Aston Villa’s FIFA Compensation for Emi Martinez
This week, FIFA declared that their Club Benefits Programme, a kind of compensation fund for the use of players for the Qatar World Cup, paid Aston Villa $834,058 (circa £637,500) in compensation. Almost half of this amount was for Emi Martinez reaching the final with Argentina.
FIFA pay a daily amount of $10,950 for each of 837 footballers at the World Cup, regardless of how many minutes they played during the tournament. The amount is then multiplied by the number of days that each player spent in Qatar, starting from their release for the tournament and ending on the day after the final match of the player’s national team.
The maximum a team could receive for an individual player who made the final with either Argentina or France was $394,215
Aston Villa though didn’t receive the total compensation amount for Emi Martinez. They actually received $361,364, with $32,851 going to Arsenal.
The Club Benefits Programme benefits the teams that a player was registered for the two years prior to the World Cup (which covers the qualification phase), so who they were registered to for the 2020/21 season, the 2021/22 season and when the World Cup started.
Since Martinez started the 2020/21 season an Arsenal player, signing for Villa on 16 September 2020, that’s why Arsenal got a percentage of the payout.
However, if Villa lost out there, they got that money back and some with Jack Grealish.
Jack Grealish Bonus Bounty
Just when you thought getting £100m was enough for Jack Grealish, Villa received a further bonus payment for Grealish’s involvement in Qatar.
Grealish, started and played the whole of the 2020/21 season, as a Villa player. The England international signed for Manchester City on the 5th August 2021.
Although the weighting of the three registration periods is unclear, and the specific amount for Grealish is not listed in FIFA’s report, we can estimate it based on the figures provided. Fulham received $98,553 for Alphonse Areola’s participation in the entire 2020/21 season at Craven Cottage, while Nice obtained $65,702 for William Saliba’s six-month loan period during the same season. Therefore, the amount for Grealish should fall within this range. This is despite England getting knocked out at the quarter-final stage and leaving the tournament eight days before Argentina or France did, which would shave a few thousand dollars off the amount.
Missing Million
When looking back in hindsight, there’s definitely a sense of what could have been. injuries didn’t help, when both Boubacar Kamara and Lucas Digne missed the cut for the French squad. Steven Gerrard favouring Philippe Coutinho over Emi Buendia, put the final nail in the coffin of his Argentine World Cup squad hopes. Then of course, Gerrard freezing out Tyrone Mings at the start of the season, also compromised his chances of an England call-up. Who knows? There could have been close to a million extra dollars in the Villa Club Benefits Programme payment kitty.
Let’s hope Unai Emery is still around come the next World Cup.
Aston Villa FIFA Compensation amount compared to other English teams
UTV
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