Squad retention: 2025-26

Tracking the league minutes lost by every Premier League and EFL team since last season

Update: This is now the final version, updated a few days after the window closed (to hopefully catch all the stragglers).

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There’s a donut chart for each team in the top four English divisions, with each segment representing a player who featured for them in the league last season. These are sized proportionally to how much they played, with faded-out segments indicating players who have left the club. The big number in the middle of each donut is the percentage of 2024-25 minutes racked up by players who are still there.

I’ve tweaked the aspect ratio of the templates a bit this season to make them fit a phone screen better, which hopefully makes them easier to read.

The data I’ve collected is available here if anyone’s interested - please let me know if you think I’ve missed something.

Also there’s another version of this post for the main European leagues here.

Premier League

As usual, the top flight has seen the lowest amount of churn overall. Fulham ended the window as the least-changed side overall, while Aston Villa were the only club in the Premier League and EFL who kept all of last season’s most-used XI together (thanks to the late collapse of Emiliano Martínez’s move to Man Utd).

Bournemouth saw the highest level of turnover, with four of their six most-used players moving on (Illia Zabarnyi. Milos Kerkez, Dean Huijsen and Kepa Arrizabalaga). It was the same story at Brentford after Yoanne Wissa’s deadline day exit: he joins Bryan Mbeumo, Mark Flekken and Christian Norgaard in leaving the club.

Championship

Moving down to the second tier, we can see that a bit more movement has taken place. There are only four teams that retained at least three-quarters of last season’s minutes, compared to 11 in the Premier League.

Sheffield Wednesday spent much of the summer as the division’s most-changed team - which was unsurprising given their off-field problems - but Southampton overtook them late on. In total the Saints have lost four of their five most-used players from last season.

Nobody in the EFL managed to keep all of their most-used XI, but four of the five teams that retained 10 were in the Championship: Bristol City, Charlton, Coventry and Wrexham.

League One

In the third tier, every team lost at least a quarter of last season’s minutes while 12 shed more than half. League One contains the two most-changed squads among the 92: the players departing Leyton Orient and Plymouth each accumulated around two-thirds of their clubs’ playing time in 2024-25.

What’s interesting about Leyton Orient is that they have predominantly lost their first-choice players: only one of their most-used seven remains and along with Luton they have lost eight of their top XI. While Northampton experienced a similarly high level of churn, their core is mostly intact: five of their most-used eight are still in the building.

Every club in the division bar one is set to be without at least two of their most-used XI, with the exception being Stevenage (who have only lost one).

League Two

Overall there has been slightly less churn in the fourth tier than the third. As with the division above, everyone has lost at least a quarter of last season’s minutes, but four more teams have held onto at least half.

Walsall have lost all of the five most-used players from last season’s promotion push, with three other teams shorn of their top three: Bristol Rovers, Cheltenham and Crewe. Crawley join the Saddlers in having only retained four of their most-used XI.