When Jeremy*’s 13-year-old son wanted to change football club because of disagreements with his team mates, the process seemed simple: the boy would just stop training with the football nursery where he had been playing since the age of seven and register with another club.
But what appeared to be a clean shift between clubs turned out to be a complicated and expensive affair.
Malta Football Association regulations stipulate that children over 10, who would have registered on a so-called Form Q, cannot change football nursery unless the new club pays what the association calls a development compensation fee.
The fee amounts to some €350 for every season the child would have played with the old club since signing Form Q.
Jeremy was shocked when he found out about this condition. Nowhere was it listed on the registration document given to him by the nursery to sign when his son turned 10. When the new club refused to pay the fee, he had to fork out hundreds of euros to give his son a chance to continue playing football.
Jeremy, who spoke to The Sunday Times on condition of anonymity, knows that by paying the fee he breached MFA regulations and his son’s new club could be in trouble with the association.
“It was the only option I had to allow my son a seamless transition between football nurseries after the MFA’s complaints board turned down my request for a free transfer,” he said.
Jeremy could afford the expense but many other parents who find themselves in his predicament cannot, forcing their children to stop playing football.
Children’s Commissioner Helen d’Amato said her office had received “a fair number of complaints” over the past six years from parents like Jeremy and cases were dealt with on their own merits.
But in 2010 her office investigated the conduct of football nurseries and made a number of recommendations to better protect the rights of children.
She said discussions were ongoing with the MFA to find an arrangement that can “protect the right of children to freely engage in leisure activities” without undermining the “legitimate interests and role of football nurseries in providing children with a valuable source of leisure, physical education, character formation and social interaction”.
An issue flagged by the Children’s Commissioner was the importance of information on the conditions of enrolment prior to actual enrolment.
MFA legal adviser Chris Bonnet said from next season the association registration forms would contain excerpts of regulations regarding the transfer of players.
But he defended the development compensation fee and insisted this was not a transfer fee. Dr Bonnet noted that development and training compensation was a principle enshrined in FIFA regulations and deemed legitimate by the European Court of Justice in the 2010 Olivier Bernard case.
The Lisbon Treaty, he pointed out, deemed sports to be of a specific nature and the court held that a club requesting compensation for educating and growing the player was making a legitimate claim according to EU law.
But Dr Bonnet insisted that the number of transfer requests and eventual compensation fee that is paid was “sporadic”.
“Compensation payments are necessary for nurseries to maintain low annual registration fees.
“If such a system did not exist annual registration fees would increase because nurseries have huge expenses in maintaining their infrastructure and paying their huge utility and wage bills.”
This is an argument Joe Attard, a former nursery coach, can understand but he still believes the “transfer fees” are a form of “trade” involving children.
“Clubs have their own reasons for wanting the fee but it is not right to trade in children this way. It is a business. What if parents cannot afford the transfer fee, or are unwilling to pay it?”
*Name has been changed