FIFA ID
A FIFA ID is the globally unique identifier assigned to each club, association, player and football agent by the FIFA Connect ID Service.
Names are a poor key. Players share them, transliterate differently between associations, and change them. Clubs merge, rename and refound. Any system built on matching names eventually merges two people or splits one.
The FIFA ID exists to stop that. It is issued centrally, it is unique worldwide, and the Connect ID Service flags duplicates when the same entity is registered twice. Every association’s electronic player registration system must be integrated with it and must assign an ID to every player from the age of 12.
That age is not arbitrary. It is where the registration history that training rewards are calculated from begins, so the identifier and the record it hangs on start together.
Agents have one too, alongside the licence number. For an agency, the practical value is that a client’s history can be assembled without anyone matching spellings by hand.
Worked example
Two players with the same name and birth year, registered in different associations.
Under a name-matching system somebody eventually has to work out which career belongs to which person, usually during a transfer. Under FIFA IDs the question does not arise.
Related terms
- 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.
- Transfer matching systemTMS is the system every international transfer passes through, in which both clubs enter the deal separately and the transfer only proceeds if the two entries match.
- 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.