Can You Sign Free Agents Outside the Transfer Window?
Yes, English clubs can sign free agents outside the transfer window if the contract ended before deadline day. The Premier League and EFL limits, explained.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Transfers & Contracts25 min read
- FIFA registration periods a season
- 2
- Premier League senior squad places
- 25
- Longest mid-season window
- 4 weeks
- English contracts expire
- 30 June
On Monday 12 September 2022, eleven days after the summer transfer window had closed, two Premier League clubs announced new players. Newcastle United registered the goalkeeper Loris Karius. Wolverhampton Wanderers registered the striker Diego Costa. Neither club had broken a rule or been granted a favour.
So the answer is yes. An English club can sign a free agent outside the transfer window, at any point in the season, provided the player's contract had already ended when the window shut and the club has room for him under its competition's squad rules. FIFA's regulations, which the FA, the Premier League and the EFL all apply, confine registrations to two periods a year and then make an exception for exactly this kind of player. Both conditions are tighter than they sound. One is about the date he became free. The other is about the space on a list.
When a free agent can be registered and when he cannot
A transfer window does not stop a club signing a contract with anybody. What it controls is registration, the act by which a league and the FA record a player as eligible to appear for a particular club. A footballer can be employed by a club and unregistered, in which case he trains, draws his wages and watches from the stand. The window is a limit on when that registration can be made.
Every club employs somebody whose job is to know the difference, usually the club secretary, and in an injury crisis that person's answer to the manager's first question matters more than the scout's. The question is whether the player can be registered. Whether he is any good comes second.
That distinction is what makes the free-agent exception intelligible. An out-of-contract player is not registered with anyone. No club's squad is weakened when he signs, no contract is cut short, no selling club is tempted by a mid-season offer. The reasons for having a window do not apply to him.
They start to apply the moment his release looks like something arranged to get round the deadline, and the rules are drawn to catch that. The dividing line is the date his previous contract ended, measured against the date the window closed.
| Player's situation | Can an English club register him outside a window |
|---|---|
| Contract expired on 30 June and he has been unattached since | Yes |
| Contract ended by mutual agreement on or before deadline day | Yes |
| Contract ended by mutual agreement after the window had closed | Generally not until the next window opens |
| Still under contract at another club | No |
| Retired, with his last contract long expired | Yes |
| On loan, with the loan cut short | He returns to his parent club and is not free to join a third |
| Left without a club by its collapse after the deadline | Decided case by case by the governing bodies |
Two further conditions sit on top of the first. The competition has to approve the registration, as it approves every registration, and it will ask for evidence of when and how the last contract ended. And the club must be able to fit him into whatever squad limit its division imposes. A free agent who clears the first test and fails the second can be signed and cannot play.
One small thing the table hides: "outside a window" is not the same as "at any time that suits". Late in a season the competitions grow wary of new faces, and the EFL writes that wariness into a fixed date, for reasons that come later.
The exception in FIFA's rules that lets a free agent sign outside the window
Article 6 of FIFA's Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players is the source of the transfer window. Players may be registered only during one of two annual registration periods fixed by the national association. The first falls between seasons and may last no more than twelve weeks; the second falls in mid-season and may last no more than four. England has worked to this system since the 2002-03 season, when FIFA made it compulsory, and the dates are set by the FA with the leagues inside those limits.
The same article then opens a door. A professional whose contract has expired before the end of a registration period may be registered outside it. Associations are told to give due consideration to the sporting integrity of the competition when they allow it. The text speaks of expiry, and in English practice a contract cancelled by agreement before the deadline is treated the same way, which is what makes deadline-day terminations worth doing.
That is the whole of the legal basis for every October signing. It is short, and the detail that matters is the timing: the contract has to have ended before the registration period closed. The exception does not say an unattached player can sign whenever he likes. It says a player who was already unattached when the door closed can.
Why FIFA drew it this way
The window was introduced to stop two things: contracts being broken in mid-season, and competitions being distorted by clubs buying their way out of trouble in March. An unemployed player threatens neither. There is also a harder-edged reason. Forbidding a man from working at his trade for four months because of an administrative calendar would be difficult to defend in an employment court, and football's regulators have been wary of that kind of challenge ever since the Bosman case.
The sporting-integrity clause gives competitions a discretion at the margins. It is the hook on which the EFL hangs its spring cut-off, and it is the reason a league can look hard at a registration that seems contrived.
Amateur and semi-professional football works differently. Below the level where players hold professional contracts, the FA's rules and each league's own deadlines govern registration, and the picture changes from step to step of the pyramid. Everything on this page concerns professionals joining clubs in the Premier League and the EFL.
Released a week too late: the cut-off that catches clubs out
Picture a centre-half at a Championship club who has fallen out of favour. The window closes on a Monday night with him still on the books. The following Friday the club agrees to pay up part of his contract and let him go. He is now a free agent, he is fit, and a League One club with two injured defenders wants him.
It generally cannot register him until January. His contract ended after the registration period closed, so he falls outside the exception, and he is in the same position as a contracted player as far as the window is concerned.
The logic is anti-avoidance. Without the cut-off, any two clubs could complete a transfer in October by dressing it up: the first club "releases" the player by agreement, the second signs him as a free agent the next day, and a payment moves between them under some other heading. The date test closes that route cheaply. Nobody has to prove bad faith. The calendar does the work.
English football has a well-known example. Sol Campbell left Notts County by mutual consent on 24 September 2009, a little over three weeks after the summer window had shut and one match into a five-year contract. He was 35, fit and unattached, and because his release came after the deadline he could not be registered by an English club before the new year. He trained with Arsenal from October and re-signed for them on 15 January 2010, once the winter window was open.
The same reasoning explains one of the least noticed features of deadline day. Alongside the transfers and loans, a batch of contracts is ended by mutual agreement in the final hours, sometimes for players who have no club lined up. Their agents insist on it. A player released at ten o'clock on deadline night can join anyone at any time for the next four months; a player released the next morning is locked out. The settlement terms are often still being argued over as the clock runs down, and how those agreements are put together is the subject of our guide to mutual consent and early contract termination.
What a late-released player can still do
More than nothing. He can agree terms with a new club and train with it, ready to be registered on the first day of the next window. He can also look abroad. Registration periods are fixed association by association, and they do not all close on the same day. Leagues in parts of Europe and the Middle East have kept their windows open after England's has shut, and competitions that run on a calendar-year season work to a different timetable altogether. A player who has missed the English deadline by a week may find a league whose own registration period is still open.
For a professional in his thirties who expected to be playing by October, that is a thin consolation. The cut-off is the harshest part of the free-agent rules, and it falls on the player far more than on the club that left his release too late.
How a player comes to be without a club
Most free agents are made on a single day. English playing contracts run to 30 June, clubs tell their expiring players in May whether a new offer is coming, and on 1 July several hundred professionals across the four divisions are out of work. The majority find clubs during the summer. The ones still unattached in September are the pool that out-of-window signings come from, and by definition they pass the date test, because their contracts ended two months before the deadline.
The second route is early termination by agreement, already described. It produces a smaller number of players, usually older and better paid, who have been bought out of deals their clubs no longer wanted to carry.
A third group arrives through a club's failure. When Bury were expelled from the EFL on 27 August 2019 the company still existed, but it had no fixtures, and the players left on its books were tied to an employer that could not field them. When Macclesfield Town were wound up in the High Court in September 2020, the contracts ended with the club. Players in that position are free agents through no decision of their own. Whether they can be registered at once depends on when the collapse fell and on the discretion of the governing bodies.
The fourth is the smallest and the most colourful: the retired player who comes back. A footballer who retires with his contract expired is not registered with anyone, and if he changes his mind a year later he is as free as a man can be. Dismissal for misconduct makes a free agent too, though one whose former club may be pursuing him for damages.
What unites the four is that nobody holds the registration. A player who has merely been told he can leave, or been left off a squad list, or put up for sale, is not a free agent, whatever the back pages call him. He has a contract, and somebody would have to end it.
The Premier League constraint: a place among the twenty-five
Being registrable and being usable are different things in the Premier League, and the gap between them is the squad list.
Each club files a list of no more than twenty-five senior players after the summer window closes and again after the winter one. No more than seventeen of them may be players who do not meet the homegrown definition. Anyone not on the list cannot play in the league, with one large exception: players young enough to count as under-21s for that season need no place and can be used freely.
A free agent has to fit that structure like anyone else. If he is young enough for the exemption, there is no difficulty. If he is a senior player, the club needs an empty place, and if he was trained abroad it needs one of its seventeen non-homegrown slots to be among the empty ones. The details of the list, the homegrown test and the age cut-off belong to our guide to Premier League squad size and registration lists.
The trap is that the list cannot be reshuffled between windows. A club that named twenty-five in September cannot take a long-term casualty off to make room for his replacement. The place is occupied until the next window, by a player who may not kick a ball in that time.
Age changes the sum completely. The under-21 exemption is fixed by date of birth for the whole season, so an unattached 20-year-old released by an academy in June can be signed in November by a club with a full list, at no cost in places. Few out-of-window signings are that young, because clubs looking for emergency cover want experience. But it means a full squad list shuts out senior free agents and leaves the door open to junior ones.
- 25Premier League squad list
- 17Non-homegrown players within it
- 22League One and League Two
Maximum senior players a club may register, with under-21s exempt in each case. The League One and League Two figure is the limit those clubs adopted in 2020; EFL limits are set by club vote and can be changed, so check the current regulations.
Clubs with good planning departments anticipate this. A list of twenty-three or twenty-four, filed deliberately short, is an insurance policy that costs nothing and keeps the free-agent market open all autumn. Newcastle and Wolves both had room in September 2022. A club that has spent to the limit in August, and filled every place with a signing it was pleased with at the time, discovers in October that the rules permit a move its own list forbids.
| Competition | Senior squad limit | Young players | When a free agent can be added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 25, of whom no more than 17 non-homegrown | Under-21s need no place | Any time, if a place is vacant |
| League One and League Two | 22 | Under-21s exempt | Any time, but see the March cut-off |
| UEFA club competitions | 25 on List A | List B for club-trained youngsters | Only at the winter registration |
| FA Cup and Carabao Cup | No squad list | Not applicable | Before the registration deadline for the round |
The EFL version, the March deadline and clubs under embargo
Seventy-two clubs with smaller squads and thinner budgets use the free-agent rule far more than the twenty above them. In the EFL an out-of-window signing is routine business.
The EFL applies the same FIFA exception and the same date test. Its squad rules are set division by division and voted on by the clubs. League One and League Two clubs voted in 2020 for a limit of twenty-two senior players, with under-21s outside the count, which matters a great deal at a level where a third of a squad may be under that age. Because these numbers are club decisions, the current EFL regulations are the place to check them before relying on any figure.
The late-March cut-off
Here the EFL adds something the bare FIFA rule does not contain. A player registered after a fixed date in late March, written into the EFL's regulations, is not eligible for the remaining league fixtures or the play-offs unless the league gives special permission. Its purpose is plain enough: the squad that finishes a promotion race or a relegation fight should be, more or less, the squad that was contesting it.
The practical effect is a second deadline day, quieter than the first two, on which EFL clubs complete their last free-agent signings of the season. After it, a newly signed player can train and wait for August.
What a club under embargo can do
An EFL registration embargo is the league's standard response to unpaid tax, late accounts or wages in arrears. It does not freeze a squad completely. An embargoed club is usually allowed to keep its number of players of professional standing up to a figure the league sets, and to reach that figure it may add free agents and loans, on restricted terms and with the league's consent to each deal. Paying a transfer fee is normally ruled out.
So for a club in that condition the free agent is the principal source of new players, in or out of a window. Derby County assembled much of a squad that way in 2021. The rules on what terms may be offered, and how an embargo is lifted, are in our guide to EFL transfer embargoes. One position is handled separately at every EFL club: a side left without a fit goalkeeper can turn to the short-term arrangement described in our guide to emergency goalkeeper loans.
Overseas free agents still need clearance: Diego Costa at Wolves
A free agent is free of a club. He is not free of paperwork, and if his last club was abroad there are two pieces of it.
The first is the International Transfer Certificate. Every player who moves from one national association to another needs one, whether or not a fee is paid and whether or not he has a club. The FA requests it from the association where he was last registered through FIFA's transfer system. For an out-of-contract player it is normally issued without argument, since no club has a claim on him, but it takes time, and a registration cannot be completed without it.
The second is immigration. Since the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, a footballer without the right to work in the UK needs a Governing Body Endorsement from the FA before the Home Office will grant a visa. Before that date a Spanish or German free agent could simply turn up. Now he is assessed on a points system that weighs his international appearances, the minutes he has played for his club, and the standing of the league and the club he played for.
That system is awkward for exactly the type of player who is available in September. It rewards recent football, and a free agent, by definition, has not had much.
Diego Costa was the documented case. He had left Atletico Mineiro in January 2022 and had not played since. Wolves, who had lost a newly signed centre-forward to a serious knee injury on his debut in early September, agreed terms with him. The deal then waited on the endorsement, and he was registered on 12 September on a contract to the end of the season.
There is something faintly absurd about a striker who had won the Premier League twice with Chelsea having to satisfy a test of whether he was good enough to work in England. But the test was doing what it was designed to do. It measures a recent record, his had been blank since January, and the FA's process includes a route for cases the points arithmetic gets wrong.
For a club the lesson is about days. A domestic free agent can be registered within a working day or two. An overseas one who needs an endorsement, a visa appointment and a transfer certificate can take two weeks, which is a long time for a team with no fit striker.
How it happens in practice: an injury, a phone call, a short deal
Jens Lehmann was 41 and had been retired since the summer of 2010, when his contract at Stuttgart ended. In March 2011 Arsenal, the club where he had spent five seasons and kept goal through the unbeaten league campaign of 2003-04, had three goalkeepers injured: Wojciech Szczesny, Lukasz Fabianski and Vito Mannone. Manuel Almunia was the only senior keeper standing.
Arsenal signed Lehmann on 17 March on a deal to the end of the season. The winter window had been shut for more than six weeks. None of that mattered, because his last contract had expired the previous June. On 10 April Almunia was hurt in the warm-up at Blackpool, Lehmann played, Arsenal won 3-1, and he had his 200th appearance for the club.
Karius is the more ordinary version. His Liverpool contract ran out at the end of June 2022. Newcastle loaned Martin Dubravka to Manchester United on deadline day, which left the club short of experienced cover behind Nick Pope. Karius signed on 12 September on a contract to January, later extended to the end of the season.
Both cases have the same anatomy: a position with no natural cover, and an absence after the deadline that the club could not fill by a transfer or a loan. Goalkeepers are over-represented among out-of-window signings for that reason. An outfield gap can be covered by moving someone across, and a goalkeeping gap cannot. Familiarity counts as well. Arsenal knew precisely what they were getting in Lehmann, and a manager who has worked with a free agent before will usually take him over a better player he would have to judge from video.
- The gap appearsA player is injured or leaves after the window has shut, and no loan or transfer is possible until the next one.
- Squad checkThe club secretary confirms there is a vacant place on the squad list, or that the target is young enough not to need one.
- Eligibility checkThe player's last contract must have ended before the window closed. The club obtains the termination or expiry paperwork.
- Terms and medicalA short contract is agreed with the player and his agent, and he is examined, with close attention to match fitness.
- RegistrationContract and forms go to the league and the FA. An overseas player also needs a transfer certificate and, where required, a work permit.
- EligibleOnce the league confirms the registration before its pre-match cut-off, he can be named in the squad.
The usual order of events for an out-of-window signing by an English club. The days taken vary; overseas players add the clearance steps.
| Player | Club | Signed | Window had closed on | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jens Lehmann | Arsenal | 17 March 2011 | 31 January 2011 | Three goalkeepers injured |
| Loris Karius | Newcastle United | 12 September 2022 | 1 September 2022 | Goalkeeping cover after a deadline-day loan out |
| Diego Costa | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 12 September 2022 | 1 September 2022 | A new striker injured on debut |
| Sol Campbell | Arsenal | 15 January 2010 | Window open | Released after the previous deadline, so made to wait |
The last row is the odd one out, and it is there to make a point. The first three players were free before a window closed and signed after it. Campbell became free after one closed and so had to sign inside the next, which is the cut-off working exactly as written.
The contracts free agents sign, and what they cost
No transfer fee does not mean no cost. A club signing a free agent in October is making a short, expensive bet, and the contract is drafted to limit what it loses if the bet goes wrong.
Length comes first. The standard deals run to January or to the end of the season. A contract to January lets the club look at the player for three months and then choose between extending, replacing him in the window, or letting him go. Karius's first Newcastle deal was of that kind. A contract to June, like Costa's, is offered when the need is plainly season-long.
Then the options. A club will often take the right to extend by a further year on stated terms, exercisable by a date in the spring. The player's side usually tries to make it mutual, or to attach a pay rise to it. A veteran who performs well on a short deal has leverage in May that he did not have in October.
Pay is weighted away from the basic wage. Appearance fees, bonuses for starts, bonuses tied to league position: all of it shifts risk onto the player, which is where a club wants it when it is signing someone who has not played for months. A free agent of real standing can resist that. One who has been training alone since June mostly cannot.
The player takes the saving on the fee, or tries to. There is no selling club, so a signing-on payment stands in for the money that would otherwise have gone to one, and the agent's commission is paid on top. In the accounts a free agent carries no transfer fee to spread over the contract, but his wages and those payments count in full towards the Premier League's profitability and sustainability calculation. A club close to its limit cannot assume a free signing is a costless one.
The judgement clubs get wrong most often is fitness. A player can pass a medical and still be six weeks from the pace of a league match, and six weeks is a large part of a three-month contract.
Europe and the cups: where a free agent still cannot play
A registration with the Premier League or the EFL covers league matches. Other competitions keep their own lists, and a free agent signed in the autumn runs into them at once.
UEFA is the strictest. Clubs in the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League submit their squad lists at the start of September, straight after the major windows close, and the list for the league phase cannot be reopened. A free agent signed in October is ineligible for European matches until the winter registration, when a club still in the competition may add a small number of new players. UEFA allows a narrow exception for a goalkeeper replaced because of long-term injury, and otherwise nothing. The mechanics are in our guide to Champions League squad registration.
The domestic cups have no squad list, only a deadline before each round by which a player must be registered with his club. A free agent who has been unattached all season arrives with a clean record and is eligible straight away.
One who played earlier in the season before his contract was terminated is in a different position. The FA Cup and the Carabao Cup have long barred a player from appearing for two clubs in the same season's competition, and because each competition sets and amends its own rules, the current ones for the round decide the case. Under that bar Newcastle went into the 2023 League Cup final with Karius in goal: Nick Pope was suspended, and Dubravka, recalled from his loan, had already played in the competition for Manchester United. A free agent signed in September as third-choice cover made his debut for the club at Wembley.
Behind the cup rules sits a FIFA limit that applies to everything. A player may be registered with three clubs in a season and may play official matches for only two. A free agent who has already appeared for two clubs since July cannot play for a third, however clean his paperwork. Hatem Ben Arfa found that out in January 2015, when he left Newcastle by agreement, signed for Nice, and was refused permission to play because he had already appeared for Newcastle's development side and for Hull City on loan. The count is explained in our guide to how many clubs a player can represent in one season.
Staying fit without a club
Clubs signing in mid-season want to know one thing about a free agent before anything else, and it is what he has been doing since his last match.
The best answer is that he has been training with a professional squad. Clubs regularly allow former players, or players known to the manager, to train with them while unattached. It costs the club little, it keeps the player sharp, and it sometimes ends in a contract. The arrangement needs no registration, since training is not an official match, though sensible clubs sort out the insurance position first.
Trials are the next step up. An unattached player can spend a week or two with a club that is considering him and can play in friendlies and behind-closed-doors games. He cannot appear in a league or cup fixture until he is registered, and in pre-season the anonymous "Trialist" on a team sheet is the visible sign of the practice.
For players with no such invitation, the Professional Footballers' Association has run a pre-season camp for members who are out of contract. It offers structured training and organised matches that clubs can watch, at the time of year when the rest of the profession is in pre-season and a player on his own would otherwise be running round a park. The union's interest is obvious and so is the clubs': a pool of unattached players who are actually fit is worth more to everyone than a list of names.
The rest train alone, or with a personal coach, or with a non-league side near home. It shows. The gap between gym fitness and match fitness is the commonest reason a promising free-agent signing contributes nothing for a month, and experienced managers discount for it in advance.
Clubs check the story they are told. A fitness test on the first day and a call to whoever has been coaching the player both go into the decision, and a contract weighted towards appearances is the club's hedge against having been given a kinder account than the test results support.
Free agent, free transfer and Bosman: three terms for three things
The three are used as synonyms and they are not.
Free agent is a status. It describes a player who has no contract and whose registration no club holds. It says nothing about how he got there or where he goes next. A 19-year-old released by an academy and a World Cup winner between clubs are both free agents. The term matters in this context because the out-of-window exception attaches to the status, and specifically to the date on which it began.
Free transfer is a kind of move: any change of club for which no fee is paid. Every free agent who signs somewhere has moved on a free transfer, but the category is wider than that. A club can agree to release a contracted player to another club for nothing, during a window, to remove his wages. That is a free transfer of a player who was never a free agent, and it can only happen while a window is open. Reports of a "free transfer" in October therefore need a second look, because only the free-agent kind is possible then.
Bosman is a court ruling, and by extension the type of move it created. The 1995 judgment established that a player whose contract has expired can join a new club without a fee being owed to the old one. "A Bosman" in English usage means a move at the natural end of a contract, often arranged months ahead. The arrangement that makes that possible is the subject of our guide to pre-contract agreements and the six-month rule.
So a player who runs down his deal, leaves on 30 June and signs elsewhere in October has been all three: a Bosman departure, a free agent for three months, and a free transfer on arrival. A player whose contract is cancelled in August is a free agent and a free transfer and has nothing to do with Bosman. The window treats the two identically, because it asks only one question of either, which is when the last contract ended. More explainers on how the English game is run are gathered on the England hub, with news and wider coverage in the football section.