Which league signed best: a comparative reading

Which league signed best? The question circulates with ready-made answers. The Premier League, because it invests the most. The Eredivisie, because it sells dear what it buys cheap. The Brasileirão, because it reveals talent. Each of these statements holds a grain of truth, and none withstands a closer look, because all of them conflate different dimensions. Investing heavily, profiting on resale and getting the signing right are distinct things.

Supporters, rightly, value what they see on the pitch: the best player, the title, Sunday's win. What sustains that result, the quality of the decision that brought the player in, stays backstage and is rarely measured. It is precisely that backstage that this comparative reading sets out to illuminate, with SigningLab's own reading of two complete seasons, 2024 and 2025. The edition covering the 2025/26 season will be published once the cycle closes.

What we are measuring

Comparing leagues requires, above all, defining what is being measured. Here we measure one objective variable: given what each club set out to do when signing, how much of that actually worked within the season. It is not volume of investment. It is not resale profit, which comes later and depends on factors beyond the pitch. It is the distance between what was expected of a signing and what it delivered, read with the same yardstick across every competition, signing by signing, so that a club in one league can be compared to a club in another without changing the criteria midway.

The first reading of the data sets the backdrop for everything else. Market hit rates fall within a relatively narrow band. The most efficient leagues sit close to four in ten successful signings, and the most difficult fall below one third. The market average hovers around 36%.

Market ranking by hit rate

The table below presents the clubs' own hit rate, with no model in the process, ordered by the 2025 season.

Read this way, the table shows that even the most efficient leagues get fewer than half of their signings right. This does not indicate incompetence on the part of the clubs. It is the mark of a market that decides at high cost, under transfer-window pressure and with little independent reading available at the moment of decision.

Why comparing league with league is difficult

Leagues do not play the same football. A shot count that looks excellent in a low-tempo competition may be merely reasonable in a fast-transition one. A center-back who dominates a physically less demanding championship may struggle in another. Comparing raw performance across leagues, without adjustment, is comparing temperatures measured on different scales.

That is why the exercise only makes sense when performance is adjusted for the context in which it was produced, and when what is assessed is the quality of the decision, not the reputation of the name. A club that invests heavily in an established player and sees him perform as expected has not necessarily signed better than a club that bet on a lightly valued athlete for a fraction of the cost and was rewarded. Signing efficiency rewards those who extract a return from the decision and convert it into performance, appreciation in value and ROI, not those who held the largest budget.

There is also the question of sample size. A window may go very well due to circumstantial variables. A single notable success cannot weigh more than a consistent record of good decisions. Any serious reading discounts this, so that the snapshot of one quarter is not mistaken for the health of a process. This is also where data analysis reduces uncertainty: it replaces the one-off impression with a stable yardstick applied to every decision.

Three highlights of this edition

Saudi Pro League (Saudi Arabia)

The Saudi league reached this level of prominence recently and already operates with a high degree of professionalization. Its market hit rate fell from 41.9% in 2024 to 35.7% in 2025, an expected movement in a market that rapidly expanded its volume of high-value signings. Institutional maturity follows the investment, and the Saudi case illustrates how structure and method gain weight as a league consolidates.

Championship (England, 2nd division)

The English second division shows a historically high market hit rate, at 45.5% in 2024, the highest of that season. The pattern has a structural explanation: the Championship signs with a more experienced, lower-risk profile, supported by mature data departments and a professionalized scouting culture. It is a clear example that signing well is an institutional capability, not a trait exclusive to elite leagues.

MLS (USA)

The MLS calls for a contextualized reading. It is a league that combines global athletes with its own rules for squad composition and budget, including mechanisms that limit how many high salaries each club can carry. The maturity of sporting departments is uneven across franchises, which widens the variance of outcomes. The market hit rate, from 31.7% in 2024 to 32.2% in 2025, should be read in light of these constraints, which make signing efficiency a challenge of management as much as of sporting assessment.

Market and the SigningLab Model

The comparison between the market's hit rate and that of the SigningLab Model sizes the room that exists for more efficient decisions. In 2025, the model outperformed the market in every league analyzed, averaging around 81%, against a market average of roughly 36%. The table below gathers the highlighted leagues.

No model is infallible, and that is not the point. The aim is to reduce uncertainty at the moment of decision and to raise the probability of getting it right. The largest jump appears precisely in the markets with the lowest market hit rate, such as Brazil, Argentina and the United States, where independent reading adds the most value to the clubs' decisions.

What the two seasons showed

Reading 2024 and 2025 this way, three patterns hold.

The first is that some leagues remain at the top through structure, not a fortunate window. The competitions that consistently appear among the most efficient combine professionalized scouting, project continuity and clarity about their own style of play. The Championship's recurring presence high in the table is the most instructive example: the top, in this reading, is almost always the top of a process.

The second is that money helps, but explains less than imagined. Investment matters, and clubs with greater margin can correct an expensive mistake without compromising the plan. But if it were only money, the biggest investor would always be the most efficient, and the data shows it is not. There are high-investment leagues that sign only moderately well, and modest-budget leagues that sign with notable discipline, because the margin for error is smaller.

The third is that football operates with a silent division of labor. There are leagues that develop and leagues that buy, and the efficiency of each must be read in light of the role it occupies. A revealing competition shows many successful bets, young players who break through and value that materializes. A buying competition shows consolidation successes, ready athletes who deliver the expected performance. Both can be efficient, in different ways, and ranking them without understanding this is unfair to both.

What does and does not belong here

It is worth marking the scope of the exercise. Pointing out that a league signed well is fair and useful. The recognition here is of the successes, read with the same yardstick and anchored in data.

The comparative reading of leagues serves a purpose larger than rewarding or embarrassing. It makes public a debate usually confined to closed rooms: that signing well is an institutional capability, trainable and measurable. The leagues that stood out across both seasons did so through the professionalization of their processes, repeated with rigor and independence from window pressure. It is less spectacular than the narrative tends to prefer. It is also, season after season, what separates those who sign well from those who merely sign, and what translates into performance, appreciation in value and return on investment.