One person. One ID. Worldwide. 

That is the aim of FIFA's FIFA Connect platform; to connect all football systems across the globe, meaning that no matter where you go as a player, coach, referee, or official, you have one FIFA ID that sticks with your throughout your career (yes - I am referring to my social sunday league as a career).

So what does this mean for us? Well for most of us, it's business as usual, however for national bodies, this opens the door to a world of more accurate and consistent data - meaning that the identification and management of duplicate records in our systems (as in all football national bodies) becomes that much easier - especially when considering players who may need an international transfer.

By being the conduit between national bodies, FIFA Connect allows national bodies to identify and merge records from all over the world, ensuring the consistency of the global database of players; as FIFA reforms their transfer processes to be more transparent across the globe, FIFA Connect makes senses.

Now if you're like me, the first thing you thought was how is this going to work from a privacy perspective - what information is being shared with FIFA and other countries? Well, turns out, not much.

From FIFA's perspective, the only data they obtain is name (hashed / jumbled and visible only to the system for purposes of deduplication) date of birth, gender, and country of registration. An overseas country sees the same thing, except without the jumbling of the name for identification and deduplication purposes.

While FIFA Connect has been in the works since 2015, it is finally starting to make its way into Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), with our systems beginning the process of joining up to the global network of football members across the globe.

Article added: Sunday 24 March 2019