The Transfer Fee That Keeps Travelling: How FIFA Solidarity Payments Work

Watkins completed his move to Saudi Arabia on 30 August for a reported fee of around £51m. Shortly afterwards, Exeter confirmed that they expect to receive money from the transaction because Watkins spent much of his development at their academy.

The club does not yet know exactly how much it will receive or when the money will arrive. Exeter have warned supporters that the process may take time and that, depending on the terms of the transfer, payments could arrive in instalments over several years.

But we can estimate the entitlement.

What is FIFA’s solidarity mechanism?

The principle is relatively simple: when clubs invest in developing young footballers, FIFA wants them to retain an economic interest in that development even after the player has moved elsewhere.

Under FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, training clubs can therefore receive two types of training reward. Training compensation can become payable when a player signs a first professional contract and on certain subsequent transfers, while the solidarity mechanism gives qualifying training clubs a share of compensation generated by future transfers.

The modern process is administered through the FIFA Clearing House. Transfer information is used to create an electronic player passport recording the clubs responsible for training the player, after which FIFA determines the allocation and the Clearing House facilitates payment to those clubs.

For qualifying transfers, up to 5% of the transfer compensation is allocated to clubs involved in training the player during the relevant development years.

That 5% figure is where the Watkins reporting can become misleading.

Exeter do not simply receive 5% of £51m.

Why £2.55m doesn’t all go to Exeter

Five per cent of a £51m transfer is £2.55m.

But that is the overall solidarity pool to be distributed according to the player’s training history, not automatically the payment to one academy.

FIFA weights the development years differently. The seasons associated with a player’s 12th to 15th birthdays attract a smaller allocation, equivalent to 0.25% of the transfer compensation for each qualifying year. From the seasons associated with the 16th through 23rd birthdays, that doubles to 0.5% for each year.

Watkins was born on 30 December 1995 and joined Exeter’s academy as a child. He remained with Exeter until his move to Brentford in July 2017.

On that reported development history, Exeter appear to account for the qualifying years from 12 through 21. Applied to a £51m transfer, the calculation looks like this:

Development period	Exeter allocation	Estimated value
Ages 12–15	1.00% of transfer fee	£510,000
Ages 16–21	3.00% of transfer fee	£1,530,000
Estimated Exeter entitlement	4.00%	£2,040,000

There is, however, an important technical complication. FIFA’s calculation is based on the player’s precise registration history and the final electronic player passport rather than simply his age when a transfer was announced. Partial seasons and exact registration dates can affect the allocation — and because Watkins moved to Brentford partway through 2017, the final qualifying season may require a pro-rata calculation rather than counting as a full year.

For that reason, The Pyramid is not treating £2.04m — or any more precise figure derived from it — as Exeter’s confirmed entitlement. Exeter themselves say they are awaiting further details, while FIFA explicitly states that even its own public Training Rewards Calculator produces estimates rather than legally binding amounts.

Current estimates around the transaction have generally put Exeter’s potential receipt at up to approximately £2m. The final allocation will be determined through FIFA’s process, using the actual electronic player passport rather than an age-based approximation.

The important point is that a meaningful portion of a £51m transaction between Aston Villa and Al-Hilal can travel all the way back to a lower-league club that last employed the player nine years ago.

This isn’t a sell-on clause

That distinction is worth understanding because Exeter have already made millions from Watkins through a completely different mechanism.

When Exeter sold him to Brentford in 2017, the deal included a contractual interest in a future transfer. Brentford subsequently sold Watkins to Aston Villa in 2020, triggering a substantial payment back to Exeter.

A sell-on clause exists because two clubs negotiated it into their transfer agreement.

A solidarity payment exists because FIFA’s regulations provide a reward for qualifying clubs that trained and developed the player.

That difference matters. A club can negotiate a poor sell-on clause, a brilliant one or none at all. The solidarity mechanism follows the player’s qualifying development record rather than relying on the selling club having negotiated such a clause years earlier.

For academies further down the pyramid, that creates the possibility of an unusually long financial tail from developing a successful player.

The initial transfer does not necessarily end the economic relationship.

The Ollie Watkins cash trail

Watkins is an unusually good example.

Exeter developed him through their academy before selling him to Brentford for an initial fee of around £1.8m in 2017. His subsequent move from Brentford to Aston Villa generated another multimillion-pound payment for Exeter through the sell-on arrangements negotiated in the original deal.

Now comes Al-Hilal.

Nine years after Exeter sold Watkins, a transaction between clubs in Birmingham and Riyadh could produce another payment approaching £2m for the club in Devon.

The mechanisms are different, but the underlying economics are the same. Exeter invested in developing a player whose value continued increasing long after he left the club, and part of that value has repeatedly travelled back down the chain.

For a Premier League club operating in a transfer market measured in tens of millions, a payment of this size is relatively small.

For Exeter, it is anything but.

Why £2m matters so much at Exeter

The timing provides an unusually clear demonstration of why solidarity payments matter.

Exeter have experienced significant financial pressure over the past year. The Supporters’ Trust has provided around £600,000 of loans to help the club through cash-flow difficulties, while redundancies and budget reductions have formed part of attempts to stabilise the business. In March, the club’s interim chairman said he expected Exeter to begin the 2026/27 season solvent but with reduced playing costs.

The club has also brought forward future transfer receipts to generate immediate liquidity. In December 2025, Exeter confirmed a banking transaction that accelerated deferred transfer money associated with former academy player Jay Stansfield.

Against that background, the potential Watkins payment looks very different from a pleasant academy bonus.

A payment approaching £2m would be more than three times the £600,000 subsequently provided by Exeter’s owners, the Supporters’ Trust, during the club’s liquidity problems.

It also reinforces something increasingly visible in Exeter’s financial model: developing players does not simply generate occasional exceptional profits. Transfer-related income can provide working capital, fund investment and help bridge the structural gap between the cost of operating a competitive professional football club and the recurring revenues Exeter can generate themselves.

The club’s response to the Watkins transfer reflects that reality. Exeter have said any money eventually received will be used to “protect and strengthen the long-term security of the club.”

That is rather different from announcing a new transfer budget.

Why the mechanism matters below the EFL

Watkins is an exceptional player, and £51m transfers are exceptional transactions. Most solidarity payments will obviously be far smaller.

The principle nevertheless matters throughout the pyramid.

A lower-league or non-league club can invest years in a young footballer only to lose that player relatively early in his career. If the player subsequently develops into something far more valuable, solidarity creates a mechanism through which part of that later value can return to the organisations responsible for his development.

FIFA’s Clearing House is designed to make that process more systematic. The electronic player passport identifies the clubs involved in a player’s development, FIFA establishes the entitlement and the Clearing House acts as the payment intermediary.

That matters particularly for smaller clubs because the relative value of the payment increases dramatically as you move down the pyramid.

A £100,000 solidarity receipt barely registers beside the revenues of an elite club. At a small professional or semi-professional club, £100,000 can fund wages, academy operations, ground improvements or a meaningful portion of an annual playing budget.

A seven-figure payment can alter the financial position of the entire organisation.

There is also an incentive embedded in the mechanism. If clubs know that successfully developing a player can produce financial returns beyond the initial transfer, investing in youth development becomes more economically rational.

The player can leave.

The development value does not necessarily leave with him.

The value of knowing where a player came from

There is a broader lesson here for understanding football transfers.

When a £51m deal is announced, attention naturally concentrates on the buying club, selling club, player and agent. But the actual flow of money can be considerably wider.

There may be instalments. Add-ons. Agent fees. Sell-on clauses. Training compensation. Solidarity contributions. Previous clubs can retain economic exposure to a player without holding any ownership interest in him at all.

That means the headline transfer fee is only the beginning of the financial story.

For The Pyramid, the interesting question whenever a major player developed lower down the system moves internationally is therefore not simply how much did the buying club pay?

It is also: who else gets paid?

In Watkins’ case, one answer is likely to be Exeter City.

Why it matters

Ollie Watkins left Exeter in 2017. Since then he has played for Brentford, Aston Villa and now Al-Hilal, while the club that developed him has remained several divisions and financial worlds away.

Yet the economic connection between player and academy never entirely disappeared.

Exeter received their original transfer fee when Watkins joined Brentford. Their negotiated sell-on arrangements generated millions more when Brentford sold him to Aston Villa. Now, nine years after he left St James Park, FIFA’s solidarity mechanism could send another substantial payment back to Devon.

The exact figure will only become clear once the FIFA process establishes Exeter’s entitlement and the relevant transfer compensation. But at anything approaching £2m, the significance is obvious for a club that recently required £600,000 of Supporters’ Trust loans to navigate its cash-flow problems.

That is why solidarity payments are more than an obscure line in FIFA’s transfer regulations. They allow some of the enormous transfer values generated at the top of football to travel backwards through a player’s career to the clubs that helped create that value in the first place.

For the biggest clubs, it can be a rounding error.

For the club that developed the player, it can help secure another season.