FIFA Clearing House
The FIFA Clearing House is the entity that sits between clubs as an intermediary for certain payments in the transfer system, rather than letting them settle those amounts directly.
Training rewards used to be a matter of one club invoicing another and hoping. A large share never reached the small clubs it was designed for, because claiming it meant knowing you were owed, knowing who owed you, and being willing to pursue a bigger club for it.
The Clearing House is the answer to that. Certain payments in the transfer system are routed through it rather than settled club to club, and it works from the registration history rather than from a claim someone remembered to make.
The regulations reflect this by carving out cases governed by the Clearing House Regulations from the ordinary process, both in the notification duty that follows an international transfer and in the solidarity mechanism itself.
For an agency, the practical point is that the money moves on a process rather than on a phone call, and that the process reads the registration record. Errors in that record become errors in payment.
Worked example
A youth club is owed a share of solidarity on a transfer it has no way of knowing about.
Under the direct model that money is very likely never claimed. Under the Clearing House the calculation does not depend on the club noticing.
Related terms
- 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 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.
- Electronic player passportThe 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.