The transfer market as we know it is at a turning point. Offers, exhausting negotiations, endless debates about the morality of a multimillionaire deal – like Gareth Bale’s 100€ millions one – newspapers front pages and entire tv programs: all that could have numbered years.

FIFPro, the worldwide footballers' union with 50.000 players represented, challenged the powerful football clubs. They made it starting from a simple principle: Gareth Bale and Lionel Messi are professionals with a fixed term contract like any other normal worker. So they have to be free to change their employer at any moment, without penalties and without any cost for the purchasing club. Even if the contract is still far from expiring.

In a not-so-far future, a three months notification could be enough to leave a club. And the club could not demand a single euro neither from the player nor from the purchasing club. What does this mean? That Neymar, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo would suddenly become available at 0 euros.

Is it an authentic revolution? Not according to Leonardo Grosso, member of FIFPro executive committee and outgoing president. “Our stance is obvious, quite banal. Today there is a huge imbalance between players and clubs, and this is totally in favor of the clubs. If a club is to get rid of a player before his contract expires, they only have to pay their residual salary. To this amount you have to subtract the salary that the footballer will collect at his new club. As a result, the clubs never have to pay a single euro”.

“Vice versa, for leaving a club a player has to pay unreasonable penalties. And you have to add even a compensation that allows the club to replace the leaving player with another of the same value”.

According to Grosso and FIFPro, the informal agreements coped in 2001 between FIFA, UEFA and the European Commission (which ratified the free circulation of footballers) have been distorted by some sentences, always favorable to the clubs. As the Morgan De Sanctis and Francelino Matuzalem cases.

In 2007 the two footballers terminated their respective contracts with Udinese and Shakhtar Donetsk and signed for Sevilla and Real Saragozza, starting legal battles that lasted years and finished with an adverse sentence for both. In De Sanctis's case, Udinese obtained 2 € millions as a compensation while Matuzalem risked a suspension for not paying the compensation to the Ukranian club, which was determined by Lausanne's Tribunal Arbitral du Sport.

Considered these precedents, today it is almost impossible to see a one-sidedness contract termination by a footballer although there is a FIFA rule (the article 17) which allows this possibility in some cases.

For medium and small clubs the reform wanted by FIFPro would have very bad consequences. Many clubs buy players for few (or zero) euros; they raise them and, finally, sell them in millionaire deals. Udinese is the Italian club that better adopts this policy. In the last summer the Friulani sold to Roma the defender Mehdi Benatia for 13,5€ millions after having bought him for zero. Two years before, Udinese sold the Chilean Alexis Sanchez to FC Barcelona for 26€ million. In 2007 Sanchez arrived in Italy for 3€ M only.

It is an authentic football business that FIFPro's revolution would sweep away. “I understand them by a legal point of view: a footballer must be free to move from an employer to another. But from a football point of view, that reform would cause huge damages to the entire system”, the agent Dario Canovi said. Canovi is the agent's dean in Italy and he currently works with Thiago Motta.

The mindset of Simone Gianese Bortolan, an emerging football agent, is close to Canovi's one. “With this reform, the majority of the football clubs which subsist on players' trading would go bankrupt. How many times is a player forced to stay in a club against his will? Very, very few” the agent of Napoli's Josip Radošević said.

FIFPro looks the other side of the coin. “Yes, Udinese is a virtuous club. But many other clubs exploit their players. They see the professionals as objects they can buy and resell whenever they want”, Leonardo Grosso answers back. It's a paradox: the two opposite fronts say they want to defend the players' equity.

According to FIFPro, if they eliminate the cost of the players, they will cut the supplies for agents and intermediary agencies. They say that 28% of the money involved in the worldwide transfer market exits the football world only to enrich football agents. So, while players and agents increase their bank accounts, the less famous players barely receive a monthly salary and may become victims of match fixers, who offer easy money, FIFPro says.

The abolishment of the cost of the players will likely cause an increase in the wages of the top football players, because clubs will only have to offer a better salary to convince a professional to change his jersey. “Top players and their agents will gain even more economic power” Raffaele Poli – responsible for the football observatory at International Centre for Sports Studies – explains.

Poli, who is a football researcher and is in contact with FIFA and FIFPro exponents, says that club owners, sporting directors and even managers often hold shares of football players. When the player is sold, each one of them has his revenue. “You don’t have to write it on a contract. Sometimes a private deal is enough. Someone justifies this profit as an advisory fee, or scouting activities” Poli explains.

So, the 50 € millions that today end in a club's treasure chest for the sale of a player, in a near future would be paid anyways, but they would go in the presidents’, intermediaries’ and sporting directors' pockets. 

“Big clubs are and will always be ready to spend huge amounts of money to sign a top player. The reform that FIFPro wants to adopt will not change that situation. Money will always circulate, but it will enrich evermore players and agents. The current system is unfair and a change is essential, but the reform will have to be far cry from what FIFPro is thinking about”.

At least on one point everyone agrees: the current transfer market system does not work. It is unfair and it is not transparent. Something has to change, but in which direction? According to Canovi and Poli, the European Union has to take awareness of the fact that free competition in football does not exist and never existed. The football players are not workers like any other, and the complete freedom of movement would only overemphasize the current gap between big and small clubs.

“We are ready to talk with everyone – Grosso finally says – but if FIFA will not impose its authority, we will address to the European court of justice”. This solution would be the deadly weapon. According to all the contenders of this complicated chess-game, a court's sentence would be inevitably favorable to FIFPro. To avoid such a cul de sac, rules have to change in the meantime.