FIFA have been urged to increase training compensation for young players and regulate agents more closely amid concerns about the impact of Brexit on the Scottish game and growing fears that Premiership clubs could be forced to shut down their youth academies.
The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union in 2020 has resulted in English clubs, who are now prohibited from signing promising footballers from the Schengen Area when they are 16, 17 and 18, increasingly targeting gifted youngsters north of the border.
This brawn drain of teenage talents who have often not featured in the first team has substantially reduced the chances of clubs in this country from making a multi-million pound profit on a player they have spent many years and considerable sums of money developing.
That has created what a senior executive at a Premiership club has described as “an existential threat” within Scottish football and put academies at risk of closure.
FIFA introduced training compensation regulations back in 2001 in a direct response to the Bosman ruling to ensure that clubs are rewarded for investing in developing young players. However, world football’s governing body stressed they had taken efforts to ensure the amounts paid did “not become disproportionate and unduly hinder movement”.
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“The FIFA training compensation metrics were devised a long time ago and they haven’t changed a euro since then,” he said. “The numbers they run to are drastically out of date. The cost of running an academy 20 or so years ago is a fraction of what it is now.
“Training compensation is not supposed to be a transfer fee, it is supposed to be an acknowledgement of the costs incurred to get the player to the level he is at when he leaves the club. If that hasn’t moved a euro in the last 20 years that assumes that costs have gone up in that time. But they have quadrupled, easily.
“The training compensation metric says that the money you pay cross-border is negligible. It is €10,000 per year for ages 12, 13, 14 and 15. Then it ratchets up to as much as €100,000 a year between the ages of 16 and 21. But the reality is that English clubs get in at the earliest age they can so they only have to pay the bare minimum.
“They want to get in early because they know if these boys sign professional contracts it is then up to their club to set their value. It doesn’t make economic sense for them to let these guys stay at a Scottish club and see how they do because a £150,000 development fee might turn into £3m.
“They are effectively shooting fish in a barrel. If they bring in four or five players it might cost them £500,000, but that is far less than they would have to pay if they tried to bring in a player at the same age from another English club. They have to pay more because of the EPPP (Elite Player Performance Pathway) rules down there.
“There will be under-23 teams in England with bigger wage bills than Premiership teams in Scotland. The numbers involved here are ludicrous. Celtic and Rangers used to have the pick of the best young players. But even they have gone from being the hunters to the hunted because of Brexit.”
Youth coaches at Scottish clubs are also worried that a player who goes to a major English club at an early age - who could, despite the fee he costs and the higher wages he receives, simply be getting signed to make up numbers in an age group squad – may find it impossible to break into the first team and might ultimately be lost to the game as a result.
The executive is concerned that teenage players are being badly advised by intermediaries who stand to make significant bonuses from their transfers. He revealed he had been unsettled after learning about the inducements which had been given to footballers who were younger than 16.
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The FIFA Football Agent Regulations were subject to a number of legal challenges after they were introduced in January last year. They were suspended globally in December until the European Court of Justice delivers a final verdict on their legitimacy.
But the executive would like to see FIFA do far more in future than they have been when the dispute is settled so that clubs are protected financially and youngsters are safeguarded.
“There is a mini-business for agents to flip young Scottish players to England now because there is a gap in the market for them there which has been created by Brexit,” he said.
“They are filling that gap in the market with 16-year-old Scottish players and are sometimes getting paid six figure fees for doing so. We have seen situations where the agent actually gets paid more than the club when a player moves. They are in the player’s ear telling them it is the best move for them.
“Sometimes the player has been at the club since they have been eight, for eight years. But the club is only getting £100,000 in training compensation and the agent is getting the same or more to take them out. It is ridiculous.
“There will be big agencies who will take on agents on a low basic salary and incentivise them with a significant share of agent fees. They might get paid £25,000 a year - but 25 per cent of the agent fees when a player moves. So it is in the interest of agents to flip players. But it is not about the best interest of the player.
“We don’t have enough scrutiny when it comes to this. It is not regulated enough. As yet, we have not made any significant progress to curb what has become a much bigger issue than it was in the past. FIFA have put their best foot forward when it comes to agent regulations, but they are subject to significant legal challenges at the moment.”
He continued: “There are some fairly unscrupulous behaviours when it comes to how agents are trying to attract minors. I have heard of kids who are younger than 16 being offered all sorts of things. It might not be illegal, but it is certainly scratching the surface of immorality.
“Even if regulations do come in, it is almost impossible to manage. That is what caused FIFA to abandon the licensing system nine years ago. It is such a big beast that policing it is so, so difficult. What there was in place before was by no means bullet proof, but when it was deregulated it became the Wild West. Now they are trying to pull that back.
“I think that might prove to be impossible. But they could try to control some of the controllables and that should start with minors. They do have the ability through law to address how an individual conducts himself or herself with minors. That should, at the very least, be stronger because there are child welfare issues. It should be as robust as possible.”
However, the executive predicted that even fewer Scottish kids will realise their ambitions of becoming a professional footballer and playing for their country because of the Brexit brawn drain of talent to England.
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“We have an issue with even the best young talent getting game time in Scotland at the moment,” he said. “If the top youngsters leave to go to Leeds United, Brighton, Cardiff, wherever, it is going to be even harder for the players behind them to get game time because they are not the best in their age group.
“It will only exacerbate the transition problem if the best young players are wrestled off the club at 16 and it is only the tier two players who are left. It is so hard to give young players game time as it is. That is not the only factor to young players not getting first team game time, but it will become an increasing one as the years go on.”
He added: “You could be on the verge or training with the first team at 16 in Scotland, go down to England and go into the under-18 team and find yourself three teams away, the under-18, under-21 and under-23 teams, from the first team.
“It is completely stunting their development. The opposite is true of players who stay here, learn their trade, get 100 or 150 games in the first team, go down south to the right club at the right level at the right time, kick on from there and have a great career.
“Of course, not every player who decides to stay in Scotland and accepts getting paid £250 a week instead of £2,000 a week in England does that. But the success rate is far higher.
“You can count on the fingers of one hand how many players have gone down to England as a teenager, developed in the academy, made their first team debuts and really kicked on. It is almost zero. Billy Gilmour is maybe the only one. And he took a long time to do.
“This is a huge threat to the development of young Scottish players and it is a threat that we cannot afford to ignore. The danger here is, unless there is a change to the FIFA training compensation metric or tougher new regulations for agents, that these players get lost to football far more than they are now.”
