On most days, Canadian soccer is generally a pretty backwards place. If we were half as good on the development side of the game as we are at playing the politics of it, we’d be giving the Germany’s and the Brazil’s of the world a run for their money.
And even when everyone agrees on something needs to be changed, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to happen. Some are afraid of upsetting the apple cart. Others are just too mired in their own bureaucracy to ever hope of pushing the game forward an inch.
But where the contrasts to the rest of the world are most obvious is in the money.
Everyone knows that we’re largely a recreational soccer country. And that’s fine. And everyone knows that we need to better professionalize what we’re doing. And that’s starting to change. But when you start to look at some of the other factors that come along with professionalizing the game – standards that exist everywhere else in the world – people here get a little sensitive.
Primarily I’m talking about parents and administrators getting uppity about the idea of clubs buying and selling players.
For a second, lets put aside the misnomer that MLS does not pay for players. They do. Publicly they say they don’t. But that’s becoming a harder and harder truth to tell in the face of so many obvious lies.
Instead, lets look at what CSN found within FIFA documents last week.
FIFA mandates when one player leaves a youth club and signs with a professional club that professional club must pay a fee for that player. Not suggests. Mandates. You can find all the details in its Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players.
Here is a sample.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
1. A player’s training and education takes place between the ages of 12 and 23. Training compensation shall be payable, as a general rule, up to the age of 23 for training incurred up to the age of 212. The obligation to pay training compensation is without prejudice
It goes further
1. On registering as a professional for the first time, the club with which the player is registered is responsible for paying training compensation within 30 days of registration to every club with which the player has previously been registered (in accordance with the players’ career history as provided in the player passport) and that has contributed to his training starting from the season of his 12th birthday. The amount payable is calculated on a pro rata basis according to the period of training that the player spent with each club. In the case of subsequent transfers of the professional, training compensation will only be owed to his former club for the time he was effectively trained by that club.
This is standard practice for everywhere else in the world, outside of North America. When a player signs his first pro contract, the team that he signs for sends money back to all the clubs that have developed him.
If a professional moves during the course of a contract, 5% of any compensation, not including training compensation paid to his former club, shall be deducted from the total amount of this compensation and distributed by the new club as a solidarity contribution to the club(s) involved in his training and education over the years. This solidarity contribution reflects the number of years (calculated pro rata if less than one year) he was registered with the relevant club(s) between the seasons of his 12th and 23rd birthdays, as follows– Season of 12th birthday: 5% (i.e. 0.25% of total compensation);
– Season of 13th birthday: 5% (i.e. 0.25% of total compensation);
– Season of 14th birthday: 5% (i.e. 0.25% of total compensation);
– Season of 15th birthday: 5% (i.e. 0.25% of total compensation);
– Season of 16th birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation)
– Season of 17th birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation)
– Season of 18th birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation)
– Season of 19th birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation)
– Season of 20th birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation)
– Season of 21st birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation);
– Season of 22nd birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation);
– Season of 23rd birthday: 10% (i.e. 0.5% of total compensation).
To use a recent Toronto FC example, when Jonathan Osorio was signed, the team would have paid out money, dating back to when he was 12-years-old at Brampton Youth SC.
But this simply doesn’t happen here.
The reasons, as I’ve heard them generally told, are three fold.
The first is that Canadian and U.S. laws prevent the purchase or sale of children. This is another misnomer. As long as the player is over 18-years-old, which is the minimum to sign a player in most countries, he is no longer considered a minor. The FIFA document lays out further parameters around that.
The second is more of a stigma issue – Canadians are brought up with a different mentality when it comes to sports. The traditional route, which is engrained in us from the second we can kick a ball, is that you go to college, get drafted, go to the pros and move on.
Now, that’s not necessarily the route players end up taking these days, but the idea of buying and selling a player isn’t just foreign to families here, it’s looked on with a level of disgust. In part, because in the youth system, parents pay to have their kids play (and the club already receives compensation in that form) but moreover because the idea is socially frowned upon.
Those are community standards that may change over time and let me explain why.
The third major reason that Canadian youth clubs don’t benefit from professional clubs paying those fees, is that the youth development system here is so badly fractured that it is seen as a third world country (as part of researching this I learned FIFA informally ranks development tiers). Canada, presently, doesn’t do enough to ‘qualify’ (which is really just a way of saying we don’t have enough leverage presently) for what is considered professional development compensation. This isn’t an official ranking but an informal standard that is often used to help determine the amount of compensation.
That’s about to change however.
Next year, if all goes according to plan, the OPDL will flip the development model on its head. If you need a better understanding of what it represents you can read Paul Varian’s piece here on it. Or check out Jason deVos’ recent column explaining more of the particulars.
But essentially, it means clubs will begin to formally professionalize the standards for their development. For those that join the OPDL program (and I’ve been reminded it’s a program that is still not yet off the ground), significant financial investment will be made. Which likely means, in a few years time, as they are now, clubs are going to be asking themselves what they get out of it — other than a warm fuzzy feeling that they helped develop the next Osorio.
That on its own is fine but over the next couple days CSN will share a few interviews that help better explain why the landscape is changing and why the idea of monetizing players can not only help our game but will be required to help sustain development.