Personal Terms in Football: What Players Agree and When

Two contracts are signed in every permanent transfer, and only one of them is about the fee. The first is the transfer agreement between the selling club and the buying club, which moves the player's registration for a price. The second is the player's employment contract with his new club. Personal terms are the contents of that second contract: wages, length, signing-on fee, bonuses and every clause attached to them.

So when a report says a club has "agreed personal terms" with a player, it means the player and the buying club have settled his pay and conditions. It does not mean the transfer is done. A fee without personal terms is a sale nobody can complete; personal terms without a fee are an agreement to join a club that has not bought him. In English football both must be in place, a medical passed, the contract signed and the registration accepted by the Premier League or the EFL and by the FA before the player can play.

Personal terms in football: the player's deal, not the clubs'

Picture the moment a transfer is announced. The selling club gets a fee. The buying club gets a player. Between those two outcomes sits a negotiation the supporters rarely see, between the buying club and the player's representative, about what he will earn and for how long.

That negotiation is the personal terms. It covers everything the player himself is promised. The basic wage, which in England is quoted per week. The length of the contract and any option years. A signing-on fee, paid in instalments. Bonuses for appearances, goals, clean sheets, league position and trophies. A loyalty bonus, if one is offered. Clauses that adjust his pay on relegation or promotion. A release clause, where the player's side wins one. Image rights, if they are separately contracted. And, alongside the player's terms but not part of them, the commission his agent will be paid.

The fee is none of the player's business in a formal sense. He is not a party to the transfer agreement and does not sign it. In practice he cares a great deal, because a buying club that has spent heavily on the fee has less to spend on wages, and his agent knows that.

Why the distinction matters to a reader

Reports in English football use both phrases loosely, and a lot of confusion comes from that. "Fee agreed" is a deal between clubs. "Personal terms agreed" is a deal between club and player. "Here we go", or "done deal", is supposed to mean both, plus a medical. A transfer that collapses after a fee is agreed has almost always collapsed on personal terms or on the medical, and a transfer that collapses after personal terms are agreed has almost always collapsed on the fee. Knowing which agreement is in place tells a supporter which kind of risk is left.

Two agreements, three parties

Three parties, two documents. The table sets out who signs which.

Document	Parties	What it settles	Who must sign
Transfer agreement	Selling club and buying club	Fee, instalments, add-ons, sell-on clause	Both clubs
Employment contract	Buying club and player	Wages, length, bonuses, clauses	The player and the buying club
Image rights agreement, if any	Buying club and the player's image rights company	Payments for commercial use of the player's image	The club and the company
Representation contract	Player or club and the agent	The agent's commission	Whoever engages the agent
Registration documents	Buying club, league and FA	Transfer of the registration	Club secretary, with league approval

The selling club is not a party to the player's new employment contract, and the player is not a party to the transfer agreement. This is the root of most collapses.

Either agreement can fail while the other is done

The clubs can reach a full transfer agreement, including instalments and a sell-on clause of the kind described in our guide to sell-on clauses, and the player can still refuse to sign. The buying club has bought nothing until he does, and nothing in the rules can compel him.

Equally a player can agree everything with the buying club, wages and all, while the clubs are still apart on the fee. If the selling club will not accept the bid, the player's agreement is worthless, because the selling club still holds his registration and he is still bound by his existing contract. He can ask to leave, but that is his own decision and comes with its own costs, which our page on the transfer request in football sets out.

1. 1Clubs negotiateThe buying and selling clubs settle the fee and how it will be paid
2. 2Permission to speakThe selling club allows the buyer to discuss terms with the player
3. 3Player negotiatesThe agent and the buying club settle wages, length, bonuses and clauses
4. 4Both agreements signedTransfer agreement between clubs, employment contract with the player
5. 5RegistrationThe league and the FA accept the paperwork and the player is registered

The usual order in an English transfer of a contracted player; free transfers and loans run differently and are covered further down the page.

What sits inside a set of personal terms

The headline wage is rarely the largest single cost of a player. A set of personal terms is a package, and the parts are paid on different triggers.

Term	What it is	How it is usually paid
Basic wage	The fixed salary for being under contract	Weekly or monthly, quoted gross per week
Contract length	The fixed term, sometimes with a club option to extend	Not paid; it sets how long the wage runs
Signing-on fee	A lump sum for agreeing to join	Spread in instalments over the contract
Loyalty bonus	A payment for remaining at the club	On set dates, usually conditional on no transfer request
Appearance fee	A sum for each match played or each time named in the squad	Per match
Performance bonuses	Goals, assists, clean sheets, team results	Per event or at season's end
Collective bonuses	League position, trophies, qualification for Europe	Through the club's squad bonus scheme
Relegation and promotion clauses	Adjustments to pay on a change of division	Automatically on the change
Release clause	A fee at which the club must allow talks with a buyer	Not paid to the player; it limits the club
Image rights	Payment for use of the player's image	Under a separate agreement with his image rights company
Agent's commission	Fee for representation	By the player, or by the club on his behalf

Two items in that table produce most of the arguments.

Option years

A club option allows the club, not the player, to extend the contract for a further year on terms set in advance. Clubs like options because they protect the asset: a player whose contract would expire can be kept for another season by the club's decision alone. Players and agents dislike them for the same reason. Whether the extension is automatic, by notice, or conditional on a number of appearances, is negotiated, and an option is often traded against a higher wage.

Relegation clauses

A relegation clause reduces the player's wage if the club drops a division, often by a set percentage. Clubs in the lower half of the Premier League have long used them to protect themselves against the collapse in income that follows the drop. Players on long deals sometimes accept them in exchange for a larger signing-on fee. The mirror image, a promotion clause raising the wage if a club goes up, is common in the EFL.

The release clause is a rarity in English contracts compared with Spain, where the law requires one. Our release clause guide explains why English clubs resist them and what happens when one is triggered.

Which comes first: the bid or the terms

Formally, English football has a clear order. The buying club makes an offer for the player's registration. The selling club accepts it. The selling club gives the buying club written permission to speak to the player. Then, and only then, the buying club and the player's agent negotiate personal terms. Talking to a contracted player before permission is granted is an illegal approach under the Premier League and EFL rules.

That is the rulebook. It is not how most transfers happen.

In practice the buying club almost always knows, before it bids, roughly what the player will cost in wages and whether he wants to come. It finds out through his agent, through intermediaries, or through conversations that never quite count as an approach. An agent who has been told nothing about a club's interest will usually know about it, and will have told the club's sporting director what his client expects to earn. A club that bids without that knowledge risks paying a fee for a player who will then refuse to sign.

Why the order is out of step with the rules

The rules on approaches assume the clubs can settle a fee in ignorance of what the player wants. No sensible club will do that for a significant transfer, because the risk of a collapse is too high. So the conversations happen first, in a form that leaves no evidence, and the formal steps are then followed in the right order, at speed. When the bid is accepted, personal terms are agreed "within hours" because they were settled weeks before in outline.

That is why a club's statement that personal terms are "not expected to be a problem" is, translated, a confirmation that the club already knows the figures. The rules on how far that informal contact can go, and what happens when it goes too far, are on our page about tapping up in football.

For an out-of-contract player the order is different. There is no fee to agree and no club's permission to obtain, so the terms come first and last. They are the whole transfer.

Who does the negotiating

The player is usually not in the room.

The negotiation runs between the player's agent and the buying club's representative, who may be a sporting director, a director of football, a chief negotiator, or at smaller clubs the chief executive or the chairman. Larger clubs employ specialists whose job is the money: they hold the wage structure, know the club's limits, and decide how much of a package to put in basic wage and how much in bonuses. The manager may speak to the player about how he will be used, which matters to a player choosing between clubs, but he rarely negotiates figures.

The agent's role

The agent argues the player's case, in money and in clauses. He knows his client's current wages, what rival clubs have offered and what other players in the buying club's squad earn, and he uses all three. He also has his own interest: his commission, which is usually agreed at the same time. FIFA's Football Agent Regulations, phased in during 2023, require agents to hold a FIFA licence, and the FA keeps its own registration and rules for agents working in English football. How the agent's fee is calculated, who pays it and why a club often pays it on the player's behalf are explained in our guide to football agent fees in England.

The lawyers

Once the commercial points are agreed, lawyers for the club and for the player turn them into documents: the schedule of individual terms that attaches to the standard contract, any image rights agreement, and side letters on matters such as relocation. A deal agreed at one in the morning on deadline day may be drafted overnight from a template, which is where mistakes creep in.

What the player decides

The player approves the final package and signs the contract. He decides between clubs if he has the choice. Many players say afterwards that they let their agent handle the figures and thought only about the football, and that is broadly how the system is built. It is also why an agent's fee can become the obstacle to a deal the player himself wants.

The standard contract under the personal terms

Every professional player in the Premier League and the EFL signs a standard basic contract. It is not drafted for him. It is a standard form set out in the league's handbook, agreed between the leagues and the Professional Footballers' Association. The Premier League and the EFL each publish their own version, but the two are close, and within a league the form is the same whether the player is a nineteen-year-old on the fringe or an international captain.

The standard terms cover the obligations both sides have. The player's duty to train, play when selected and keep himself fit. The club's duty to provide training and medical treatment. Rules on conduct, injury, sick pay, holiday, and what happens if the player is injured long-term. The disciplinary procedure and the limits on fines. The grievance procedure. Termination for serious breach. The release of players for international duty.

None of those clauses can be negotiated away. An agent cannot buy his client out of the disciplinary procedure or the training obligations, and a club cannot impose a fine above the limit in the contract by writing it into the player's schedule.

The schedule at the back

The personal terms live in a schedule. The schedule sets out the individual terms: the basic wage and the dates it rises, the signing-on fee and when each instalment falls due, the bonuses, the loyalty payments and any special clauses. It also records the agent's involvement. When the contract is lodged with the league, the schedule goes with it, and the league checks it against its rules: whether payments are permitted, whether a bonus is properly disclosed, whether anything is being paid outside the contract.

That last point is why everything goes in writing. A payment promised to a player outside the registered contract, by a club or a third party, breaches the leagues' rules. The arrangements that have caused the biggest scandals in English football transfers have nearly always involved money paid outside the schedule.

The way English clubs pay signing-on fees, in instalments over the contract, means a player's signing-on money is mostly still to come at any point in his deal. Our transfer request guide explains why that matters if he wants to leave early.

Gross per week against net per year

English football quotes wages in a way almost no one else does.

A wage reported in England as £100,000 a week is a gross basic wage, before income tax and National Insurance, paid weekly or monthly and quoted per week. That figure does not include the signing-on fee, bonuses, loyalty payments or image rights. Players, agents, clubs and the press all use the weekly gross figure because English football has paid by the week since its early professional era.

Continental football, in Spain and Italy above all, discusses wages differently. A player's salary there is usually stated as an annual figure, and very often net of tax, the sum the player actually receives. A Spanish club offering a player a net annual salary has to pay much more than that once the tax is added.

What the difference does to a negotiation

The two conventions collide in every cross-border transfer. A player at an Italian club accustomed to a net annual figure will ask what he takes home. An English club thinks in gross weekly cost. An agent can exploit the gap by quoting whichever form makes the offer look worse.

An illustration, with round numbers. A wage of £100,000 a week gross is £5.2 million a year gross. A UK taxpayer at that level pays the additional rate of income tax on most of it, plus employee National Insurance, so he keeps somewhere a little over half. The precise figure depends on allowances, the tax year and how the rest of his income is structured, and the illustration ignores all of that.

Gross annual, as an English club quotes it5.2m

Approximate net annual, as a continental club might2.77m

An arithmetic illustration only, assuming £100,000 a week gross and UK additional-rate tax plus employee National Insurance; it ignores allowances, bonuses, image rights and any change in tax rates.

Show the numbers

The same wage stated two ways, in £ millions per year

Item	Value
Gross annual, as an English club quotes it	5.2m
Approximate net annual, as a continental club might	2.77m

Where the bonuses sit in the headline

The weekly figure in a report is basic wage only, and at many clubs it is a smaller share of total pay than supporters assume. A club wary of fixed costs will offer a lower basic wage and a richer bonus schedule, so that the player earns the headline-grabbing sum only when he plays and the team does well. A player confident of his place may accept that structure; one who fears the bench will push for the guaranteed money. Two offers with the same "per week" figure can therefore be worth very different amounts, and an agent comparing them looks first at what is guaranteed and only then at what is possible.

The difference is more than presentation. An English club negotiating with a player who expects a net figure is negotiating over a sum roughly twice as large on its own books. Clubs that have failed to make that clear have lost deals at the last stage when the player discovered the number in his contract was not the number he had thought he was agreeing to. Our guide to Premier League wage bills explains how those gross figures add up across a squad.

Why talks fail after a fee is agreed

A collapse after the clubs have agreed a fee has a short list of causes. They are mechanical, and they are the same at every level.

The wage structure

Every club has one, written or not. A player's demand that would make him the highest earner in a squad threatens every other negotiation the club will have, because the dressing room finds out what everyone earns. A club may refuse a demand it can afford because paying it would mean renegotiating with five other players within a year.

Contract length

Older players want longer deals, for security. Clubs want shorter ones, to avoid paying wages for a player whose best years are behind him. A player in his late twenties asking for five years, at a club with a policy of offering three at that age, is a familiar sticking point.

The agent's fee

The commission can be larger than any single bonus in the package, and if the buying club is paying it, the club can regard it as part of the cost of the deal. An agent whose fee is not met has every reason to slow the negotiation down, and a player who trusts his agent may side with him.

Image rights

Where a player's image is held by a company, the club and the company must agree terms on the use of that image. The tax authorities scrutinise these arrangements closely and the leagues require them to be disclosed. A club with a strict policy on image rights may refuse what a player's previous club allowed.

A rival offer arriving late

The bluntest cause. A player agrees terms in principle with one club. Another club agrees a fee with the seller and offers him more. The player is under no obligation to the first club, because nothing has been signed. Deadline days have plenty of examples, and they are almost never described accurately at the time.

Tax residence and the family

Less common, but real. A player moving to England from abroad becomes a UK taxpayer, and the advice he receives on what that means for his take-home pay, his image rights company and any income he earns outside football can change his view of an offer late in the process. Family considerations sit alongside: schools, a partner's career, the city itself. None of these is a negotiating point the club can meet with money alone, and an agent who has not raised them early can find them raised for him on the last day.

The medical can also fail, though that is not about personal terms. Our guide to what happens in a football medical explains why a failed medical can mean a renegotiated fee rather than a cancelled move.

Personal terms on a loan and on a free transfer

Loans

On a loan the player's employment contract with his parent club continues. He does not sign a new one. What changes is who pays his wages. The two clubs negotiate the split: the borrowing club may cover all of his wages, part of them, or none, and the parent club pays the remainder. A loan fee may be added, and the agreement may include an option or obligation for the borrowing club to buy him at the end.

The player's terms are therefore not renegotiated so much as reallocated. He may be offered loyalty or appearance bonuses at the borrowing club, which are agreed separately, but his basic wage does not drop because he has moved. A player on a high wage is hard to loan to a lower-division club for exactly that reason, because the borrowing club cannot pay much of it, and a parent club that wants him to play somewhere has to keep paying. The limits on loans and recalls in the lower divisions are set out in our guide to EFL loan rules.

Free transfers

A player whose contract has expired joins a new club without a fee. That changes the negotiation completely. The buying club has saved the money it would have paid the selling club, and the player's agent knows it. So a free agent can ask for a substantially larger signing-on fee, and frequently a higher wage, than a player bought for a fee would get. The saving on the fee is, in effect, shared between the club and the player.

Free transfers in England exist in their current form because of freedom of contract in 1978 and the Bosman ruling of 1995. The background is on our page about the Bosman ruling and English free transfers.

A first professional contract

The personal terms on a teenager's first professional deal are a different negotiation, and the rules on minors shape them.

Academy players in England can sign as scholars at sixteen and can sign a first professional contract at seventeen. Under FIFA's Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, a player under eighteen may not sign a professional contract longer than three years, whatever the club would like. For adults, FIFA's regulations set five years as the maximum length but allow longer contracts where national law permits them, and English law does: in January 2023 Chelsea signed Mykhailo Mudryk and Enzo Fernández on contracts of eight and a half years. The Premier League and UEFA responded by limiting how far a fee can be spread in the accounts to five years, which removed most of the incentive, but the contract length itself is a matter for negotiation.

• 16Age a scholarship can begin
• 17Earliest age for a professional contract
• 3Longest contract for a player under 18

Limits set by FIFA's transfer regulations and the English youth rules; a contract signed at seventeen can be renegotiated when the player turns eighteen. FIFA's five-year ceiling for adults gives way to national law, and English law allows longer.

The parent's part

Because the player is a minor, a parent or guardian must sign as well. The parent's signature is a requirement in the registration rules, not a formality. The player may also have an agent, and the rules on representing minors are stricter than for adults; agents are restricted in how they can be paid for representing a player under eighteen.

What is usually on offer

A first professional contract for an academy player is shaped by the club's own scale. The basic wage is modest at most clubs, with bonuses for first-team appearances, and the length is two or three years. The club wants to lock in a prospect. The player and his family want enough security to commit to the club rather than leave at eighteen. Our guide to what age a player can sign a professional contract covers scholarships, the switch to professional terms and the compensation that applies if a young player moves.

From agreed to signed to registered

A deal reported as agreed has not been completed, and every step between the two can fail.

Heads of terms. The commercial points, set out in a short document or exchange of emails. Not usually binding as a contract, and not signed by everyone involved.

Medical. The player is examined by the buying club's doctors. A failed medical can end the deal or lead to a revised fee and terms.

Signature. The player signs his employment contract and any image rights agreement. The clubs sign the transfer agreement. Until then, either side can walk away.

Lodging with the league. The contract and transfer documents are sent to the Premier League or the EFL, which check them against the league's rules.

FA registration. The FA registers the player to his new club. For an international transfer, an International Transfer Certificate must be issued through FIFA's system.

Deadline. In a window, all of this must be done by the deadline. Deadline day deals sometimes complete by the deal sheet procedure, which gives clubs a short extension to submit documents if they have registered that a deal is in progress.

1. 1Heads of termsThe main commercial points are settled between club and agent
2. 2MedicalThe buying club's doctors examine the player
3. 3SignaturePlayer and clubs sign the employment and transfer documents
4. 4Lodged with the leagueThe Premier League or the EFL checks the paperwork against its rules
5. 5RegisteredThe FA registers the player, with an international certificate if needed

An outline of the usual English sequence; international transfers add the transfer certificate, and window deadlines govern the timing.

Reading the reporting

Transfer reporting has a vocabulary, and the phrases commit people to very different things.

Phrase	What it usually means	What is still to happen
Talks opened	The clubs have exchanged figures	Fee, terms, medical, signature, registration
Fee agreed	The clubs have settled the transfer agreement	Personal terms, medical, signature, registration
Personal terms agreed in principle	The headline figures are settled with the player's side	Detailed drafting, agent's fee, medical, signature
Personal terms not expected to be a problem	The club believes it knows what the player wants	Every formal step
Total agreement	Both agreements are settled in substance	Medical, signature, registration
Medical scheduled	The buying club is satisfied it has a deal	Medical result, signature, registration
Completed	Signed and registered	Nothing

"In principle" is the phrase to watch. It means the parties have agreed the main points and expect the remainder to follow, but nothing has been signed and anyone can still walk away. Deals agreed in principle fall through regularly, usually over a detail the headlines did not mention.

The judgement worth taking from all of this is simple. A transfer in English football is not done until the player is registered, and the personal terms are the part of it most likely to be described as settled when they are not. For more on how the rest of the market works, the England hub gathers our guides to English football's rules and money.