ABSTRACT
The International Federation of the Associations of Professional Footballers (FIFPro), which groups together the unions of players from 40 countries, in existence since 1966, was not recognized by either FIFA or UEFA prior to 1995, when the Bosman law came into force. With this decree the status of players within the system of professional football was raised significantly. In the first place, while ruling that all players whose contracts have expired are free to sign a new one with another club without payment or any compensation to the original club, the Bosman law provoked a massive increase in the amount in salaries paid to players. In many cases, the money saved by the clubs in the payment of these compensations was reinvested in salary budgets in order to attract players. According to Gianpaolo Monteneri, former director of the players’ status department of FIFA, ‘from an economic point of view, after the Bosman law, the direction of capital flows in professional football has considerably changed. Instead of circulating between clubs, more and more money ended up in players’ or the agents’ pockets.’[ 1 ] Moreover, in the major European leagues, the new cash profits generated by the sale of television rights equally contributed to a strong increase in salary. In France, for example, the gross salary expenditure of the League 1 clubs almost trebled from the season 1995/96 to 2001/02.[ 2 ] During the same period, a similar growth in the total amount of wages occurred in German Bundesliga clubs, while in the English Premiership and Italian Serie A clubs the gross salary expenditure increased almost fourfold (see Figure 1).[ 3 ] Gross salary expenditure growth from 1995/96 (white) season to 2001/02 (black) in French, German, Italian and English top level divisions https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315878904/874f9d84-eb84-413b-854f-7c7a61e780f2/content/fig6_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
