FIFPRO Europe launches new analysis: Protecting the infrastructure behind football’s global economy

• New report by FIFPRO Europe, Player IQ and Football Benchmark shows that European-based players account for 94% of total player value at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, highlighting Europe’s role as an employment hub for football’s global workforce
• Findings show why the infrastructure underpinning football’s global workforce cannot be treated as a sellable and undervalued asset, as the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal sought to do, putting the global development and solidarity system at risk
• Evidence strengthens the case for trusted and inclusive governance, including an independent review of FIFA Council decision-making and the formal integration of professional football stakeholders into how the game is governed

FIFPRO Europe, in cooperation with Player IQ and Football Benchmark, have released today Protecting the Global Player Workforce, a data driven analysis of the value the European employment market and its players contribute to the global game, and inviting closer cooperation and coordination among all stakeholders, global and European, on the governance reforms it points to. 

The report, focused predominantly on the 2026 FIFA World Cup, uses the tournament to illustrate the global nature of the player workforce and the interconnected employment market that underpins it.

A Global Resource and a global gateway for all players and confederations

The report shows that football's global value is created by one global workforce, drawn from every confederation, with European professional football operating as its principal employment and value-creation hub.  This eco-system does not generate this value alone. It depends on the talent that arrives in it from every part of the world, and on the professional development of the game across the globe.

Every individual award of the last five editions of the FIFA World Cup — Golden Ball, Golden Boot, Best Young Player, Golden Glove — was won by a player with a European employment contract, and of the 856 players employed within the European market at the 2026 World Cup, 451 are non-European nationals, generating 33% of the tournament's total player value: the clearest evidence of a shared gateway, not a closed system. 

That global character extends beyond the players who compete within it: investment into this infrastructure itself is increasingly international, with around 40% of Big-Five league clubs holding a non-European majority owner in 2025/26 — further evidence that the European employment market is a global gateway that needs to be governed responsibly, not sold behind closed doors.

Protecting the global football ecosystem and Value Creation 

Safeguarding this interconnected ecosystem is essential to protecting the global development and solidarity system that depends upon it. Recognising how that value is created, and sustaining the conditions that support it, is central to the future growth, investment and solidarity of the global game as a whole. Sixty per cent of 2026 World Cup player value is already concentrated among just 20 releasing employers — all European — illustrating the extent to which FIFA's flagship global competition depends on value created across the wider professional football ecosystem. FIFA’s global distributions, including the USD 2.25 billion FIFA Forward programme, ultimately depend on the collective success of this competition.  

Yet the share of FIFA World Cup revenue returned as prize money to competing federations has fallen from an estimated 10.5% in 2006 to around 7.7% in 2026, even as tournament revenues have multiplied. Players receive only a fraction of that return, while participating federations rely on it as FIFA's only performance-based revenue stream. Players, clubs, employment markets and national federations are therefore not simply beneficiaries of the global system. They help finance it.

This year's FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal showed what happens when that principle is set aside: an attempt to convert the game's core competitions into a tradeable and even undervalued financial asset, developed unilaterally and without the professional football stakeholders and the entire football ecosystem whose work contributes significantly to the value in question. FFE was withdrawn. The governance gap that allowed the global ecosystem to be put at risk continues to exist. 

Advancing Solidarity through trusted governance, not unilateral decision-making

FIFPRO Europe's objection to FFE was never an objection to raising funds for under-resourced confederations — that goal is shared. The objection was, and remains, to unilateral aspirations dressed as a solidarity mechanism designed and imposed without the consent, transparency or participation of the players, clubs, leagues and federations whose work sustains it. Any future proposal to grow solidarity funding should be built together, through trusted governance, not advanced unilaterally.

FIFPRO and FIFPRO Europe call for an independent review of the FIFA Council's executive decision-making function, so that no single office can act unilaterally again, and for the formal integration of professional football stakeholders — the players, clubs and leagues that create the game's value — into that decision-making, alongside Member Associations. It is a shared opportunity for the global football community to strengthen football's governance, so that it reflects and serves everyone who sustains and depends on the game.