FIFPRO agrees to develop system that will give players ability to control their own performance data

Global players union FIFPRO and its 66 member unions have agreed to develop a data management system that will give individual players the ability to store and control their own performance data throughout their careers.

A debate has been raging for years about who owns the millions of data points collected from players every game and training session, with ex-manager Russell Slade leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 1,400 cricket, football and rugby players against the betting firms and gaming companies he claims have been using player data without paying the players for it.

The legal basis of Slade’s “Project Red Card” lawsuit is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in the European Union and European Economic Area in 2016. This piece of legislation gave individuals more protection in terms of how their personal data is collected and shared, and it has been copied by governments around the world.

According to Project Red Card, the performance data collected from professional athletes should be treated in the same way as personal data under GDPR. This means anyone wanting to use this data for commercial reasons – such as designing an accurate, football-based computer game or setting betting odds – should seek permission and, if granted, pay for it.

FIFPRO is not a party to Project Red Card, which is seeking backdated payments of more than £500million from over 150 different companies, but has been pushing the football authorities to come up with minimum standards for how player data should be treated. Last year, the union teamed up with world governing body FIFA to create a charter of player data rights.

But the Netherlands-based organisation wants to go one step further by providing every player with their own secure, cloud-based database that can store performance data collected in different competitions, including international tournaments, and follow them from club to club.

And, having secured the agreement of its member unions, FIFPRO will now start talking to technology partners about building a robust and affordable system that will work for every professional footballer, male and female.