According to FIFA, “the September 2020 reform took into account several situations deemed to be excessively severe or rigorous which were pointed out by member associations or revealed in practice, and codified the jurisprudence of the FIFA Statute Commission. Player”.
In this regard, four new exceptions allowing a change of association have been added.
Among these exceptions is the one “rectifying the excessive rigor applied when a player holding several nationalities or a “common nationality” has played for a member association in an official competition, in any football discipline whatsoever, at international level “A”, over a limited number of matches or even for a few minutes during a single match.
In general, FIFA details in this document the eligibility criteria, the meaning of the term “nationality”, the principles of acquiring a new nationality, the situation of stateless persons, and the change of association.
According to FIFA, “the primary objective of the document is to provide all stakeholders with further information on the conditions that players must meet in order to play in the national team.”
The publication of the Commentary is “following the increase in the number of requests to be processed by the FIFA Players’ Status Committee in relation to this subject, the need to provide legal certainty to football stakeholders and the approval in 2020 by the FIFA Congress of the first major revision of the rules governing player eligibility since 2008”, explains the world body.
In its first version, the FIFA regulations simply provided that a player was eligible to play in a representative team of a football association as long as he held the nationality of the territory in which the football association concerned was domiciled. Once the player had played with the representative team of this football association in official competition (whatever the level), he was linked to the “sporting nationality” attached to the latter for the entire duration of his career. in international football. The only exception was for players whose nationality had been changed involuntarily.
Between 2004 and 2008, new rules were introduced, which allowed, among other things, players to change their sporting nationality (on condition of respecting certain objective criteria), to rule on cases of players having a “common nationality” (to several associations) and to rule on cases of players having acquired a new nationality.
On 18 September 2020, the FIFA Congress adopted the first fundamental modernization of the regulations governing eligibility since the FIFA Congress in May 2008.
2024-09-29 10:39:24