How FIFA handle the rush on the final day of the transfer window

The last day of August will be a busy day at FIFA as clubs who have left their business until the last minute scramble around to get transfers done before the deadline. However, thanks to FIFA's International Transfer Management System (ITMS) software, things are not as stressful as they once were. 

Mark Goddard is in charge of overseeing the smooth running of the system, which is in place at FC Barcelona and thousands of other European clubs and must be used correctly before any transfers can be completed. He explained to SPORT what Barça have to do when they want to sign a player and spoke about what clubs will be going through at the end of this month when the panic button is pressed.   

How does the software work? 

OK, for example, when a club sign a player (for example, Barcelona and Luis Suarez last summer) they have to enter standardised data into the ITMS system. This ranges from the player’s identity though to the details of the transfer agreement and the intermediary involvement. The other team (in SPORT's example, Liverpool), for their part, would have to enter the same data. Once both clubs have submitted all this, the transfer can be processed. 

What if Barça and Atletico send through different information?

It can go wrong. If when a club signed someone (for example Barcelona and Suarez again), if they entered the transfer fee in euros and the other club (e.g. Liverpool) input the fee in sterling, it wouldn't have matched and a problem would have flagged up. The amounts obviously have to be the same, the dates, the currencies and what not. Once it all matches, it's sent through to the respective associations and the transfer is done.   

What if, on deadline day, there's not enough time to upload the information?

Clubs have, what, 90 days to get these transfers done. They're spending this time playing chicken, putting other parties under pressure... Our system is managed by a computer and we know how it works, so we are not interested in excuses about why they failed to registed a deal in time. If you're organised, transfers can take 10 minutes once you've sorted out the lawyers, the costs, the agents... Registering the deal with the ITMS is one of the faster parts of the process. 

But what if a club makes a mistake at the last minute and the transfer doesn't register correctly? 

There is no dispensation for clerical errors. If you don't get what you need uploaded on to the system by the deadline, then that's your fault, I'm sorry. A registration window is a registration window. When we first launched the system [in 2010], there were some small problems, with clubs compalining that deals did not go through, which they took to FIFA and to the CAS to challenge, who sided in our favour. Five years later, there are even less problems and we give all clubs equal treatment and hopefully they appreciate the support which we make avaialble to them. 

So we shouldn't expect too many clubs to be complaining about your software?

Like I said, the number has dropped on failures, so there are very few cases when a transfer can't be completed because of an error on our part, but there are occasionally challenges to the system.

Who would be in charge of ensuring everything goes through at a club? 

A club's TMS manager can be anyone. We have over 6,500 clubs using the platform and the person in charge of getting the transfer finalised could be the club president or it could be a more general administrator. At smaller clubs, you tend to find it usually is the president. (At Barcelona it is likely to be Raul Sanllehi).

Whoever it is, when he logs into the system, he will have a countdown clock which tells him how much time they have left to make a transfer. Every club's TMS manager will have one, with the clock set to their local time, so there can be no excuses about time zones. They have until midnight local time and that's that. 

You must be expecting a busy day on deadline day?

Last year we processed 400 transfers involving 494 clubs on the final day of the window, with 408million USD being spent. That was 65 percent of the total spend in Europe's big five leagues, which shows you how long this game of chicken goes on. 

Unfortunately we can't provide the individual transaction fees as we're bound by Swiss data protection laws, but we can provide a lot of data about spending patterns in different leagues and countries, comparisons, statistics and so on. So we can't say a player cost this much, but we can offer all sorts of break downs of spending within La Liga. 

*FIFA's BIG5 report, which offers a look into spending patterns in Europe's biggest leagues, will be available in early September on FIFATMS.com.

*This article was amended on August 26 to make it clear what Mark Goddard had and had not said. At no point did he directly refer to Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Liverpool or any of the players mentioned. He merely explained the processes all clubs have to go through.