Patrick Agyemang of Derby County celebrates scoring his team’s first goal with teammates during the Sky Bet Championship match between Derby County and West Bromwich Albion at Pride Park on January 23 in Derby, England. (Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images)
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At the behest of commissioner Don Garber, Major League Soccer has tried to position itself as a selling league for the better part of a decade.
Perhaps nowhere is that effort bearing more succulent fruit than with this year’s exports to the EFL Championship.
In total, MLS clubs have sold five players to clubs in the English second-tier – a league almost universally recognized as the best second division in the world – for a total of about $23.6 million, according to data from the Transfermartk website. That’s the most money recouped from any foreign division during the 2025-2026 calendar, though there were a higher volume of sales to Mexico and Brazil’s top flight.
And it’s hard to point to any of those five players and say they’ve been a disappointment to their new clubs.
Agyemang, Adilson and Ali Ahmed All Firing
Former Charlotte FC striker Agyemang began life in England recovering from sports hernia surgery. But he has scored five times – good for 38% of Derby County’s total output – in all competitions since Dec. 15, and with eight league goals total is now two goals shy of Carlton Morris for the team lead.
Another former Charlotte player, center back Adilson Malanda, has moved to Middlesbrough and become an immediate fixture on the back line of a team trying to secure automatic promotion to the Premier League.
Former Vancouver wide man Ali Ahmed has four goal contributions in his first three games for Norwich City, a stretch that has coincided with a desperately needed three-game winning streak to pull the Canaries out of the relegation places for now.
Montreal export George Campbell and longtime Philadelphia fullback Kai Wagner have both become integrated quickly into the rearguard of West Bromwich Albion, and Birmingham City, respectively.
2025-26 MLS to EFL Championship Transfers
Patrick Agyemang | Charlotte FC to Derby County | $8.3 million
Adilson Malanda | Charlotte FC to Middlesbrough | $8.3 million
Kai Wagner | Philadelphia Union to Birmingham City | $3 million
Ali Ahmed | Vancouver Whitecaps to Norwich City | $2.4 million
George Campbell | CF Montreal to West Bromwich Albion | $1.6 million
Note: Data via Transfermarkt, using currency exchange rates from Jan. 27
If you take any five transfers at random, it’s rare that you’ll see such early and consistent success across all five. And given that this set of five transactions all involves motion from from one league to another, it’s almost certain that other EFL clubs will try to replicate that success in the next couple of transfer cycles.
Not All Good News
But for MLS, these succeses are a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, given the amount of money coming into clubs from these sales – an average of more than $5 million per deal – it’s a dream scenario in terms of setting up future business.
On the other, Garber has also spoken about trying to transition the league from the current 2.0 version – one of consistent growth from its startup phase – to a 3.0 iteration of full maturity where it vies to be one of the best leagues on earth. And while one part of that vision was the recently announced schedule flip coming in 2027, another part of that equation is doing a better job of retaining the league’s elite young talent.
It’s one thing to lose such players to the Premier League, the Serie A or the German Bundesliga. But for MLS to go where it wants over the next decade or two, it can no longer be a division whose clubs struggle to match offers from England’s second tier.
All but one of the five players who made the EFL Championship move are age 25 or younger. And while individual player salaries aren’t publicly disclosed in England, it’s almost certain that all five players received a meaningful pay raise as a result of their move. The case of Agyemang is particularly stark, with his wages increasing by roughly 10-fold from his rookie deal with Charlotte.
Under the most-recent MLS collective bargaining agreement – which expires at the end of 2027 – players don’t reach free agency until they’ve acquired four seasons of MLS service time and are out of contract. In theory, that sounds reasonable compared to other North American leagues, where the path is similarly lengthy and sometimes moreso. In practice, it creates a scenario where other rival domestic clubs have less bandwidth to swoop in and for a blossoming young player than mid-tier foreign sides.