played about 50% of the minutes available to them. Not a lot of smash hits but these leagues are at least reasonable suppliers of CPL-level talent. 

The natural question to ask is if there is any underlying reason why good CPL players come from these leagues. I think there is. Australia, Spain, and the Netherlands are all developed football nations with relatively few professional opportunities domestically. Australia only has one professional division, which has 11 Australian clubs and 1 from New Zealand. That isn’t a lot of professional spots and even fewer regular starting roles. So players like Jesse Daley and Pacifique Nyongabire can have a hard time breaking in. 

The problem is not quite as extreme in Spain or the Netherlands but both only have two divisions with professional status, despite being powerhouse footballing nations. I also think it’s notable that both of these nations have reserve teams directly integrated into their pyramid. So you could be a perfectly good Eerste Divisie player but if your Eredivisie parent club doesn’t feel you have the potential to play for them then you can find yourself cut loose. 

The strong performance of players signed from the lower leagues of Sweden and Norway is a little bit harder to parse. But it might just be the case that those are solid leagues in countries where a large percentage of the population speaks English and the climate is cold. So the players have a relatively high level of ability and acclimating to life in Canada is relatively easier.

What Markets Have Been Less Successful?

In addition to talking about the successes of CPL foreign recruitment, we should also talk about which markets have not produced many successful signings so far. 

First up is English Non-League football, that is to say, the leagues that are below League 2 in the English pyramid. Signings from these leagues have played 42% of the minutes available to them. Certainly not the worst set of outcomes but nothing to write home about. I see two possible reasons for these slightly below-average results. Firstly, the CPL, with the possible exception of a few particularly wealthy clubs, is a higher level than the English non-league. Not every player is going to successfully make that step up, even if they were performing well previously. On the other side of things, England has no shortage of professional opportunities and is flush with cash. Players in England earn considerably more than players in comparable leagues globally. So nobody is going to make the move to the CPL if things are going really well for them in England. 

Even less successful have been signings from comparable CONCACAF leagues. This includes American and Mexican leagues below MLS and Liga MX and all of the Non-Caribbean leagues. Signings from these leagues have only played 36% of the minutes available to them. At first, this seems counter-intuitive as the level of CPL is comparable to these leagues. But, I think the answer is pretty simple, money. CPL salaries are a bit of a touchy subject but if you look at the flow of transfers between CPL and USL, you see a lot more prime-age CPL players making the jump to USL than the other way around. In Central America, talent distribution tends to be more stratified. CPL, in the here and now, does not offer the salaries or the cache to compete with a Saprissa or an Olimpia for top Central American players. That could certainly change in the future, but right now CPL teams are mostly left picking at the scraps. 

But the worst performing source of foreign talent has been foreign youth leagues. Players signed from these leagues have played only 31% of the minutes available to them. This is pretty understandable as many of these players will not have been ready for regular first-team football right away. But it does underscore that these players represent a substantial risk. 

Overall Effectiveness of the CPL’s Foreign Recruitment:

Zooming out a little bit, how effective has the CPL recruitment of foreign players as a whole since that first season? To analyse this we will again look at the percentage of available minutes played as well as where the players who have left the league went. 

All of the foreign players signed since 2020 have played 50% of the minutes available to them. About 46% of the individual players have played at least 50% of the minutes available to them and about 74% played at least 30% of the minutes available to them. 

Of foreign players who have left the league, only one player, Alejandro Diaz was sold for a fee and over a quarter of them went back to the exact level they were playing at before. About 17% are not currently in professional football but have not officially retired. Establishing the exact levels of every league is always a challenge but most of the rest have made what can fairly be described as lateral moves.

This all leads me to conclude what I had sensed to be true going into this article. The CPL’s clubs are doing a pretty good job of identifying players with the requisite quality to play in the CPL. But they are struggling to find players with the capacity to exceed that level.

This outcome is not particularly surprising, given CPL’s financial clout and position in global football. It is hard to find gems when you are picking up players on free transfers. The spread of data and coverage of smaller leagues in some ways makes scouting easier than ever but it also means that it’s harder to find unknown gems because everybody else has that information as well. This is especially true in Europe where most of the CPL foreign signings come from. 

Where do we go from here?

I think the obvious thing for CPL clubs to do is to lean into what has worked for them. That is providing opportunities to players who do not have sufficient professional opportunities in their own countries. With that in mind, here are some markets I would consider targeting.

New Zealand National League and Australian State Leagues:

Since players who were struggling for time in the A-League have been so effective, why not try to beat the A-League to the punch on emerging talent? Both the clubs operating in the New Zealand National League and the Australian leagues act as feeders for the A-League. But the relatively small number of professional sports means these leagues always have a few players who are comically more talented than their peers. Joint CPL Golden Boot winners in 2023 Myer Bevan and Ollie Bassett were both examples of this sort of thing when they played in New Zealand.

There has only been one NPL player signed, Luis Lawrie-Lattanzio, who only played 562 minutes for York United; But he did manage 2 goals and an assist in that time. Obviously, I may be a little biased, as I currently live in New Zealand, but I think there are many more Bassets to be found.

League of Ireland:

The League of Ireland is notorious as a place where it’s hard to earn a living as a professional player. However, Brexit has meant that the best Irish talent can’t be syphoned off by British clubs as efficiently. This has raised the level of the competition and seen an increase in players who have played in the league making successful moves abroad. Now, is the next Evan Ferguson going to come play for Forge? Probably not. But could the next Promise Omochere (google him) play in the CPL? I think he probably could. There have been two signings from the LOI, one of which was Daryl Fordyce which hardly counts as he already had a significant track record in Canada. The other was Jamie Siaj who is a striker with 0 goals. Not a great start, I grant you, but with a bigger sample size I think things would work out better. 

Ghanaian Premier League:

It’s pretty clear that if you want to see a big return on player investments then Africa is the place to go. But finding the right market can be a bit tricky. Leagues in Northern Africa and South Africa pay players a lot of money and it’s easy to see CPL having similar problems to their shopping in Central America. But smaller leagues that produce talent like Zambia and Cote D’Ivoire are a lot harder to scout and don’t mesh very well with the CPL’s preference for leagues that can be data scouted. Ghana, I think, is the perfect compromise for the CPL. There’s at least some data coverage and players from that league have a relatively high rate of success when moving abroad.

(Image Credits: Canadian Premier League)