Indian Football Records Highest Number Of Foreign Player Signings In Asia

Indian Football came in top on signing foreign players in 2017 amongst all the other Asian countries. Indian clubs successfully signed 158 players in the 2017-18 season. One of the major reasons which led to this was the addition of two teams in the ISL – Bengaluru FC and Jamshedpur FC and the fact that I-League, which runs parallelly to ISL, relaxed its rules and allowed clubs to register 6 foreign players in their squads instead of five.

China saw a drop of incoming players for the restriction imposed on the clubs as incoming transfer dropped 10.1% in 2017 while Thailand and Saudi Arabia have seen a huge increase in incoming transfer 26.5% and 32.9% respectively.
Following are the number of players signed and percentage increase or decrease of incoming transfer for all major Asian Countries in football for the 2017-18 season :-

India 158 (+32.8%)

Japan 152 (+18.8%)

China PR 143 (-10.1%)

Thailand 124 (+26.5%)

Saudi Arabia 113 (+32.9%)