Brazil tops global export market according to latest CIES study
May 14 – Brazil continues to dominate football’s global export market, but France is closing fast. That’s according to figures released by the CIES Football Observatory, which show 1,455 Brazilians currently playing abroad – the most represented expatriate nationality across the 135 worldwide professional leagues analysed.
France now sits second with 1,275 players overseas – and has recorded the largest overall growth since 2021, adding 332 expatriates in just five years. World champions Argentina rank third with 1,016 players competing outside their domestic system.
The figures underline how football’s talent pipeline is becoming increasingly globalised, with player migration continuing to accelerate across almost every major exporting nation.
According to the study, only nine of the world’s top 50 exporting countries have seen a decline in the number of players abroad since 2021.
Portugal recorded a 66% increase in footballers playing overseas during the period, while Spain and Nigeria both posted growth of around 60%.
France’s rise is perhaps the most striking – the country continues to produce elite-level talent at a remarkable rate, with French players now scattered across virtually every major football market.
Brazil, meanwhile, retains its title as football’s great exporter. Portuguese football is the key landing spot for Brazilian talent – largely thanks to the linguistic and cultural links between the two countries – while the sheer volume of players leaving Brazil shows simultaneously the scale of the country’s talent production and the economic pull of overseas leagues.
Argentina’s position in third further reinforces South America’s enduring role as one of global football’s primary talent suppliers, particularly following the commercial and sporting uplift generated by the country’s 2022 World Cup triumph – though there is a notable inability to keep a hold of their top players.
Not every nation is moving upwards, however. Serbia recorded the sharpest decline among major exporters, with the number of Serbian players abroad falling by 53 since 2021.
The broader trend, though, is unmistakable: football’s labour market is becoming more international with every passing season. Success for the majority is increasingly measured by how effectively they export talent to the rest of the world.
Contact the writer of this story, Harry Ewing, at
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
Related Posts
Former FC Barcelona star Gerard Pique fined for insider trading
Infantino pal Trump says he wouldn’t pay $1000+ to watch the US team open World Cup 2026
