Record-breaking 18 senior Portuguese players in the English Premier League

There have never been as many Portuguese players plying their trade in the English Premier League as there are right now.

With more Portuguese players added in the January window, the number of Portuguese players in England’s top flight has now surpassed the total from last campaign, which was the previously set record tally.

In the 2018-19 season, there were 16 Portuguese players across the Premier League - 7 of which were at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

However, after Helder Costa, Ivan Cavaleiro, Adrien Silva and Rafael Camacho departed the league, and with Xande Silva no longer currently amongst the first-team squad for West Ham United, the tally of Portuguese players in the league this season compared to last was lower until the winter window closed, with those five players only being replaced with the quartet of Joao Cancelo, Pedro Neto, Bruno Jordao and Goncalo Cardoso in the summer.

Now, however, three more additions in the English top flight has taken the tally of Portuguese players up to 18, with Gedson Fernandes joining Spurs, Bruno Fernandes making the highly anticipated move to Manchester United, and Daniel Podence joining the Portuguese contingent at Wolves.

A look back at Portuguese players in the English Premier League

Throwback to the inaugral Premier League season. 1992-93. A new era of English football begins, twenty two teams plying their trade in the pinnacle of a rebranded English game. And across the board, not a single Portuguese footballer was involved - not one.

Indeed, for the first three seasons of the new-look top flight, no Portuguese player entered a Premier League field. None were even registered to a Premier League team.

It seems a far cry away now, of course, but that was the norm at time. After all, Portugal were little more than footballing minnows back then, even as recent as the early to mid 1990s. Seeing a top Portuguese player plying their trade in a foreign country at that time was a rare sight to behold.

Of the 29 players to represent Portugal in 1993, for example, only 4 played their football outside of Portugal. In 1994, that number remained the same, all four foreign-based internationals working in Italy. In 1995, the number of internationals based abroad increased slightly, but again came to the modest total of six.

It was a different time, with very different expectations for Portuguese football as a whole. The hopes and aspirations of the nation weren’t what they are today; just to qualify for a major tournament would have been deemed a great success for the nation, let alone win it.

The thought of having Portuguese players en masse playing in any major league across the world was fanciful, and Portuguese football wasn’t what it once was, or what it was soon to become.

This graph illustrates just that, showing how many Portuguese internationals were based abroad compared to how many were based in Portugal’s domestic league per year since 1993:

The graph is spectacular in its ability to show the sheer evolution of Portuguese football over the last 16 years. While in 1993 there were just 4 foreign-based internationals to represent Portugal - compared to the 24 domestic players to play for the Selecao - since 2005, there has been no year where there have been more Portuguese-based players playing for Portugal than players plying their trade abroad.

It’s a stark, fascinating contrast between the 1990s/early 2000s and the last 15 years. As the number of domestic players playing for Portugal has dropped rapidly - from 24 in 1993 to just the 6 in 2019 - the number of players abroad has increased virtually year on year, from 4 in 1993 to 20 in 2019, peaking at an astonishing 33 in 2018.

That trend is reflected in the number of Portuguese players playing in the Premier League year-on-year too. Portugal had to wait until 1996 to see their first player make the move to the English Premier League, when Dani completed his transfer to Harry Redknapp’s West Ham.

That number increased to three the following year, and steadily rose to 9 by 2006, and peaked at an impressive 15 by 2008-09 in the aftermath of the success Jose Mourinho had at Chelsea with his strong Portuguese contingent, as you can see in the graph below.

This number dropped off again in the subsequent years, settling at around 7 to 8 between 2010 and 2017. Not quite as high as the 15 in 2009, but still considerably higher than that in the early Premier League era, and the benchmark for Portuguese talent in the most prestigious league in the world was set.

We have reached an entirely new level now, though, with the promotion of Wolverhampton Wanderers to the English top flight having a significant effect on the Portuguese representation in the Premier League.

And Wolves’ subsequent success has only triggered more Portuguese talent to be imported, both at the West Midlands club and across the length and breadth of the league.