Steve Finnan holds a unique status in English football as the only man to play in the National League, all four professional divisions and the Champions League.
His career started at Welling United in 1993, and the full-back worked his way up the pyramid via Birmingham City, Notts County and Fulham before a 2003 transfer to Liverpool, where he was part of the team that won the Champions League final in Istanbul two years later.
Antoine Semenyo is set to join Finnan in that exclusive club next month, when Manchester City play in the same competition’s round of 16.
Having been ineligible for the final two league-phase games after transferring from Bournemouth for £62.5million ($84.9m) last month, his debut in Europe’s premier club tournament will mark the completion of a journey that, like Finnan, did not look destined for glamour while he was scrapping to make his name in non-League as an 18-year-old Bristol City prospect on loan at fifth-tier neighbours Bath City in 2018.
The non-League to Premier League path is one that was also trodden by Jamie Vardy, who made the jump from Stocksbridge Park Steels and Halifax Town to Fleetwood Town and then Leicester City, though he missed out the Leagues Two and One steps.
In 2015, after Vardy broke the record for scoring in the most consecutive Premier League games for a Leicester side who went on to win that season’s title, it seemed to have dawned on football that there must be others plying their trade in non-League — the many divisions below the four fully professional leagues in the English pyramid — with the potential to rise to the very top.
Dan Burn (Darlington), Tyrone Mings (Yate Town and Chippenham Town), James Tarkowski (Maine Road), Maximilian Kilman (Welling and Maidenhead United) and Ethan Pinnock (Dulwich Hamlet) all learnt the principles of defending in non-League. The first three have gone on to become full England internationals, as Vardy did. (Finnan played 53 times for the Republic of Ireland, including at the 2002 World Cup, Semenyo is 32 appearances into his Ghana career and Pinnock has 26 Jamaica caps.)
Bournemouth midfielder Alex Scott, who received his first call-up from England head coach Thomas Tuchel in November, is another who started in non-League, with Guernsey. Jarred Bowen, Ollie Watkins and Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who will all hope to be on the plane to this year’s World Cup with Tuchel, began their goalscoring exploits in non-League, with Hereford United, Weston-super-Mare and Stalybridge Celtic, respectively.
Yet, despite all three of England’s current goalkeepers also spending time playing in the fifth-tier National League as teenagers, Semenyo’s story is still viewed as an outlier.
The Athletic has delved into the non-League ecosystem, analysing its evolution, its potential as a talent conveyor belt and its relationship with Premier League academies. We learnt that:
- Top Premier League teams are now scouting non-League games to try to spot the youngest talents early
- A dedicated non-League analytics company is working with clubs to identify the next Premier League stars
- Some scouts believe it may become more common for players to rise from non-League because of how sterile academy football is
- Some Category 1 academy players (the elite) are refusing to go on loan to non-League sides due to fear of failure.
“Everyone loves prodigy stories like Phil Foden, Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka, but it (graduating through a club’s academy to their first team) is actually the least common route to the Premier League,” says Peter Chadwick, founder of Non-League Gems, an analytics business used to scout players by more than two dozen teams, ranging from the Premier League to fourth-tier League Two.
“It’s such a small minority, but because they are on TV, it feels like that is the way, whereas it’s (more) typically the rocky road. The Semenyo pathway is going to become more common in the next five years.”
Jamie Vardy rose from non-League to win the Premier League with Leicester (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
If he sounds confident in that prediction, it is because he has the numbers to support it.
More than 100 players move from non-League to the three divisions of the EFL each season. That constant flow is why, in 2017, Chadwick turned ‘Non-League gems’, a common phrase he heard at that level, into a business.
He started filling his spare time as a volunteer scout for Barnet and posted on social media about who had caught his eye. Players and agents started messaging him, asking for their profile to be amplified. Soon, he played matchmaker, when he met a Hamilton Academical scout in 2018 and helped take Mickel Miller from Carshalton Athletic, in the eighth tier of English football, to the Scottish top flight. Now at Huddersfield Town of League One after spells with Rotherham United, Northampton Town and Plymouth Argyle, Miller made his 200th professional appearance this weekend.
“All the clubs spoke about the same things,” says Chadwick. “Not how they cross a ball or their first touch. Physical profile, age and stage, non-performance related stuff, like character and pathway.”
That is when the penny dropped.
Research had also shown Chadwick that performance metrics of elite junior players do not have a strong correlation with who turns out to be elite at senior level. There were late developers waiting to be unearthed.
Non-League Gems built a predictive modelling analytics tool that evaluates how closely players fit the trends of previously successful transfers to the professional tiers. Using its own methodology and data points, it provides insight into their profile, who they are as a person, where they have come from and what their story is.
From five arranged showcase games — those at the top of the algorithm are invited — more than 20 players have earned moves to EFL teams.
Queens Park Rangers, Crewe Alexandra and Barnsley were the beneficiaries last summer, while Raees Bangura-Williams, 21, was not rated in the top three but still moved from Tooting & Mitcham to Millwall, who are in the Championship’s play-off places so could be a Premier League club six months from now. Another two of those showcase matches are scheduled this year, and the expectation is that Non-League Gems will add to the current tally of 50 players it has helped into the EFL.
“We’re trying to predict who is the next multi-million-pound player from non-League,” says Chadwick, whose modus operandi is to “distinguish the vital few from the trivial many”.
Boreham Wood’s 22-year-old winger Abdul Abdulmalik, a former Millwall youth player, is being tipped for a higher level due to his explosive dribbling ability. Kyron Gordon, a 23-year-old ball-playing centre-back at Rochdale, after being released by Sheffield United in 2023, is one who could boomerang back up the levels. He has three goals and five assists in the National League this season.
York City striker Josh Stones, 22, is a player who has had a taste of football at a higher level, having previously earned a move from Guiseley to Wigan Athletic in 2022 before dropping back to the National League. Fylde striker Danny Ormerod is excelling this season — the 19-year-old has 19 goals in 25 league appearances.
There is nobody with more experience of giving non-League talents a leg up than Peterborough United’s director of football Barry Fry.
He was the man who plucked Finnan from Welling for Birmingham in 1995. “Best five grand I ever spent,” he says.
Non-League has been Fry’s favourite market to shop in for more than four decades. It is why he always carries a blank contract in the glove compartment of his car, just in case. “I’ve always found non-League players to have a wonderful attitude and drive — and there are plenty of talented boys waiting for an opportunity,” he says.
Fry sold Rob Johnson from Bedford to Luton Town in 1979, and he went on to help them win a League Cup final against Arsenal nine years later. He took Graeme Pearce, then a part-time painter and decorator playing for Hillingdon Borough, to Barnet and within four years he was lining up for Brighton & Hove Albion in an FA Cup final against Manchester United. Fry also gave a platform to Andy Clarke, who went from washing dishes in a hotel kitchen while playing for Islington St Mary’s to Barnet and then on to Wimbledon as part of their fabled Crazy Gang, after the club rose from non-League to the First Division and became an established Premier League side throughout the 1990s.
At Peterborough, he has helped propel the careers of Dwight Gayle (from Stansted, Dagenham & Redbridge and Bishop’s Stortford to scoring twice for Crystal Palace in the epic late fightback from three goals down to draw 3-3 that pretty much denied Liverpool the 2013-14 Premier League title) and Ivan Toney, who was signed from Northampton Town in League Two and has gone on to play for England and make a €40million move from Brentford to Saudi Arabia’s Al Ahli.
Their most recent non-League finds have included Ronnie Edwards (signed from Barnet at 17, sold to Southampton four years later for £3million), Ephron Mason-Clark (signed for £150,000, also from Barnet, and sold to Coventry City for £4.25m after 18 months) and Emmanuel Fernandez (picked up from Ramsgate in 2021 after a year out of the game and bought by Rangers last summer for £3m, with added sell-ons expected to come).
They all have something in common: physical profile.
“My assistant is very friendly with a Premier League head of performance and would pick his brains on what trends are coming down the line to our level in three to five years. Physicality is massive, ” says National League club Solihull Moors’ manager Chris Millington.
Most Premier League clubs still prefer to wait until players have moved to Leagues One or Two before assessing them as potential targets, due to how big a jump in levels it is. Semenyo would not have become the player he is now without spending six seasons in the Championship with Bristol City before his 2023 move to top-flight Bournemouth, but some are looking to get ahead of the curve.
“There have been top-four Premier League clubs at our games in recent weeks — and I checked if there were any of their players on loan at the opposition and there weren’t,” says Millington. “The players are here (in non-League), and after the success of Semenyo and others, no one wants to miss out now. They are trying to identify those players before the others, and the costs and competition go up.”
Chelsea signed Jayden Wareham from Woking in 2021 as an 18-year-old. He topped their under-23s’ goal chart but was released two years later and is now at Exeter City of League One. Most big clubs will not look at non-League players aged over 19 or 20 and if they do sign them early they bring them into their under-21 sides, which means they then lose the element of crucial seasoning in the first-team game.
“Academies are producing the best-ever players technically, tactically and physically, but the one thing they are struggling to do is give them the most valuable part, which is exposure to senior football at a young age,” Millington says. “That experience of what it means to fight for three points, maintain standards when they’re not playing, the gruelling schedule, the pressure… You can only learn from doing it. It accelerates their development far quicker than an under-21 games programme ever will.”
Which brings us back to the Premier League.
Top-flight clubs want to find the next big thing, but non-League is also emerging as a viable tool in developing their academy talents.
The biggest reason for that is a change to the rules this season that allows players to join a non-League side on a 28-day loan for the first time. Prior to that, there was no such flexibility. They had to commit to a loan club for several months, from one transfer window to the next.
“It has opened up more doors, but I don’t think many are walking through it yet,” says one Premier League loans manager, who asked to speak anonymously to protect their position.
Why? ‘First-loan nervousness’ is one of the explanations — a condition that has come to afflict many decision-makers, players and agents as they plot how to bridge the gap from academy to first team. Clubs are wary of sending players to a low level early in their career, in case the experience damages them and affects their trajectory. Some youngsters see a cliff edge, not a springboard.
“They look down their nose at it,” says another top-tier loans manager, also speaking anonymously for the same reason. “They believe they’re going to get to the Premier League, so, while you don’t want to say, ‘You need to prepare for non-League’ at 13 or 14, you also don’t want to not say anything, as the reality is most of them will have to go there to make a career.”
Status and ego both play a part. Clubs traditionally want to keep the very best of their academy’s youngsters in the building, so they can properly assess them in their own environment. The player is excited to be there, and so are their parents and the agent.
“It requires a large dose of humility to accept they are being sent to an old-school club to see if they can handle the rough and tumble,” says one loans manager.
“Parents, players and agents want to be associated with stars, so when they are leaving an academy, the ego kicks in. We had a chance for some boys to go on a loan to the National League. Two thought we were taking the p**s out of them. The other didn’t perceive the level to be high enough.
“He saw it as, ‘What happens if I fail (at the side he was going to be sent to)? I’m f***ed’. Yeah, maybe you are, but you’re an academy player, and I don’t expect you to fail. Your job is to perform. Do you back yourself? Or are you going to drift to nothing and be happy that this is the best contract of your life?”
Anxiety is perhaps understandable, given that 98 per cent of players who earn an academy scholarship at age 16 are not playing in any of the top five tiers of English football by 18.
The main reason so many academy players struggle to transition to senior football is that they are deemed to be too sheltered. One loans manager says he recently watched one of his lads head the ball more in a single half of non-League football than he did in two years for his parent club’s under-21 side.
The gap between academy and first-team football is a difficult one to bridge (Nick Taylor/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
In short, academy football is not competitive enough and some players at that level are overly pampered.
This chimes with the analysis Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola provided earlier this month that the absence of B teams in the modern game means players grow up not competing sufficiently, and the game loses a lot of talent as a result.
The various loans managers and scouts The Athletic consulted on the topic all agreed that academy football does not adequately prepare players for the step up to the Premier League, bar the exceptional few such as Arsenal’s 16-year-old Max Dowman. The problem of how to bridge the gap between Premier League 2 (an under-21s competition) and the Premier League remains.
“Our job is to provide a more rounded product for our first team, but to do that, they need to go out and play,” says another loans manager. “The level you want to send them to probably requires video evidence to convince a club and manager that they will cope (in senior football), so you might need to send them to a lower level at an age you’re not totally comfortable with.”
In an attempt to limit the shock factor, one Premier League club have started taking their 14- and 15-year-old players to watch non-League games, to show them that the level is better than they may presume — and to highlight that some of those in action for those lower-level sides once stood in their shoes.
Others send their young players on work experience to a non-League club, where they train but also have to wash their own kit, arrange their own travel and sort their own meals before they are allowed away on their first true loan. One club have even taken it upon themselves to create a readiness assessment of scholars, to establish whether their youngsters know how to speak to a first-team manager, handle their own finances and cook for themselves before deciding if they are up to being loaned out.
It is no wonder so many talents exiting academies are being passed on the way down by those talents who, once rougher around the edges, are now bestowed with the battle-hardened knowledge and momentum of a non-League grounding.