Plenty of Northern Ireland players secured important moves this summer with several moving up a level, or dropping levels on loan for game time. The list below covers players who have been called up to the senior squad or under 21s so will not include a lot of promising young players who have recently made moves across the water.
As of the start of the 2025/26 season we have 4 players in the Premier League, the most for a long time. Conor Bradley has established himself as one of Liverpools’s right back options, but had had his opportunities hampered by niggling injuries. Trai Hume and Daniel Ballard achieved promotion with Sunderland and Justin Devenney broke into the Crystal Palace team at the back end of last season. Ballard scored in Sunderland’s opnening day win against West Ham and Devenney scored the decisive penalty in the Community Shield shoot-out against Liverpool.
The bulk of the NI squad is likely to be made up from players in the A-B grades with C grade players often getting called up due to a lack of options in certain positions (centre forward!), or injuries. There are a further 24 players in the B grade leagues.
There are 23 players in the C grade leagues. There are plenty of young players at this level, and at that age it is better for a lot of these players to be getting regular game time rather than sitting on the bench elsewhere. Premier League 2 is ranked in the D grade so it is not a bad thing for Premier League young players to spend time on loan in lower leagues, playing against experienced professional footballers, rather than talented players who are either not experienced enough, or physically ready for football at a high level.
The league of Ireland has been promoted to the D grade. It is quite difficult to place but the league has 2 clubs in the Europa Conference League (Shamrock Rovers finished 12th in the league phase last season, well ahead of Hearts who failed to progress) and some players from the premier League have been getting loan moves there. James Norris is on loan at Shelbourne from Liverpool and would not be considered a guaranteed starter. For reference, League 2 makes up the bulk of the D grade league players.
The bulk of the players in the E grade are in the Irish League, a lot of these players are young and have spent some time across the water. The quality at the top end of the Irish League has been increasing over the last few years. We didn’t get a side into the league phase of European competition this season, but we did have 2 clubs reach the 3rd round of the qualifying stages for the first time, with the other 2 clubs being unfortunate to be knocked out by picking up red cards. Most of the players in the E grade have been called up to the Under 21s.
The final portion of the list includes players below the professional level in England and those who are currently without a club. The most prominent player with no club is Jamal Lewis, but as he was a free agent before the transfer window closed he can still sign for a club.
You can see the beakdown below of how many players in each position are in each league.
Finally you can see the list of transfers of players at or above U21 level for Northern Ireland in the table below. Isaac price moved for £3 million and Ethan Galbraith moved for £2 million.
Which young players are you excited to see more of in the future? And which young players will make it onto this list for next year?
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