Professional v Amateur football players – ARTICLE 2 RSTP ⚽️
According to the FIFA regulations, players participating in organised football are either amateurs or professionals. No other status shall be recognised.
Article 2.2 defines a professional as “a player who has a written contract with a club and is paid more for his footballing activity than the expenses he effectively incurs”. All other players are considered to be amateurs. Expenses may include things like transportation to and from training, feeding, hotel expenses and training equipment.
As art. 2 is binding at national level, Member Associations are not allowed to modify these categories from what they are in the Regulations. However, those au fait with the English system will know that there are other categories such as the “scholar” status and the similar categories of “aspirant” or “stagiaire” in France, “giovani di serie” in Italy, or “Vertragsamateure” in Germany, but interestingly in any dispute under the FIFA regulations, none of these hybrid categories will be recognised by FIFA or the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) 🤔.
There are a number of reasons why it’s important to know the status of a player, but the big one for me is because the acquisition of a specific status can activate the obligation to pay training rewards. We have discussed the Solidarity Mechanism in previous posts, but there is also Training Compensation (“TC”). In summary, TC is paid to the clubs that were involved in the player’s training and education, when he signs his first professional contract. It is therefore important to know when the player’s status changed from amateur to professional to establish who needs to pay and who needs to be paid.
I was once invited to give evidence at a CAS hearing where, inter alia, there was a dispute over the status of a Nigerian player when he was registered with a Danish club 🇩🇰. Some African football administrators assume that a player only signs a professional contract when he travels to “the abroad” aka Europe 😅. In this case, the player was actually transferred to Europe as a professional.
Something important to note is that it doesn’t matter whether the club registers the player as an amateur or a professional, once the player passes the art. 2.2 “test”, he is a professional. I have seen FIFA rulings involving players registered as amateurs, but where it was concluded that they were professionals because they had signed written contracts with their clubs and the amount they received to play football exceeded their expenses; basically the players passed the art. 2.2 test, and were deemed to have been professionals, notwithstanding their registration.
I like to keep my posts simple without too much “legal jargon”, but if anyone is interested in some case law..👇🏾
CAS 2014/A/3610 CS Grevenmacher v. Sport Clube Vila Real; CAS 2006/A/1177 Aston Villa F.C. v. B.93 Copenhagen
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