Purely amateur club
A purely amateur club is one with no legal, financial or de facto links to a professional club, and which either may only register amateurs, has no registered professionals, or has registered none in the previous three years.
Read the test in order, because the first limb does the work. Before anything about players, the club must have no legal, financial or de facto links to a professional club. A feeder side with the same owners is not a purely amateur club whatever its squad looks like.
The words "de facto" are doing something deliberate. The test is not satisfied by keeping the ownership structures apart on paper if the two clubs operate as one in practice.
Only then do the alternatives about players apply: permitted to register amateurs only, no registered professionals, or none registered in the three years before the relevant date.
The status matters because training compensation is not payable to purely amateur clubs. Anything else is a professional club, which the regulations define simply as a club that is not a purely amateur one.
Worked example
A youth club shares a training ground, a director and a shirt sponsor with a professional club.
Its squad may be entirely amateur. The de facto links limb is not satisfied, so the purely amateur status is not available.
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.
- 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.
- Club-trained playerA club-trained player is one who was registered with their current club for three entire seasons, or 36 months, at any point between the ages of 15 and 21.