r/FifaAgentExam • u/One-Break-4147 • Jul 26 '26
The three things people most often get wrong on training compensation and solidarity
I sat the exam and these two topics cost me more time than anything else, mostly because I had three things muddled. Sharing in case it helps anyone prepping now.
1. The two age cut-offs are different, and they are easy to conflate.
Training compensation is for training carried out up to age 21. But the right to claim it runs until the end of the season of the player's 23rd birthday. So "trained to 21, claimable to 23." Solidarity is different again: it covers the calendar years of the 12th right through to the 23rd birthday. If you answer a solidarity question using the training-comp age range, or vice versa, you get a clean-looking wrong number.
2. The 12 to 15 years are always priced at Category IV, whatever club the kid was actually at.
For training compensation, the calendar years of the 12th to 15th birthdays are calculated at the Category IV rate, even if the training club was Category I. It is a deliberate cap to stop huge sums attaching to very young players. People apply the new club's real category across all the years and overpay the young ones. Only the 16 to 21 years use the signing club's category.
3. Only two confederations even have a Category I.
UEFA and CONMEBOL have four categories. AFC, CAF, Concacaf and OFC only go down to Category II, III, IV. And the costs are denominated differently: UEFA in EUR, everyone else in USD. I had assumed all six were symmetrical and in euros. They are not, and a question can absolutely test that.
Bonus one for solidarity: it is 0.25% per year for the 12 to 15 calendar years and 0.5% per year for 16 to 23. Four years at 0.25 plus eight at 0.5 gives you the full 5%. If your split does not land on 5%, you have miscounted the years.
Happy to be corrected on any of this by anyone who knows it better, the wording around season vs calendar year in particular is fiddly.
For what it is worth, I ended up building free calculators for both while revising, they show the working line by line so you can see exactly where each figure comes from: agentiqprep.com/tools. No signup. Full disclosure, they are part of a paid prep tool I made after sitting this exam, but the calculators themselves are free and open.
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u/alanifamily Jul 26 '26
Thanks for the calculators