Table of Contents
Day 10 — Money Explained | 11 November 2026
When a club announces it has signed a player for €50 million, the number in the headline is not the amount that changes hands in a single payment, and it is not the amount the selling club keeps. A transfer fee is the starting figure for a chain of deductions, commissions and future claims — and understanding who takes what explains a surprising amount about how African football's economy actually works.
Here is the fee, taken apart.
The fee itself: compensation, not a price tag
A transfer fee is compensation paid to buy out the remainder of a player's contract. The buying club pays the selling club for the right to register the player before his deal expires. That is the headline number. Everything else — wages, signing-on fees, image rights, loyalty bonuses — is negotiated separately, in the player's employment contract, and is paid by the buying club on top of the fee. The fee buys the registration. It does not buy the player.
Fees are usually paid in instalments over several years, not in a lump sum, and the reported figure is typically the total including add-ons that may never be triggered. When a fee is described as "€22 million plus €3 million in add-ons", as Manchester United's sale of Antony to Real Betis was reported this month, only the first part is guaranteed money. The rest depends on appearances, goals or trophies. Treat every headline fee as a maximum, not a cheque.
Solidarity: the 5% that goes back to where the player was made
The first deduction from any international transfer is not a tax. It is FIFA's solidarity mechanism, set out in Article 21 of the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players. Whenever a professional is transferred internationally before his contract expires, 5% of the fee is distributed to the clubs that trained and educated him between his 12th and 23rd birthdays.
The split is fixed by age. Each year of training between the ages of 12 and 15 earns the training club 0.25% of the fee; each year between 16 and 23 earns 0.5%. On a €50 million transfer, that is €2.5 million in total — €125,000 for each of the four early years, €250,000 for each of the eight later ones — spread across every club on the player's registration record, or "player passport", in those years.
There is no age limit on receiving it. A player can trigger solidarity payments on every international move of his career, even in his thirties, as long as the training being rewarded happened between 12 and 23. Since November 2022 the money has been routed through the FIFA Clearing House, which uses official registration records to work out who is owed what, replacing a system in which small clubs often had to chase big ones for money they did not know they were owed.
For African football, this is the mechanism that matters most. A fee agreed in London or Paris sends money back to the academy in Accra, Dakar or Abidjan that produced the player — provided the academy is properly registered, the player's passport is complete, and somebody is watching for the payment. The solidarity rules were written for exactly this: to make youth development pay, even for clubs that will never play in a European competition.
Training compensation: the separate bill for young players
Solidarity is often confused with training compensation. They are different mechanisms, and they can both apply.
Training compensation is paid when a player signs his first professional contract, or is transferred internationally before the end of the calendar year in which he turns 23. It rewards the clubs that trained him between the ages of 12 and 21, and the amount is set by FIFA's published training-cost categories rather than by the transfer fee. Unlike solidarity, it is not a percentage of anything: it is a fixed, published rate per year of training, which varies by confederation and by the category of the training club.
The practical difference is simple. Training compensation is the bill for developing a young player. Solidarity is the dividend a training club collects every time that player moves for a fee afterwards. One is capped by age and by a published tariff; the other follows the player for his whole career.
Sell-on clauses: the seller's second payday
A selling club does not have to take all its money up front. In a sell-on clause, the seller keeps a percentage of any future transfer fee — usually of the profit, sometimes of the total — when the player is sold again.
Antony's move to Real Betis is the clearest recent example. United accepted a reported €22 million plus €3 million in add-ons for a player they signed from Ajax for a reported €95 million guaranteed, plus €5 million in add-ons, in 2022 — a loss of roughly €70 million on the headline numbers. But the deal includes a 50% sell-on clause on the profit of any future sale. If Betis sell Antony on for a profit, half of that profit comes back to Old Trafford. The clause is how a selling club trades a lower fee today for a share of tomorrow.
Sell-ons are why small and mid-sized clubs fight so hard over the wording. A 10% sell-on on a player who later moves for €80 million is worth more than a slightly higher fee today. For African clubs selling young talent to Europe, a well-negotiated sell-on is often the difference between a one-off windfall and a lasting revenue stream — and it costs the selling club nothing to ask for.
Agent fees: the biggest line nobody puts in the headline
Agents are paid separately from the transfer fee, and the sums are now enormous. FIFA's Football Agents Report 2025 records that clubs in men's professional football paid a record US$1.37 billion in service fees to club agents on international transfers in 2025 — up more than 90% on the previous year, and far above the previous record of US$889.4 million set in 2023. Club agents were involved in a record 3,010 international transfers. English clubs alone accounted for more than US$375 million of it.
The domestic picture is just as large. The English FA publishes what clubs actually pay: Premier League clubs paid £409.1 million to agents between 2 February 2024 and 3 February 2025. Chelsea were the biggest spenders at £60.4 million, ahead of Manchester City at £52.1 million and Manchester United at £33.0 million. And the FA notes that some of those payments relate to deals signed in earlier periods — the agent bill arrives in instalments, like the fees themselves.
Who pays the agent depends on who the agent represents. Under FIFA's Football Agent Regulations, introduced in 2023, the written caps are 5% of annual remuneration up to US$200,000 and 3% above that for an agent representing a player or a club, and 10% of the transfer fee for an agent acting for the selling club. But those caps have never actually operated. A German court granted an injunction against them in May 2023, FIFA suspended the disputed provisions worldwide in December 2023, and the Court of Justice of the European Union's July 2026 ruling in the RRC Sports case left the question to the German courts rather than reinstating the caps. As of November 2026, commissions are effectively set by the market — and the market rate is commonly around 10% of a player's remuneration.
The rule that did survive is licensing: since 2023, agents must pass a FIFA exam to operate. As of 4 December 2025 there were 10,525 licensed agents worldwide. In Ghana, the football association has publicly warned that many people presenting themselves as agents are unlicensed — a warning that applies across much of the continent, where young players and their families are the most exposed to unregulated intermediaries.
What this means for African football
Put the pieces together on a hypothetical €50 million sale of a player trained in Africa and sold on from Europe. Roughly €2.5 million of it is solidarity money, owed by rule to the clubs on his passport between the ages of 12 and 23 — which, for a player who came through an African academy, should include that academy. The selling club's agent may take up to 10% of the fee under the written rules, and in practice the agent economy around the deal runs into the millions. If the selling club negotiated a sell-on, it keeps a claim on the next move too. And none of that counts the wages, signing-on fee or image rights, which are a separate negotiation entirely.
The headline number is the least informative figure in the deal. The real story of a transfer fee is in the deductions — and for African football, the solidarity mechanism is the part of that story that turns a European transfer into money for the academies that produced the player in the first place. The rules already exist. The question is whether the clubs that did the training know they are owed, and whether the system pays them on time.
Sportblot will carry the continental story from here.
Sources: FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, Articles 20–21 and Annexes 4–5; FIFA Football Agents Report 2025 (inside.fifa.com); The FA, Football Agent Fees 2 February 2024 – 3 February 2025; Court of Justice of the European Union, RRC Sports v FIFA (C-209/23), 16 July 2026; BBC Sport reporting on Antony to Real Betis, November 2026. Transfer fees for Antony are reported figures, not disclosed by the clubs. All money figures in this article are disclosed or reported as labelled; no estimated figures are used.
