Electronic player passport
Also called EPP
The electronic player passport is the consolidated record of where a player has been registered across their career, from the calendar year of their 12th birthday onwards.
The EPP holds, for each registration, the member association, the player’s status as amateur or professional, whether the registration was permanent or on loan, and the club, including that club’s training category at the time.
It exists to answer one question reliably: who trained this player, when, and for how long. That is the question training compensation and the solidarity mechanism both turn on, and before the EPP it was answered by assembling paper player passports from associations that did not always agree with each other.
The starting point is the calendar year of the player’s 12th birthday, which lines up with the period training rewards are calculated over.
For an agency the EPP is the reference version of a client’s registration history. It is worth knowing what it says before a negotiation rather than after, because it is what the other side’s calculation will be built on.
Worked example
A club queries a solidarity claim on the basis that the player was only there on loan.
The EPP records the nature of each registration, so whether that is true is a matter of record rather than of correspondence.
Related terms
- Player passportA player passport is the record a registering association provides to a club, setting out the clubs a player has been registered with and the relevant details of those registrations.
- Training compensationTraining compensation is paid to the clubs that trained a player when they first register as a professional, and on every subsequent transfer until the end of the calendar year of their 23rd birthday.
- Solidarity mechanismThe solidarity mechanism reserves 5% of any compensation paid when a professional transfers before their contract expires, distributed among every club that trained them between the calendar years of their 12th and 23rd birthdays.
- Training rewardsTraining rewards is the collective name in the regulations for the two mechanisms that compensate clubs for developing young players: training compensation and the solidarity mechanism.