I wonder who the first high profile player to opt out will be? I’ll drop a 20 on Sheva.

Jan, you obviously need to do a 10,000 word post on why money in footballing is so backassward.

1) 4+ year contracts will no longer be offered.

2) Clubs could back-load contracts. So that a player will get 15K a week and a balloon payment at the end to make this more difficult.

3) This is a new rule, so I doubt it could affect Cesc and Berbatov and Ronaldo. There has to a grace period.

4) If they try to enforce it immediately, could clubs sue the EU for loss of revenue?

5) Clubs can offer higher salaries as transfer costs will drop drastically.

When I wrote about this yesterday my first thought was that with transfer fees now so strongly tied to salaries, higher wages would now become a kind of insurance policy for clubs worried about losing their stars to rival teams. If Arsenal are desperate to sign Fabregas to a four- or five-year contract, paying him some enormously inflated wage is the only way to ensure that he’ll either stay out the contract or that they’ll at least receive a hefty fee if they lose him.

Other than that scenario, I can’t see why any team would want to offer any player a long-term contract. I share the worry about the effect this will have on smaller clubs, who won’t be able to afford to pay their prospects enough to ensure a decent fee for them. And I worry about it even more for the sake of player-fan relations and the identities of teams. If turnover increases as much as some people fear it will mean fans have less time to identify with players, teams will struggle to take on recognizable personalities, and especially if players salaries do dramatically increase, all of this will contribute to more alienation between players and supporters.

I don’t say this all that often, but I’m hoping Sepp can somehow pull this one out.

The contract system is already a joke – how many players actually complete their contract at a club? – and this ruling will blow the bottom out of smaller clubs financially.

Let’s look at a hypothetical. A talented young striker rises up through the youth academy at, say, Fulham. He signs professional terms, makes a few appearances, and is clearly one of the best players of his generation. There’s little chance of him staying at a club like Fulham today, but he can be sold for a hefty fee to a top club, which benefits Fulham in the long run – they can gradually improve the team through sales of home-grown players – and benefits football in general, because it provides an incentive to develop youth players.

The situation now is radically different. If Manchester United came to that young striker, there is no chance in hell that he would say no to joining them. Now, though, Manchester don’t have to pay Fulham a large amount of money – and Fulham not only lose a great player, but get no compensation for having brought him up through their youth system. At the extreme, this ruling turns every club in the world that isn’t one of the very top teams into a glorified training academy for the Manchester Uniteds and Real Madrids of the world.

Here’s hoping FIFA win the appeal.

Well €76m was madness and €6m would be madness. Nothing new.:-)

“It may not greatly impact the likes of Internazionale, Juventus, Barcelona and Real Madrid, but what about the mid-table clubs? Or lower?”

Exactly. What about clubs like Hamburg or Tottenham who have plans to become big clubs. Dimitar Berbatov was just recently given a Premier League record transfer fee tag, but could now leave Tottenham for something like €2m in the summer. Hamburg planned to cash in on Rafael van der Vaart to finance his replacement(s), but he will be worth much less now. But then again, Hamburg could try and get a cheap replacement in the same way Juve or whoever will now get a very cheap vdV.

Maybe it will all play out in a way that the balance between the clubs remains the same, just that contracts get renegotiated every two years all the time to reset the protected time period or some other new contract/transfer habits emerge. We’ll see.