Training Compensation and the Solidarity Mechanism in the International Transfer of Football Players

The FIFA Framework, Its Interface with the FIGC Internal Organisational Rules (NOIF), and the Case Law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport

By Dr. Giovanni Del Buono

Abstract. This contribution reconstructs the system of training compensation and the solidarity mechanism applicable to the international transfer of football players, as governed by Articles 20 and 21 of the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP) and the corresponding Annexes 4 and 5. After outlining the operation of the two institutes and the role of the FIFA Clearing House, the analysis turns to the interface with the Italian legal order, examining the discipline set out in the FIGC’s Internal Organisational Rules (Norme Organizzative Interne, “NOIF”) following the 2021 sport reform (Legislative Decree 36/2021). A dedicated section addresses the case law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), with particular reference to the allocation of solidarity contribution in chains of successive transfers. The paper closes with a reflection on the systemic shortcomings of the model, in particular on the proportionality test under European Union law.

Sommario: 1. Introduction – 2. The FIFA Framework: Training Compensation and the Solidarity Mechanism – 3. The Interface with the Italian Legal Order: the NOIF after the Sport Reform – 4. The Case Law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport – 5. Systemic Shortcomings and Prospects for Reform – 6. Conclusions

1. Introduction

Contemporary professional football rests on a structural paradox: the economic value generated by an established player is, to a very large extent, the product of years of investment by clubs that, in the majority of cases, will never directly benefit from the sporting and economic return of that player once he reaches professional maturity elsewhere. Youth academies, football schools, amateur clubs and the youth sectors of professional clubs bear significant costs for the technical, physical and educational training of players during their developmental years, with no guarantee of a proportionate return should the player move, even on a free transfer, to another club at the end of, or during, his training pathway.

It is in response to this structural asymmetry that the international sports legal order developed, from the early 2000s onward, a system of economic compensation built around two distinct but complementary institutes: training compensation and the solidarity mechanism, governed respectively by Articles 20 and 21 of the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), with the related implementing provisions contained in Annexes 4 and 5. These institutes were historically conceived as a systemic response to the consequences of the Bosman ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which in 1995 liberalised the movement of out-of-contract professional players, depriving training clubs of the possibility of retaining a player’s registration or claiming an economic counterpart outside a regulatory framework specifically designed for that purpose.

This contribution sets out to reconstruct the operation of the two institutes within the FIFA regulatory framework, to analyse their interface with the internal discipline of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) — in particular with the Internal Organisational Rules (NOIF), substantially reformed following Legislative Decree 36/2021 — and to give an account of the most significant developments in the case law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, which over time have progressively eroded certain consolidated administrative practices of FIFA’s own justice bodies, in particular as regards the allocation of solidarity contribution among clubs involved in successive transfers of the same player.

2. The FIFA Framework: Training Compensation and the Solidarity Mechanism

Article 20 RSTP, together with Annexe 4, governs training compensation, which is owed in two exhaustive circumstances: when a player signs his first contract as a professional, or each time a professional is transferred internationally until the end of the season of his 23rd birthday. The obligation falls on the new club and arises irrespective of whether the transfer takes place during the term of the contract or upon its natural expiry. The calculation of training compensation is based on a tabular mechanism that divides clubs into four categories according to their sporting and economic level, to which correspond standard training costs predetermined by FIFA, UEFA and the other continental confederations. For the seasons between the ages of twelve and fifteen, the calculation is always made on the basis of category-four costs, regardless of the actual category of the training club, whereas for subsequent seasons the category of the engaging club applies.

Article 21 RSTP and the related Annexe 5 instead govern the solidarity mechanism, an institute conceptually distinct in that it is not tied to the player attaining professional status, but rather to every international transfer of a professional player carried out for consideration, regardless of his age. In this case, five per cent of any amount paid as transfer compensation — excluding training compensation — must be distributed by the engaging club to all clubs that contributed, between the player’s twelfth and twenty-third birthdays, to his training, according to predetermined percentages for each season. Unlike training compensation, the solidarity contribution is not subject to any age cap for its enforceability: it remains due even in relation to transfers of players over thirty, provided that at least part of their market value can still be traced back to a training pathway falling within the relevant seasons.

A development of considerable importance, introduced by the FIFA Council in October 2022, is the FIFA Clearing House, a regulated payment entity based in Paris, tasked with automating the entire process of identifying, calculating and distributing the sums owed as training compensation and solidarity contribution, through the creation of an Electronic Player Passport that reconstructs a player’s federative history from the age of twelve onward. The system, fully operational since 2024, aims to overcome the long-standing enforcement difficulties that characterised the previous regime, under which the burden of pursuing the claim fell entirely on training clubs, which often lacked the legal and administrative resources needed to assert it against foreign counterparties.

3. The Interface with the Italian Legal Order: the NOIF after the Sport Reform

The FIFA system described above applies, by its own express terms, exclusively to international transfers, namely those between clubs affiliated to different national federations. For transfers occurring entirely within Italian territory, the matter is instead governed autonomously by the FIGC’s Internal Organisational Rules (NOIF), which underwent a reform of systemic importance following the entry into force of Legislative Decree 36/2021 on sport reform and the consequent abolition of the so-called “sporting bond” (vincolo sportivo) for non-professional players.

The new regulatory framework identifies three distinct compensatory institutes. The registration premium (“premio di tesseramento”), governed by Article 96 NOIF, accrues whenever a player classified as a “young amateur” or “non-professional” registers with a new club of the National Amateur League (Lega Nazionale Dilettanti) or the Women’s Serie B Division, and remains due until the end of the season in which the player turns twenty; the relevant amount, calculated on the basis of the five seasons preceding the player’s sixteenth birthday, is apportioned among the various clubs that registered the player. The technical training premium (“premio di formazione tecnica”), provided for under Article 99 NOIF, instead arises upon the first biennial registration or upon execution of the player’s first sports employment contract, whether professional or amateur, and is apportioned proportionally among all clubs that contributed to the player’s training between the ages of ten and twenty-one, with a doubling mechanism for the shares due to amateur clubs where the first contract is signed with a professional club.

The third institute, of more recent origin, is the preparation indemnity (“indennità di preparazione”) under Article 99 quater NOIF, which operates within a considerably narrower scope: it is owed where a club executes the first professional contract with a player who, already bound to another club by an apprenticeship-style professional training contract, has declined an adequate contractual offer made by that club. In this scenario, unlike the other two institutes, fixed and particularly high amounts apply, as determined by federal tables, with no doubling mechanism. Scholars who have examined the provision have highlighted its nature as a safeguard clause protecting training investment, built — albeit with due differences in structure — on the indemnity logic underlying the FIFA system, while also flagging its potential tension with the principle of free professional movement for young athletes, especially regarding the proportionality of the tabular amounts to the training costs actually incurred by the clubs of origin.

4. The Case Law of the Court of Arbitration for Sport

Over the past two decades, CAS case law has played a fundamental role in refining the interpretation of the system set out in Articles 20 and 21 RSTP, addressing in particular issues that the regulatory text left unresolved or open to conflicting readings. A particularly significant interpretive question has concerned the allocation of solidarity contribution in cases of successive, chained transfers of the same player, specifically where a player, after being transferred definitively from one club to another, is subsequently transferred a second time during the same contractual period: in such a scenario, the question arose as to whether the obligation to pay the five per cent falls solely on the club that actually paid the price of the second transfer, or whether it must also be borne by the selling club in the first transaction.

On this specific point, CAS adopted, starting with CAS 2008/A/1544 (RCD Mallorca v. Al-Arabi) and confirmed in the subsequent CAS 2009/A/1773, a consistent interpretive line, based on a textual reading of Article 1 of Annexe 5 RSTP, according to which solidarity contribution must be calculated and deducted from every compensation amount paid in connection with an international transfer, regardless of whether it concerns the first or a subsequent transfer of the same player. This position stood, for a long time, in contrast with the administrative practice adopted by FIFA’s Dispute Resolution Chamber (DRC), which tended to limit the obligation to the engaging club in the most recent transaction alone. Only in more recent times has the Single Judge of the Players’ Status Committee aligned FIFA’s administrative practice with the CAS approach, expressly acknowledging the soundness of the interpretation adopted in arbitration — a significant development, testifying to the role of CAS as a genuine driver of harmonised interpretation within the system, capable of shaping over time even the practice of FIFA’s own internal justice bodies.

On the domestic front, Italian federal justice bodies — primarily the Economic Disputes Section of the National Federal Tribunal and the CONI Guarantee Board (Collegio di Garanzia dello Sport) — have repeatedly grappled with analogous interpretive questions in relation to Article 96 NOIF, both in its previous wording and in the version reformed by Official Communication No. 119 of 12 November 2020, ultimately characterising the preparation premium not as a wealth-transfer instrument between professional and amateur club categories, but as a mechanism of descending vertical solidarity, designed to compensate the training investment borne by economically less structured clubs for the benefit of those in higher categories.

5. Systemic Shortcomings and Prospects for Reform

Notwithstanding the evident solidaristic purpose underpinning it, the system set out in Articles 20 and 21 RSTP is not free of structural shortcomings, extensively discussed in the international scholarly literature. A first problematic aspect concerns the compatibility of the mechanism with European Union law on the free movement of workers, enshrined in Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. While it is true that the Court of Justice, already in the 2010 Bernard ruling, recognised the legitimacy in principle of an indemnity system designed to incentivise youth training, regarding it as a legitimate objective of general interest, it is equally true that such legitimacy remains conditional upon compliance with the proportionality principle between the amount of compensation claimed and the training costs actually incurred by the club — a principle that the rigidity of the FIFA tables, based on standard category costs rather than actual historical costs, sometimes struggles to satisfy in practice.

A second area of concern, raised in particular by the literature dealing with the revision of the solidarity framework, relates to the structural imbalance the current system produces between clubs of differing economic categories: the training cost tables, calibrated on the parameters of the wealthiest European leagues, tend to generate very high training compensation amounts when a player moves to a higher category club, creating a potentially disincentivising effect on the transfer of young talents toward smaller or extra-continental leagues, where the receiving clubs may lack the economic capacity to bear such charges — resulting, in some cases, in the paradoxical penalisation of precisely those growth pathways most favourable to the player from a sporting standpoint.

Against this background, the establishment of the FIFA Clearing House represents a significant step forward in terms of the effectiveness of the rights recognised under the system, resolving the long standing problem of enforcement faced by small training clubs, but it does not address the underlying shortcomings relating to proportionality and the calibration of amounts. At the domestic level, similar tensions arise in relation to Article 99 quater NOIF, where recent scholarship has flagged the need for an interpretation of the provision consistent with the principles expressed in EU case law following Bosman, in the sense of admitting the contestability of tabular amounts where disproportionate to the actual costs incurred by the training club, particularly in cases where the player spent the final years of his training at a Serie A club that was ultimately left without a return proportionate to the investment made.

6. Conclusions

More than twenty years after its introduction, the system of training compensation and the solidarity mechanism constitutes one of the most significant regulatory pillars of the entire international football sports order, insofar as it achieves a balance — however imperfect — between the need to protect clubs’ training investment and the principle of free professional movement of players established in the wake of the Bosman ruling. The interface between the FIFA regulatory level and the internal discipline of national federations, such as the Italian one, reveals a process of progressive substantive convergence, notwithstanding the persistence of distinct institutes and terminology, as evidenced by the recent reform of the NOIF following Legislative Decree 36/2021.

The analysis of CAS case law confirms the decisive role of that body in filling the interpretive gaps left by the regulatory text, shaping over time even the administrative practice of FIFA’s internal justice bodies, as demonstrated by the evolution concerning the allocation of solidarity contribution in chained transfers. Shortcomings of a systemic nature nonetheless remain, linked to the rigidity of the calculation tables and their resilience against the proportionality principle — shortcomings that will require, in the coming years, further regulatory and judicial refinement, also in light of the full implementation of the FIFA Clearing House and its effects on the effectiveness of training clubs’ rights, in particular those of smaller clubs that represent the vast majority of the amateur football fabric in Italy and across Europe.

Sources and References

Regulations and Legislation

FIFA, Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), January 2025 edition, Arts. 1, 20, 21 and Annexes 4 and 5.

FIFA Clearing House Regulations, approved by the FIFA Council on 22 October 2022, and accompanying Explanatory Notes.

FIGC, Internal Organisational Rules (NOIF), Title VII, Arts. 91-118, text updated to 8 January 2025, in particular Arts. 96, 99 and 99 quater.

FIGC, Official Communication No. 119 of 12 November 2020, amending Art. 96 NOIF.

Legislative Decree No. 36 of 28 February 2021, on the reform of sport, as subsequently amended.

Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), Art. 45.

Case Law

Court of Justice of the European Union, judgment of 15 December 1995, Case C-415/93, Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL v. Jean-Marc Bosman (“Bosman ruling”).

Court of Justice of the European Union, judgment of 16 March 2010, Case C-325/08, Olympique Lyonnais SASP v. Olivier Bernard and Newcastle United FC.

CAS 2008/A/1544, RCD Mallorca SAD v. FC Al-Arabi SC, award of 13 February 2009.

CAS 2009/A/1773, Borussia VfL 1900 Mönchengladbach GmbH v. Club Atlético Argentinos Juniors / Asociación del Fútbol Argentino.

FIFA Players’ Status Committee, Single Judge decisions, Case Nos. 09121350 (25 September 2012), 0415291 (22 April 2015) and subsequent decisions, on the allocation of solidarity contribution.

FIGC, National Federal Tribunal, Economic Disputes Section, and CONI Guarantee Board (Collegio di Garanzia dello Sport), decisions on Art. 96 NOIF (preparation/registration premium).

Scholarship

Various Authors, “Solidarity compensation framework in football revisited”, The International Sports Law Journal, Springer, 2018.

Various Authors, “A guide to training compensation and solidarity payments in football”, LawInSport.

Various Authors, “FIFA’s U-turn on solidarity contribution: regulations v. CAS jurisprudence”, European Leagues.

G. Nicolella, “L’art. 96 NOIF tra nuove modifiche e questioni interpretative”, 2020.

F. Raimondo, “Indennità di formazione calcio giovanile: quando è dovuta”, online contribution.

“L’indennità di preparazione nel calcio italiano alla luce della riforma dello sport”, Diritto.it.

F. Casarola, “Nascita ed evoluzione del sistema dei premi all’interno della FIGC”, series of in-depth articles.