A working guide for FIFA licensed agents

On 16 July 2026 the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on FIFA’s agent regulations (FFAR). Some rules are gone, or cannot survive in the form they were written. Most of the rest go back to a German court to be argued out again.

If you hold a FIFA licence, that changes who you’re allowed to approach, whether you keep money you’ve already earned, and who gets to see what you charge.

One thing to be clear about before you read on. Nobody yet knows what the rulebook will look like when this settles. FIFA’s chief legal officer has invited stakeholders to help rewrite it, and a revised FFAR is expected alongside the new transfer system in January 2027.

The Court didn’t tear up the rules. It accepted that FIFA is entitled to regulate this profession — licences, exams, even a limit on your commission.

What it refused to do was rubber-stamp the detail. Almost everything went back to national judges with an instruction: check whether each rule is genuinely needed, or whether it’s just squeezing agents.

So FIFA is still in charge, but on a leash. And the leash is held by ordinary courts.

1. The rule that stopped you approaching a signed player

FFAR ARTICLE 16(1)(B) AND (C)

The old rule gave you a two-month window. If a player or coach was already signed to another agent, you could only approach him in the last two months of that agreement — and you couldn’t sign him outside that window either, even if he came to you.

The Court struck it down in the strongest terms available. It held the rule was so obviously anti-competitive that nobody has to prove what harm it caused. The damage is simply assumed.

The reason is that the rule only pointed one way. It never applied to the agent who was already there. He could re-sign his player any day of the year, while footballer sat and waited. That handed whoever got there first a protected position — and that, the Court said, rigs the market.

FIFA tried three defences and lost all three. It argued the rule gave everyone a clear negotiating period; the Court said you can’t claim that when incumbent agents are exempt from it. It argued the rule made the market work better; the Court said a rule that ties one side’s hands and not the other’s improves nothing. And it argued the rule protected agent-client contracts; the Court said that’s a commercial interest, and commercial interests don’t override your right to work across borders.

What this means for you as agent:

The Court answers questions of European law. It does not rewrite FIFA’s rulebook. The rule sits in the FFAR until FIFA amends it, the German court still has to apply the ruling to the facts in front of it, and your own national association may have written the same restriction into its own regulations. Outside Europe, a competition law argument may not even be available to you in front of a FIFA or CAS panel.

With that said:

The rule has become very hard to defend. A restriction the Court has described in these terms is unlikely to survive in its current form, and FIFA knows it. That is a meaningful shift in your position — but it is a shift in the balance of risk, not a guarantee you will not be challenged.

Check your own association’s rulebook before you act on it. What binds you day to day could be the national regulations, not only the FFAR itself. Whether your association has suspended, kept or quietly ignored its version of this rule is a question worth answering before you make a call, not afterwards.

Expect more competition for your own clients. If this restriction goes, it goes for everyone. Agencies with more staff and more appetite may come for your best client earlier in the cycle than they would have before. I would plan for that rather than hope it doesn’t happen.

Exclusivity is doing less work than it used to. However this lands, the direction of travel is away from rules that hold a client in place for you. That puts more weight on the relationship, the results, and on notice and termination terms that are properly drafted rather than borrowed from a template.

One warning, whatever happens to the FIFA rule. Ordinary contract law is untouched by this judgment. Talking to a player is one thing. Actively pushing him to walk away from a contract he is still bound by is another, and it can cost you damages in most countries. Nothing in this ruling changes that.

2. Losing the unpaid part of your fee when a player moves again

FFAR ARTICLE 14(12)(A)

Picture the deal. You negotiate a three-year contract for a player. Your fee is paid out across those three years. In year two he moves to another club — a move you had nothing to do with, for a player you no longer represent.

Under the rule, whatever hadn’t yet fallen due to you simply stopped.

The Court called that arbitrary. The only thing that triggers the loss is the player moving before his contract expires. Whether you were involved in the new transfer, whether you still act for him, whether you did anything wrong at all — none of it comes into it. You lose part of a fee you had already earned, because of something someone else did. The Court reached for its own reasoning in the Diarra case to say so, which is a strong signal about how it views mechanisms of this kind.

But give FIFA its due on the aim. The Court accepted there is a real problem here. Without some rule of this sort, an agent has an incentive to push a client into terminating early, or into signing short contracts, so that a fresh fee falls due each time. That is a legitimate thing for a governing body to worry about. The objection was not to the aim. It was that the rule swept in agents who had done none of that.

Two limits worth knowing. The Court’s conclusion rests on reading “not yet due” in the natural way, and it left the final word on that reading to the German court. And only the first half of the rule was condemned. The second half — where the player walks out on his contract without good reason while you still represent him — was left standing.

What this means for you as agent:

The same caution applies as above. The rule sits in the FFAR until FIFA amends it, the German court still has to apply the ruling, and your national association may have its own version.

But there is a more useful point here, and it has nothing to do with waiting for FIFA.

Your entitlement to a fee is governed by your contract, not by the FFAR. If your representation agreement simply repeats FIFA’s wording, you have imported a rule the Court has now called arbitrary. If instead it says plainly that your fee is earned on signature and remains payable for the life of the contract the player signed, you are relying on ordinary contract law — and ordinary contract law is not what is being fought over in Mainz.

Expect a narrower rule to come back. Given how the Court framed the problem, a redrafted version tying the loss of a fee to your actual involvement in the new transfer would stand a far better chance. I would draft on that assumption rather than on the assumption that nothing replaces it.

3. What FIFA is allowed to publish about you

FFAR ARTICLE 19

Article 19 required FIFA to make five things available: your name and contact details; who you represent, whether exclusively, and when the agreement ends; the services you provide to each client; every sanction imposed on an agent or a client; and the details of every transaction you’re involved in, including what you were paid.

Two of those five failed. Both on data protection grounds.

Your fees. Data protection law says you may only collect and share what you genuinely need. The Court held that “the details of all transactions involving agents” is drawn so widely that the scope of what would actually be published isn’t properly bounded. That is what defeated it.

Sanctions. Read this one carefully, because it is not the clean win it looks like. The Court accepted that naming a sanctioned agent can be entirely legitimate — it forms part of the punishment, it helps restore confidence in the market, and it lets people who may have been harmed find out. What failed was publishing everything: every sanction, however minor, with no cut-off once time has passed and no regard to whether anyone was actually damaged.

And notice what survived. The first three limbs were upheld. Your name, your contacts, who you represent, whether that representation is exclusive and when it expires — all of that stays visible to clubs, leagues, players, coaches and rival agents.

One point that is widely misread

You will see it argued that publishing agents’ fees to their competitors would have encouraged price signalling and tacit collusion, and that the ruling protects the market from that.

The Court considered exactly that argument and did not accept it on these facts. It reasoned that the information concerns transactions already completed, so it reveals little about anyone’s future strategy; that it would be shared among people already active on these markets, so it isn’t confidential in the way competition law means; and that while price transparency can encourage collusion on a highly concentrated market, on a dispersed one it can just as easily sharpen competition. The agent market did not appear to it to be concentrated.

So the conclusion was that publishing your fees was not, in itself, anti-competitive. It fell because of data protection, not antitrust.

What this means for you as agent:

For now, your commercial terms are not going onto a platform for your competitors to read. That is worth having.

I would not treat it as permanent. The Court did not say fee transparency is unlawful in principle. It said this version was too broad. It even pointed to what a lawful version might look like — anonymised figures, such as how prices are spread around an average — which would give the market useful information without exposing what you personally charged. A revised FFAR could reasonably go there.

Expect sanctions publication to return in narrower form, limited by seriousness and by how long ago the conduct occurred.

Treat confidentiality as a contract term, not a regulatory outcome. If it matters to you that a club or a player doesn’t disclose your fee, say so in the agreement. Relying on FIFA’s rulebook to keep your numbers private is relying on something that is uncertain.

4. Right now, there is nowhere to take a claim

FFAR ARTICLES 20 AND 21 — SUSPENDED BY FIFA

FIFA built a forum for agents to bring claims: the Agents Chamber. Unpaid commission, broken agreements and free to use.

It was switched off in December 2023 and has not come back on. And perhaps will be back on.

So picture the situation. A club owes you your commission and stops answering your messages. You reach for your contract and it says any dispute goes to the FIFA Agents Chamber. You are knocking on a locked door.

What this means for you as agent:

Your representation agreement needs a second address. Name a fallback — an arbitration body, or your national association’s own tribunal — so that wherever the FIFA rules land, you always have somewhere to go. This is the single most common gap I see in agent contracts, and it costs people real money.

What I’d do as a football agent:

1. Read your own standard contract properly. If you haven’t touched it since 2023, it is built around rules that no longer exist.
2. Add a fallback forum. Never rely on the Agents Chamber alone. Pick a forum.
3. Fix the fee clause. Earned on signing, payable in full, whatever the player does next.
4. Rethink client retention. Exclusivity no longer protects you the way it did. Notice periods, service standards and genuine relationships now do that work.
5. Leave room to change. These rules will move again before the new transfer system starts in January 2027. A short clause letting you update terms saves you rewriting everything later.

If you work in Asia

The European ruling doesn’t apply directly in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines or anywhere else in the AFC. But two things reach you regardless.

The suspension was worldwide. When FIFA switched these rules off, it switched them off everywhere — not only in Europe.

The rules here were copied, then frozen. Most associations in this region wrote FIFA’s agent rules into their own book in 2023, then stopped when FIFA hit pause. Very few have said clearly which parts are on and which are off.

That leaves a genuine gap. If a club here refuses to pay you, it often isn’t obvious who is supposed to hear your case — and that uncertainty is worth far more to the club than it is to you. Find the answer before you need it, not on the day you do.

The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Article numbers follow the FFAR as set out in the Court’s judgment of 16 July 2026, Case C-209/23 (RRC Sports v FIFA). If you’d like your representation agreements reviewed against where the rules now stand, get in touch.