Player passport
A 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.
The passport is administrative and easy to ignore right up to the moment it decides who gets paid. Training rewards are calculated from where a player was registered and when, so the passport is the document that establishes which clubs are owed training compensation and shares of a solidarity contribution.
For entitlements not governed by the FIFA Clearing House Regulations, the existing obligations remain unchanged: the registering association must provide the club a player is registered with a passport containing the relevant details.
An incomplete or contested passport is the usual reason a training reward claim stalls. The dispute is rarely about the percentage, which is fixed, and almost always about the dates.
Worked example
Two clubs claim the same season of a player’s registration between the ages of 15 and 16.
The percentages are not in question. What resolves it is the passport, which is why the dates on it are worth checking long before a transfer makes them expensive.
Source: FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, January 2026 edition, art. 7
Related terms
- 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.