International Football
Gabriel walks off injured against Senegal on Saturday Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
It is every club manager’s worst nightmare: part with a key player at the beginning of an international break and then, 10 days later, they return from representing their country carrying an injury that will keep them out of your upcoming matches.
This is one of the perils in a sport where the pursuits of club sides and national teams co-exist, and there is little that can be done to fully guard against it.
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Just ask Arsenal, who face a nervous wait after Gabriel limped out of Brazil’s 2-0 friendly win against Senegal on Saturday. “We are very sorry and disappointed,” Brazil manager Carlo Ancelotti told reporters after the game. “Bad? I don’t know. He had an injury in his adductor, the medical staff has to check.”
Gabriel has formed part of an almost impenetrable defence for Arsenal this season, and Mikel Arteta’s team will want him back as soon as possible, given they face Tottenham and Chelsea in the Premier League over the next two weeks, with a Champions League match against Bayern Munich sandwiched in the middle.
Newcastle United suffered similar frustrations in September, losing summer signing Yoane Wissa to a knee injury when away with DR Congo just days after he had joined. Or Bayern Munich, after they saw Alphonso Davies ruled out for an extended period when suffering an anterior cruciate ligament knee tear with Canada in March.
There is, though, some relief for clubs in these situations, as we explain below.
FIFA, world football’s governing body, recognised in 2012 it had a problem that needed addressing. Age-old tensions between the club and international games led to what amounts to an insurance policy being introduced before that year’s European Championship, co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine.
The European Clubs Association (ECA, the body representing the continent’s biggest teams, and now known as European Football Clubs) had pushed for a new arrangement and subsequently called it a “landmark moment in strengthening the relationship between clubs and national associations”.
The clue is in the name of FIFA’s Club Protection Programme (CPP) and, over time, it has helped placate employers putting staff whose wages they pay at risk on the international stage for the benefit of others.
Any player who picks up an injury that sees them sidelined for 28 days or more is eligible for compensation through the CPP, with FIFA stepping in to cover the wages of that individual. It does little to help with the inconvenience of the player being unavailable, but there is at least financial support to soften the blow.
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FIFA’s current version of the CPP, spanning four years between 2023 and the end of 2026, ensures any professional footballer employed by a club is covered when away with their national team. It begins from the moment they leave their club’s base to the point they return to it, and covers all international matches, training sessions and travel.
Any serious injury — or what FIFA calls “a temporary total disablement” — accidentally ruling a player out sees the CPP come into play.
Significant amounts. According to the circular to member associations signed off by FIFA’s then secretary general Fatma Samoura in the summer of 2023, one injury could see a club claim as much as €7.5million (£6.6m, $8.7m) to cover that player’s wages inside a year, which works out as a capped-day rate of €20,548.
That figure is there to cover the basic salary, excluding bonuses and image rights, of the injured player and nothing more, such as medical expenses.
So, if a player earning £20,000 a week suffers a hamstring injury playing for his country that rules him out for 12 weeks, FIFA will distribute £240,000 to his club to cover his salary needs during the period when unavailable. A six-month lay-off for a player earning £40,000 a week, meanwhile, would bring compensation of just over £1million ($1.3m).
FIFA’s compensation framework ought to be enough to fully cover the vast majority of international footballers but the biggest names on the highest wages fall outside its limits. That capped rate ensures the most a player could be earning and have their salary matched completely by FIFA is roughly £120,000 a week.
So global stars such as Erling Haaland of Manchester City and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah would only have a small portion of their wages covered if they were injured while away with Norway and Egypt. Cristiano Ronaldo’s Saudi Arabian employers Al Nassr, meanwhile, could only claim for a fraction of his wages if problems arose when he was on Portugal duty.
FIFA, too, covers itself through the CPP. Its annual pot only stretches to €80million, so if there were an improbable flood of serious injuries to players on international duty, not every club would be able to claw back wages on their sidelined players.
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The CPP covers men’s and women’s internationals, but it is worth noting that it does not compensate for the loss of a player turning out for their country at youth levels, which includes under-21s football.
That means Brentford, for example, were not eligible for a payout after Antoni Milambo suffered an ACL injury when playing for the Netherlands Under-21s in October. The midfielder, signed from Feyenoord in his homeland for £16million in July, will not play again this season.
It is. That is a scheme devised for the Men’s World Cup, with hundreds of clubs around the globe benefitting when sport’s biggest tournament is played every four years. Not only are clubs who directly release players to feature at the World Cup rewarded, those who played a part in a player’s recent development also get a slice of the pie.
At the most recent men’s World Cup, in 2022, FIFA committed approximately $10,000 for each player for every day they spent away from their clubs. Any player who went all the way to the Argentina vs France final, regardless of their involvement, brought their clubs a payment in the region of $370,000.
A total pot of $209million covered the cost of borrowing players for those finals, with 440 clubs from 51 FIFA member associations receiving payouts.
That figure for the Club Benefits Programme will be higher still at the 2026 World Cup. Those finals, played across the United States, Mexico and Canada, will see FIFA distribute $355million to clubs, an increase of almost 70 per cent.
For the first time, that will include payments due for a player used in World Cup qualifiers, but the kitty also needed to be expanded with 48 teams, as opposed to the 32-strong fields we’ve seen since the 1990s, featuring in an expanded tournament next June and July.
Assuming it is going to be 26-man squads as in 2022, up from the prior limit of 23, that will be the clubs of 1,248 players in need of compensation.
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