The main footballers union and the European clubs are fighting a war. But instead of weapons, they are using data. The point of contention is the future of the transfer market. As we wrote some weeks ago, FIFPro started a battle to revolutionise the system as we know it. No more transfer fees: according to the union, a footballer should be free to move as a free agent with a three months notification in accordance with the principle of freedom of movement for European workers.

As the outgoing FIFPro president Leonardo Grosso said to SerieAddicted in January, “Today there is 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”.

What happened in the meanwhile? ECA, the European Club Associations, prepared the anti-aircraft. In the last days the ECA, whose chairman is Bayern Munich Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and first vice-chairman Milan's Umberto Gandini, published a “Study on the transfer system in Europe”, with a huge quantity of data regarding the seasons 2011/2012 and 2012/2013. There's no need to be too malicious to notice a clear reaction to FIFPro's offensive.

According to the study, prepared by PwC and LIUC University, the current system “allows solidarity redistribution between clubs”. The clubs belonging to the top countries (the most important leagues), “redistributed $1,028m to the rest of the world while, from a major 5 leagues’ perspective, the highly ranked clubs within those leagues had an outflow of money of €904m to other clubs”.

ECA claims that such a balance grants the gap between big and smaller clubs not to widen and this would be confirmed by another fact: there is a high turnover of clubs participating to UEFA competitions, 578 in the last 10 years, which means 11 per country on average.

Does freedom of movement already exist? If FIFPro claims that it is very complicated for a player to get rid of a club at the end of his contract, ECA's study says that out-of-contract transfers represented 73% of total transfers made by European clubs. Loans and permanent transfers seem to be a minority: 14% and 13% respectively.

A boom of employees' costs. European football revenues have grown since 2007 by an annual average of 5,6%. The good news is that transfer expenditure affect an ever smaller slice of the revenues (from 28% to 22%) but in the same period, the employee costs increased by 8,5% each year, i.e. what clubs saved in the last years was spent to pay players and staff. According to a recent study by La Gazzetta dello Sport, in Italy almost 70% of Serie A clubs' revenues is spent to pay salaries.

There's no solidarity. But ECA's study is – at least in one aspect – self critical. European clubs are failing to  fulfill FIFA's compensation rule. It is a solidarity rate of 5% of the transfer fee that the buying club should pay to the teams where the player trained between the age of 12 and 23. If the rule had been followed, European clubs would have paid an extra $257m. The reality is immensely different, as only $58m (1,15% of transfer fees) were effectively paid. The rule is barely fulfilled, but European clubs are even more reluctant when they should pay the 5% rate to a non-UEFA club. “Solidarity contribution paid between European clubs – the study reports - amounted to 1.28% (or $50.2m) of the overall transfer expenditure, while solidarities paid to non-UEFA countries was 0.88% (or $6.9m)”.

It is clear that the main opponents for FIFPro's revolutionary plan are European clubs. The transfer market is a European hunting ground: in the last two seasons the value of international transfers was $5,147m (3,7 € billions), and 66% of these transfers took place within UEFA territory. ECA has 214 member clubs. Among them, there are the most powerful and famous football clubs in the world.

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