Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 6:08 PM• Jeroen van Poppel • Last update: 18:22

FIFA will impose a strict limit on the number of players a football club can rent out. From the 2022/23 season, only eight leased players may be under contract, from the summer of 2024 that number will even be reduced to six. Clubs such as Manchester City, Real Madrid, Chelsea and Juventus will be particularly affected by the new rules, as the superpowers have come to view the talent trade as a business model in recent decades.

Talents are being stolen from the youth academy of smaller clubs by the European top clubs at an increasingly younger age. The superpowers are fishing the sea with trawl nets: large numbers of talents are bought for a small amount, in the hope that a few will make it to the first team. The bycatch is not thrown away, but is often rented out to other clubs for years on end. In this way, rental fees are collected and the superfluous players can put themselves in the spotlight, in order to eventually be sold for a good amount. It is a profitable business model, but in the eyes of FIFA not in the interest of young talents.

The World Football Association therefore wants to limit the talent trade to a large extent by setting a rental limit. The new rules have already been announced, but have yet to be formally approved by the FIFA Council. There will also be an exception for players under 21 who have been trained by the club itself; these talents do not count. It is still unclear what conditions will apply to be allowed to call a talent ‘self-trained’.

Looking at the top fifteen clubs with the most players on loan, it is noticeable that the model is mainly popular in Italy. Atalanta takes the cake with no fewer than 63 temporarily sent away players, followed by Juventus (40) and Genoa (39). Manchester City (34), Internazionale (26), Real Madrid (25), Arsenal (22) and Chelsea (21) will also have to adjust their behavior considerably. Incidentally, FIFA also puts an end to the phenomenon of satellite clubs. In the past, Chelsea has stored large numbers of players at Vitesse at the same time, while Manchester City once rented eight players at a time to NAC Breda. In the future, a maximum of three players may be rented out to the same club.

The intervention by FIFA seems favorable for the Eredivisie clubs. Especially for talents between the ages of sixteen and twenty it becomes less attractive to make the switch to a European top club, because of the threat of falling between two stools: if you don’t make it, you can’t easily do it as a non-self-trained player. rented out and you threaten to disappear into the anonymity of a promise competition. For example, Mohamed Ihattaren (Juventus) and Philippe Sandler (Manchester City) could not possibly have been loaned out to Ajax and Feyenoord respectively in January if the rule had already been in effect. A talent like Mink Peeters (left in the photo above) would probably be much less likely to switch from Ajax to Real Madrid again at the age of sixteen in the new situation. There he was rented out three times and then written off permanently.

Ajax (5 players on loan), PSV (3) and Feyenoord (8) already remain within the limit that will apply from next season. Ajax and PSV have a big advantage over the Rotterdam competitor, because their own talents in the young team can already gain experience in professional football because of their participation in the Kitchen Champion Division. Feyenoord therefore has the highest number of loaned players in the Netherlands, but would not get in trouble with FIFA even with this number.