FIFA Capped Agents' Fees, and Courts Across Europe Suspended It

What FIFA was trying to fix

Football’s agent market had four features FIFA regarded as problems.

No licensing. Between 2015 and 2023 there was effectively no barrier to acting as an agent, so anyone could represent a professional footballer.

Uncapped commissions, in a market where the money is enormous and the client is frequently a teenager.

Unclear payment. Fees were often paid by the buying club rather than by the player being represented — so the person the agent worked for was not the person paying them.

Multi-representation. The same agent could act for the player, the selling club and the buying club in a single transaction, which is a conflict of interest so complete it barely needs describing.

The Football Agent Regulations, approved in December 2022, addressed all four: licensing from 9 January 2023, and the conduct provisions — the fee cap, the client-pays principle and the multi-representation restrictions — from 1 October 2023.

The one that got litigated

Almost all the opposition concentrated on the fee cap.

That is not because the other provisions are uncontroversial. It is because a cap on what one group of businesses may charge, agreed among the buyers of their services, is a competition law problem in a way that licensing is not.

Licensing can be justified as a quality standard. A price cap is a restraint on price, and competition law regards horizontal agreements about price with the deepest suspicion available to it.

Two legal systems, two answers

In July 2023, the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed a challenge and found the regulations compliant with EU and Swiss competition law.

Then the national courts.

Germany: the District Court of Dortmund granted a preliminary injunction in May 2023 prohibiting FIFA from enforcing the fee-cap provisions, upheld on appeal at Düsseldorf in March 2024.

England: in November 2023, an FA Rule K tribunal declared that implementing the fee cap and pro-rata payment rules domestically would breach the Competition Act 1998.

EU: a German court referred to the Court of Justice the question of whether the regulations comply with Article 101 on cartels, Article 102 on abuse of dominance and Article 56 on freedom to provide services.

So the sport’s own supreme tribunal approved the rules, and courts applying ordinary commercial law suspended the central one.

Which is the recurring lesson

That divergence is not a scandal. It is what happens when two systems ask different questions.

CAS asks whether a rule is a proportionate means of pursuing a legitimate sporting objective — a test sport’s own institutions have developed and which is relatively forgiving of restraints justified by the specificities of sport.

A competition court asks whether an agreement between undertakings restricts competition, and if so whether the justification is sufficient. It is not asking whether football’s aims are good.

The Bosman ruling is the same story: a transfer system that football considered essential and its own bodies had upheld for decades, dismantled by a court applying ordinary free-movement law. Rule 40 is the Olympic version.

The pattern is consistent enough to state as a rule of thumb: a sports body’s own tribunals cannot tell you whether its rules are lawful, because they are not applying the law that will eventually be brought to bear.

Where it leaves things

Most of the framework stands. Licensing is in force, and it has restored a barrier to entry the sport removed in 2015 and quickly regretted.

The fee cap is suspended or unenforceable in several jurisdictions, and its future rests on the outstanding rulings.

That is an awkward outcome rather than a clean defeat. A regulation that applies globally cannot easily survive being unenforceable in the two or three markets where most of the money moves, and FIFA’s options narrow to abandoning the cap, redesigning it to survive competition scrutiny, or accepting a regime that binds agents in some countries and not others.

For the market these rules govern, see football transfer rules and the squad cost ratio.