What does the transfer market look like below the top division?

The stated fee is a top-division phenomenon

The sample is players arriving from another league whose previous league is on record. Of those arrivals, 6.1 per cent carried a stated fee and another 10.7 per cent were recorded as undisclosed, which mixes fees nobody published with moves where no fee information was recorded at all. Split by the division the player joined, the stated fee collapses.

Below the second division a stated fee almost never appears on the record: seven arrivals in a thousand. Part of that collapse is how the record is kept, since lower tier moves more often carry no fee information at all, so read 0.7 per cent as a floor rather than a measurement of every fee paid.

For scale, FIFA puts the share of international transfers with a fee at 17.7 per cent in 2025. Our first division figure of 17.5 per cent is consistent in size with it, but the two count different moves. Ours covers arrivals into first divisions from another league, at home or abroad, with loan returns excluded. FIFA's covers international moves at every level, with returns from loan counted.

Free transfers are not the fringe, they are the market

65.2 per cent of arrivals from another league were free transfers. In some leagues it is far higher, and in others far lower.

Two things stand out. Malta signed 262 players from other leagues across three seasons, and a stated fee appears for none of them. And Serie B is a loan economy: nearly half its intake is borrowed, which is a completely different recruitment problem from everyone else on the list.

Recruitment runs along a few well worn roads

Leagues sign from many places, but most of their intake comes from very few. Across every league with 50 or more arrivals in the sample, the median league took 60.5 per cent of its arrivals from just three source leagues.

The roads are narrow and well worn:

• Cyprus takes from its own second division (60 moves), the Greek top flight (43), the Greek second division (17), Serbia (14) and Turkiye (13).
• Malta takes from its own Challenge League (58), Portugal's third tier (11), Serbia's second tier (10), Lithuania (7) and Nigeria (6).
• Greece takes from its own second division (83), Cyprus (30), Argentina (29), Portugal (25) and Italy (22).
• The A-League takes from the New South Wales NPL (34), New Zealand's National League North (20), the Victoria NPL (15), Scotland (9), and Greece and Japan (8 each).

That last line is worth sitting with. The A-League's three biggest sources are two of Australia's own state leagues and New Zealand. It is not recruiting the world. It is recruiting its own backyard.

The arrivals left out of the sample

A further 82,612 arrivals have no previous league on record. That is 30.1 per cent of all 274,019 arrivals into senior leagues in the archive once loan returns are set aside, a count that also includes the moves within a league that the sample excludes. Some are players registered as joining without a club; others came from clubs whose league the record does not identify.

They are counted separately rather than folded in, so none of the shares in this report includes them.

What moves

Method

The sample is drawn from Transfermarkt transfer records for the 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons, crawled in August 2026: every arrival into a senior league in that crawl, with youth competitions left out.

An arrival is counted only when the player came from a different league and that league is on record. Excluded throughout: loan returns; moves within the same league (71,624); arrivals from a youth or reserve competition (6,273); and arrivals with no previous league on record (82,612), which are described separately above. That leaves 113,510 arrivals. About two thirds of them are moves between two leagues of the same country, and a third are international.

Fees are read from Transfermarkt's fee column. A stated fee means an amount is shown. Undisclosed means the column shows "?" or "-", so it covers both fees nobody published and moves where no fee information was recorded. Free and loan are as Transfermarkt records them. Percentages are of arrivals into that league or tier.

Position shares group Transfermarkt's position labels into eight positions, so generic labels such as "Defender" are assigned by our own grouping. Transfermarkt is edited by its users and places very different competitions in its lower tiers. The sample does not refresh itself, so every figure here is a three season picture as at August 2026 rather than a live one.