World football’s governing body have been using a pilot version of their new “transfer-matching system” since January, and with test runs proving successful they will now push to have the system installed in every national association and club on the planet.
Current laws require the associations of the buying and selling clubs to certify deals by fax, which leaves FIFA inundated with paperwork every trading season as they must manually register every transfer request.
Switching to an electronic system would drastically speed up the process and allow FIFA to monitor and process transactions with greater ease, hopefully leading to a crackdown on corruption via ‘bungs’.
The FIFA executive committee met in October and agreed to set up a company called FIFA Transfer Matching System GmbH to carry out the task.
"The pilot was a success," FIFA general secretary Jérôme Valcke told the Guardian. "The centralised matching system will ensure that the transfers people will be able to point out if they consider something to be strange."
Mike Maguire
FIFA Announce Electronic Transfer System
