The World Cup also serves to put figures on the value of the youth team. The footballers who these days compete to lift the Cup have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the clubs that participated in their formation. That is precisely the objective of FIFA Clearing House, the system created by FIFA in November 2022 to guarantee that training clubs receive their fair share when one of their players makes an international transfer. The result begins to be gigantic: almost 1 billion dollars generated in just four yearsof which 639 million have already been distributed among thousands of clubs around the world.
The World Cup once again demonstrates the dimension of the mechanism. The 530 footballers summoned for this edition have generated 221 million dollars in compensation for training and solidarity throughout their careers. In total, clubs related to players from 46 of the 48 participating teams have received or will receive part of that money.
This is how the system works
The two finalists also dominate this classification. Spain and Argentina have 20 footballers whose transfers have activated payments for the clubs that participated in their training. Croatia appears behind, with another 20 internationals that have generated training rights; Colombia (19), Ecuador (18), Ivory Coast (17) and the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland, with 16 each.
But the money doesn’t always stay at home. Argentine clubs receive 89.8% of the compensation generated by their internationals, a figure that even exceeds Germany (88.6%) and only improves Czech Republic (92.4%). At the opposite end there are selections such as Senegal (15.3%)Algeria (14%) or the United States (11.5%), whose footballers completed a good part of their development away from their countries of origin.
The list of players who have generated the most money confirms the global nature of the system. Neymar, João Félix, Enzo Fernández, Manuel Ugarte, Kai Havertz, Moisés Caicedo, Michael Olise, Kim Min-jae, Malik Tillman and Viktor Gyökeres They top a ranking that has distributed 34.3 million dollars among the clubs that bet on them when they were still promising. And the World Cup barely represents a part of the business. From November 2022, The transfers of 10,422 players who do not even participate in the tournament have generated another 768 million dollars in training rights. A figure that explains why FIFA considers this system one of the most important tools to sustain grassroots football.
