By Metehan Söğüt & Mehmet Burak Baran
Football Is No Longer Managed Only on the Pitch
The most visible moment in football is when the ball hits the back of the net. Supporters see the goal, the player, the coach and the score. But behind that moment, there is often a much larger system at work: player contracts, transfer fees, tax obligations, agent commissions, performance bonuses, foreign currency payments and cash flows spread over several years.
Modern football is not simply a ninety-minute match. It is a global economic organisation connecting many countries, currencies, regulations and professionals. For this reason, today it is not possible to manage a club, a professional player or an agency business through sporting knowledge alone. Sporting decisions have financial consequences, and financial decisions have direct sporting consequences.
Sporting decisions have financial consequences, and financial decisions have direct sporting consequences.
This is the starting point of this article: football’s visible face is on the pitch, while its financial architecture is built through contracts, budgets and tax calculations.
A transfer’s announced fee is not its real cost
When it is announced that a player has been “transferred for 10 million euros”, this usually refers only to the transfer fee payable to the former club. The real economic burden on the club is much broader: seasonal salary, signing and loyalty bonuses, performance-related bonuses, agent service fees, tax and social obligations, image rights payments, housing and travel support, training compensation and solidarity contribution, exchange-rate movements, financing costs and the risk of early termination of the contract.
Within FIFA’s transfer system, training compensation and the solidarity mechanism are separate obligations designed to give clubs that contributed to a player’s development a share from future transfers. The FIFA Clearing House is also at the centre of the system that helps these payments reach the clubs entitled to receive them in international transfers.
Therefore, the “transfer fee” and the “total contract cost” are not the same thing. The correct financial question is this: how much will this player cost the club over the full term of the contract, and on which dates will that cost turn into cash outflow?
A player’s salary is not a single number
When we hear that a player will earn 2 million euros a year, the first questions should be: is that amount net or gross, does it cover only the fixed salary, are the signing fee and appearance fees included, are goal and win bonuses separate, will image rights be paid separately, and are benefits such as housing and insurance included?
There can be a very large difference between the net salary guaranteed to the player and the gross cost borne by the club. The same net salary request can also produce completely different cost outcomes in different countries because income tax rates, social security systems, withholding practices and filing obligations differ. For this reason, three concepts should be calculated separately: the net amount received by the player, the gross income subject to tax and the club’s total cost. Long-term contracts signed without making this distinction can lead to serious budget deviations in later seasons.
In Türkiye, the “net” era is over, but the habit remains
This distinction is not theoretical in Türkiye. When you sit down at the table here, the first figure discussed is almost always net. The player says what he wants to receive, and the club calculates the gross. When speaking with a player coming from Europe or a foreign agent, you notice the difference at the first meeting: they come with a gross figure, hear a net figure from the other side and stop to ask again.
The habit remains. But it no longer has the same legal ground.
In July 2025, the Turkish Football Federation added a paragraph to Article 19 of the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Professional Football Players, providing that parties to a contract cannot agree clauses that shift taxes imposed on one party under Turkish tax law to the other party. Contrary provisions are considered invalid and also constitute a disciplinary violation. In other words, a clause stating that “taxes belong to the club” is not only ineffective today, but also creates a separate risk. In the same regulatory package, supplementary and additional agreements relating to ongoing contracts that had not been submitted to the Federation were also required to be filed with the TFF. Read together, the direction of these two rules is clear: greater transparency and proper recording of contractual relationships are being encouraged.
The background to this also includes Law No. 7194. Since 2020, when athletes’ salary income exceeds the relevant threshold, the player is required to file an annual income tax return. The return is filed in the player’s own name. If it is not filed, the penalty is imposed on the player and the tax is pursued from the player. A commitment by the club to assume the tax may create an obligation between the parties, but it does not protect the player against the tax authority. We see the practical result of this: a player who has left the club, or even the country, can face a tax debt and penalty in his own name years later.
So what needs to be done in practice? The net figure in the player’s mind cannot simply be brought to the table as a net figure. It first needs to be converted into a gross amount together with the accountant and lawyer, and then presented to the club as a gross figure. This is not a matter of style. It concerns the validity of the contract.
There is another side effect that is not discussed enough. Previously, in the team spending limit calculation, only the withholding tax paid by the club was taken into account, while the player’s own tax was not included. Now that taxes are reflected in the gross salary, the same player takes a much larger share of the club’s spending limit. The change has affected not only the wording of contracts, but also a club’s capacity to build its squad.
Many parties still do not fully understand this change. The information gap that appears during negotiations can work against the weaker side at the table.
There is also a recent decision showing that this area is still evolving. In 2026, the Constitutional Court annulled, on property-rights grounds, the wording that made the offset of withheld taxes in the annual tax return conditional on those taxes having been paid to the tax office by the party responsible for withholding them. A club’s failure to pay over tax it has withheld will therefore no longer remove the player’s right to offset that amount. This decision itself shows how closely a player’s tax position can be connected to the club’s financial discipline.
Tax residence is more complicated than the colour of the shirt
A player’s nationality alone does not determine where tax will be paid. When assessing tax residence, the country where a permanent home is available, the time spent in different countries during the year, the centre of family and personal relations, the centre of economic activity, the place where the services are actually performed, the domestic laws of the relevant countries and applicable double taxation agreements are considered together.
For professional athletes, the subject is even more specific. A player may work under a club contract in one country while taking part in national team matches, tournaments, training camps or commercial events in other countries. Article 17 of the OECD Model Tax Convention contains a special rule allowing income from an athlete’s personal activities to be taxed in the country where the activity takes place. The actual result, however, depends on the wording of the relevant treaty and the domestic law of each country.
For this reason, a player’s club salary, national team income, tournament bonuses, sponsorship and advertising income, image rights payments and social media activities can produce different tax consequences. International football taxation is not simply a matter of calculating a rate. It is a process involving residence, source country, filing, withholding, tax credits and documentation.
Foreign currency contracts create an invisible budget risk
A significant number of football contracts are denominated in euros, dollars or sterling. At the same time, a large part of a club’s ticketing, broadcasting, sponsorship and commercial income may be earned in local currency. This mismatch creates a significant foreign exchange position.
Assume that under a three-year contract a player earns 2 million euros in each season. Even if the euro salary does not change, the cost in local currency can increase significantly each year because of exchange-rate movements. Budgeting should therefore not be based only on today’s exchange rate. A base scenario, an average exchange-rate scenario, an adverse exchange-rate scenario and a financial stress scenario should all be considered.
The same number, two different outcomes: foreign currency restrictions in Türkiye
The analysis above assumes that the parties are able to enter into a foreign currency contract. In Türkiye, that assumption does not apply to everyone. The reason comes not from football regulations, but from foreign exchange legislation.
Under provisions introduced in 2018 into Decision No. 32, based on Law No. 1567 on the Protection of the Value of Turkish Currency, employment contracts between persons resident in Türkiye generally cannot set the contract price in foreign currency or index it to foreign currency. In the Ministry of Treasury and Finance’s official explanations concerning Communiqué No. 2008-32/34, football players are addressed separately and the distinction is clear: the salaries of football players who do not have citizenship ties with the Republic of Türkiye may be paid in foreign currency or indexed to foreign currency, while this is not permitted for players who have Turkish citizenship in contracts with clubs resident in Türkiye.
The criterion is citizenship. Place of birth, a second passport or a player’s “domestic/foreign” status on a club’s squad list is not decisive. A player born abroad who has not yet chosen between two national teams is still within the restriction if he is a Turkish citizen. When drafting the contract, the relevant point is not squad status, but citizenship status.
A breach is also subject to an administrative fine under Law No. 1567, applied separately to each party to the contract and doubled in the event of repetition. In other words, the fine can apply to both the club and the player.
Let us look at the practical result with an example. Suppose a club signs two players in the same summer for equivalent amounts at the exchange rate on that day: 800,000 euros for a foreign player and 20 million Turkish lira for a Turkish player. On the signing date, the two contracts are equivalent. In the following season, the Turkish player’s salary may rise to 22 million lira under the contractual increase, while the unchanged euro salary of the foreign player may reach the equivalent of 35 million lira. Nobody promised anything extra and no clause was breached. The balance changed by itself.
There are two separate costs to this. The first arrives at the negotiating table: a player with two years left on his contract asks for a revision while the club’s budget is already full. The second is paid in the dressing room, and it can be more expensive. Once the difference between two players in the same position with similar playing time starts to be discussed, it stops being only a financial issue. Trust between management and the player can weaken, and that can quickly reach the pitch.
Today, the domestic player has limited protection against both tax and currency effects. What is needed is not an exception, but a broader solution: an adjustment mechanism agreed by the parties while the contractual amount remains in Turkish lira. Clauses linked to consumer price inflation are among the most practical options to discuss in this respect. Alternatives linked to precious metals or commodities require a separate assessment under foreign exchange legislation. Whatever the method, the central issue is how to reduce the difference in protection between domestic and foreign players.
Sporting performance is also a financial event
Goals, assists, appearances and minutes played are sporting data. But when contracts contain performance-related provisions, the same data also produce financial consequences. They can create a right to a bonus, trigger a contract extension option, increase the club’s budget burden, change the player’s market value and affect future transfer income.
For this reason, performance data are not information only for the technical staff. They are also direct decision inputs for finance managers, accountants and lawyers. A properly designed system should be able to show not only how many goals a player has scored, but also which bonuses the player is approaching, how much these could increase the end-of-season cost and what the total burden would be over the next three seasons if the contract were renewed.
For example, if a player is entitled to a 500,000 euro bonus after reaching 10 goals in a season, that clause is not simply text sitting in an archive. It is an obligation that needs to be monitored.
The bonus clause: the most frequently written, least considered clause
A significant number of cases that reach the Dispute Resolution Chamber in Türkiye arise from bonus clauses. The reason is usually not bad faith. The clause simply has not been written in enough detail.
First, a distinction needs to be made because this is one of the points most often confused in practice. Bonuses linked to goals, assists or trophies are completely different from bonuses linked to appearances, being named in the squad or minutes played. They measure different events, depend on different conditions and raise different questions in a dispute. When they are squeezed into the same sentence, both clauses become unclear.
Take the sentence: “A bonus will be paid if the player scores 10 goals during the season.” On paper, it looks clear. In practice, it answers none of the following questions: which competitions count, are cup matches included, are friendly matches included, do penalty goals count, and if the player leaves halfway through the season, does a proportional right arise based on the goals already scored?
For bonuses linked to playing time, the questions are completely different: how many minutes must a player play for it to count as an “appearance”, does entering the match in the final minutes create an entitlement, does being named in the squad without playing count, and how is playing time treated during injury or suspension? When the conditions for these two types of clause are not written separately, each party starts to defend the interpretation that works in its own favour.
When there is a gap, both sides speak through the same gap. The player may rely on previous seasons’ practice to support a claim, while the club may try to interpret that same practice in its own favour in the following season. We often see the reverse as well. When a dispute arises, the decision-maker interprets the contract by looking at the intention with which the parties signed it. The less that is written in the clause, the wider the room for interpretation and the less predictable the outcome.
Commercial contracts of the same value are often drafted down to the smallest detail. There is no reason for player contracts to receive less care. When bonus provisions are drafted, both the player and the club should work with legal counsel, each type of bonus should be defined separately with its own entitlement conditions, and the competent dispute-resolution body should be clearly identified in the contract.
There is also a side to this that cannot easily be measured. A bonus is a direct source of motivation for a player. A player who does not know exactly when the entitlement arises can lose that motivation. A player who learns at the end of the season that the bonus was not earned may be disappointed. A club faced with a claim it did not expect may begin to see the relationship as one of mistrust. Both sides may believe they are right because they understood the same sentence differently.
The cost of a poorly written bonus clause is not simply the amount paid or not paid. A bonus is not only a financial item. It is a contractual provision.
A bonus is not only a financial item. It is a contractual provision.
Financial sustainability is now part of sporting strategy
For clubs, the ratio of salary, transfer and agent costs to revenue is no longer only a matter of internal budget discipline. Under UEFA’s 2026 Club Licensing and Financial Sustainability Regulations, the squad cost ratio is calculated by reference to relevant personnel expenses, amortisation of player registration costs and agent service costs, and the upper limit is set at 70 percent.
This approach clearly reflects the new reality of football: sporting squad planning cannot be separated from a club’s ability to generate revenue. A transfer can be technically correct but financially unsustainable. Similarly, a player who appears expensive may still be an economically sensible investment when sporting contribution, commercial impact and future transfer potential are considered together. Player decisions should not be assessed only through cost or performance, but through the relationship between performance, cost, risk and value.
Conclusion: football must also be won financially
Success in football is not only about finding the right player or choosing the right tactics. It is also about structuring the contract correctly, calculating the real cost, planning tax properly, managing cash flow, measuring currency risk and identifying risks before they emerge.
In Türkiye, there is another factor: regulations change quickly and parties often come to the table with habits from the previous period. The habit of discussing net figures and the instinct to protect value through foreign currency no longer have the same legal basis. The only way to close this gap is for finance professionals and lawyers to work at the same table.
The game on the pitch lasts ninety minutes. But the financial system that makes that game possible works every day of the year. The institutions that succeed in football’s future will not only be those that manage the player and the ball well. They will be those that can manage contracts, data, tax, cash flow and risk within the same architecture.
The game on the pitch lasts ninety minutes. But the financial system that makes that game possible works every day of the year.
Because modern football is no longer played only on the pitch. It is also played at the transfer table, in contract negotiations, in tax calculations and in budget meetings.
This article has been prepared for general information and professional commentary purposes. Tax, financial and legal outcomes may vary depending on the country, period, contract structure and the specific circumstances of each case. For each transaction, the current legislation of the relevant country, international agreements and the assessments of authorised professionals should be taken into account.