The English Football League (EFL) is one of the UK’s best breeding grounds for talented young footballers. EFL clubs are typically keen to give academy prospects first-team opportunities earlier than those in the top-flight, allowing them to gain valuable experience and accelerate their development. 

Many of those EFL young stars will be popular transfer targets in Football Manager 2023. Here, we’ve worked with our Research team to produce a definitive list of the best.

While Football Manager 2023 won’t be fully released until November 8th, we know that many of you are already thinking long and hard about where your journey will start. You’ll be thinking about how you can make the most of the new Recruitment tools and when you’ll get to experience those big European nights under the lights for the first time. 

One thing that will have changed from FM22 are the names at the top of most Wonderkid shopping lists. Many of those that have caught our eyes in recent years have also impressed real-life scouts and managers, so much so that they secured big moves over the summer months.  

MaddFM looks at 10 of our favourite FM22 Wonderkids that have new homes in FM23. Which of these will you be managing this year? 

We’ve all got stories of the Wonderkids that we discovered in Football Manager long before they’d made an impact in real-life. Those players that not only lift your team to new heights on the game but let you drop that ever so slightly smug ‘oh him, yeah I signed him on FM a couple of years ago’ into the group chat. It’s even more satisfying when the player has flown completely under the radar so that you seem like some kind of Wonderkid Nostradamus.

To help get you up to speed on the latest crop of emerging talent, we’ve put together a Matchday squad of the brightest young stars, including one player you definitely won’t have discovered in FM21 so far…