FIFA's solidarity mechanism: how the club that trained you gets paid on every transfer

In September 2025, when Manchester United sold Antony to Real Betis for €25 million, keeping a right to 50% of any future resale of the player, a slice of that money became owed to an unexpected creditor: São Paulo FC, the club where the Brazilian forward spent part of his youth and made his professional debut before moving to Europe. The mechanism that makes this happen automatically, on practically every international transfer in world football, is called FIFA's solidarity mechanism.

What the solidarity mechanism is

The rule sits in Article 21 of FIFA's Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP): whenever a professional is transferred before his contract ends, a slice of the fee paid goes to every club that contributed to his training. The annex spelling out the calculation is direct: 5% of any compensation paid in a transfer, not counting training compensation, which is a separate thing, is withheld and distributed by the buying club as a solidarity contribution to the clubs involved in his training and education over the years.

There is no limit on how many times this can repeat over a player's career, nor an age cap for receiving it: the mechanism can be triggered again with every new international transfer, even once a player is over 30, as long as the training being rewarded happened between his 12th and 23rd birthdays.

The calculation follows a method known as "95+5": any declared transfer fee is treated by FIFA's system as equal to 95% of the total, with the 5% solidarity share already automatically withheld before the money even changes hands.

How the 5% is split by age

Not every year of training counts the same. Of the total 5%, each year between a player's 12th and 15th birthdays earns the training club 0.25% of the transfer fee; each year between his 16th and 23rd birthdays earns double, 0.5%. Adding the first four years (1%) to the following eight (4%) comes to exactly the 5% set out in the rule.

Training compensation: the other, rarer mechanism

Training compensation differs from solidarity in two key ways: first, it doesn't depend on there being a transfer fee at all, it's due the moment a player signs his first professional contract, even with no sale involved; second, it only applies to international transfers, never within the same country. It is paid (1) when a player registers as a professional for the first time and (2) on every international transfer until the end of the calendar year of his 23rd birthday.

There are three situations where training compensation is not owed: when the former club terminates the player's contract without just cause; when the player moves to a category 4 club, the lowest tier; and when a professional reacquires amateur status.

The four club categories, and what each is worth

FIFA sorts training clubs into four categories, and the training compensation figure varies by confederation and by the category of the club that did the training. The figures below are updated by FIFA at the end of every calendar year.

One rule keeps the bill from inflating for very young players: for the first four years of training, between ages 12 and 15, the calculation always uses the cost of a category 4 club, the cheapest tier, no matter the actual category of the club that did the training.

The money that reached small clubs

In 2023, SC Malesherbois, an amateur club in rural France, received €159,990 in solidarity payments from FIFA for training, between the ages of 12 and 15, a player who had just signed for a major European club. According to FIFA itself, the figure was larger than the club's entire annual budget. Malesherbois's president summed up the practical effect of the automated system: the club didn't have to claim anything, the payment simply arrived.

In the United States, youth club PA Classics was entitled to at least $548,000 from Christian Pulisic's move from Borussia Dortmund to Chelsea, for $73.1 million, in 2019, but publicly announced it would not seek the payment.

In Brazil, São Paulo FC is entitled to around R$5.5 million from Antony's move to Real Betis in 2025, based on a 3.5% solidarity rate tied to the period the club trained the forward.

The Clearing House: why this actually started working

For decades, collecting these payments meant every training club had to track its former players' careers around the world by itself, and, by FIFA's own figures, around 80% of the money owed through the solidarity mechanism simply went unpaid, because nobody claimed it. That changed with the creation of the FIFA Clearing House, in November 2022: the Transfer Matching System (TMS) now automatically identifies, on every international transfer, which clubs are entitled to a payment, calculates the amount, and processes it, without the training club having to do anything.

How it works inside a single country

FIFA's regulations govern transfers between clubs of different federations, and also a transfer within one country when the training club is affiliated to another federation; for all other domestic transfers, each national federation sets its own rule, with the only requirement being that some system exists to reward training clubs. In Brazil, that domestic rate reaches 6%, higher than the 5% international rate, split among clubs that trained the player between the ages of 12 and 19.

The American youth-club fight that ended up in court

Collection isn't always peaceful. In June 2015, three American youth clubs, Crossfire Premier, Dallas Texans SC and Sockers FC Chicago, filed formal complaints with FIFA's Dispute Resolution Chamber, seeking a combined $480,500 in training compensation and solidarity payments tied to the careers of DeAndre Yedlin, Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley. The clubs later took the case to US federal court against the MLS players' union and the players themselves, a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by a federal judge.

The case still protecting the system in European courts

The legal foundation underpinning this kind of compensation inside the European Union dates to 2010, in the Bernard case, where the Court of Justice of the EU ruled that a training-compensation scheme is compatible with the free movement of workers, as long as it is proportionate and tied to real, documentable training costs, never to arbitrary figures. That precedent is still alive: the same court cited it again, by analogy, in October 2024, when ruling on footballer Lassana Diarra's case against FIFA, more than a decade after Bernard was decided.

It is this set of rules, built so that nobody would train a player for free for the rest of the world to profit from, that sends the money from a multimillion-euro sale in Europe, years later, back to São Paulo FC's academy or to an amateur club in rural France.