This article describes business aspects of registering a player for which a FIFA_ID already exists. It assumes that your MA is onboarder and your NRS already has this functionality. If you are a technical person/system provider looking for advice on how to implement the transfer functionality, see this article instead: Transfer / taking over an existing player - technical overview.
Introduction
Your National Registration System (NRS) is already integrated with the FIFA Connect ID Service (Connect ID). In practice it means that almost all the operations concerning players or clubs that you perform in your NRS, are also done in Connect ID. E.g. if you change the date of birth of a player, it will be changed in both places: in your NRS first and then in the Connect ID. Fortunately the synchronisation of changes to Connect ID is automated, so in most cases you don't need to think about it.
The most important thing about a player that Connect ID needs to know, is so called data owner of a player. For all intents and purposes, data owner is the Member Association for which the player currently plays (or played recently if he/she is inactive). The main responsibility of a data owner is to share player details with other MAs if someone is trying to register a similar person (for the purpose of deduplication). You don't need to worry about this, though, because the sharing is done automatically. What you need to make sure of, however, is that you are a data owner of every player who currently plays for your association. In other words: that the data which is stored centrally, in Connect ID, points to your association and not to the previous one or e.g. TMS.
How to transfer the ownership of the FIFA_ID to your NRS?
The most important thing to say is that your NRS already has the capability to transfer the ownership of the player record (FIFA_ID) to your MA. You just need to make sure that you perform the required actions. Unfortunately, since there are 50+ different systems in the world, we don't know exactly how this procedure looks like in your NRS. In some systems the option may be called: "Take over FIFA_ID" or "Use FIFA_ID". If in doubt, contact your IT and/or System Provider to learn that.
You should avoid at all costs adding your inactive registration to an existing FIFA_ID! Since Connect ID is not storing the history of registrations, such an operation will replace the current registration of another MA with your historical registration. If you want to assign an existing FIFA_ID to your historical record, without overwriting data centrally, use the data holders functionality instead.
How to make sure that your MA is a data owner of a FIFA_ID?
Assuming that you already registered the player with an existing FIFA_ID in your NRS, let's see how we can make sure that the data ownership was correctly transferred in Connect ID as well.
Step 1 - go to "Admin Console" (https://console.id.ma.services/AuditTrail). Audit Trail lists all the operations executed in the Connect ID Service. If you don't have access to Admin Console, request it via support.id@fifa.org.
Step 2 - filter the page by your FIFA_ID
If you correctly transferred the FIFA_ID not only in your NRS but also in Connect ID, you should see at the top the operation called "Registrations added" or "Registrations added forcefully". The time of the operation will correspond to the moment you changed the ownership. Let's see an example:
We can see that the FIFA_ID was originally registered by Ukraine on 2020-10-11. Then, on 2024-06-20, the player was transferred to Armenia - as is indicated by the first operation from the top.
Special case: players registered via TMS
In some cases, FIFA_IDs are registered/created by MAs using TMS. This functionality is expected to be turned off in 2025, however it is still possible that you encounter such a case. The FIFA_ID visible in Admin Console will look as if it was registered by your MA and only upon a closer examination will you find that the real data owner is TMS. This can be spotted in two places:
Audit Trail: you see that the person is registered with Belgium but the system who created the records was TMS(!)
Single Person View: the presence of the System ID property set to TMS
Fortunately in both cases (FIFA_ID registered by another MA and FIFA_ID registered via TMS) changing the ownership will work in exactly the same way. After you have successfully taken the ownership of the FIFA_ID, you should see e.g. something like this:
It looks like a transfer from Belgium to Belgium but in fact it is a transfer of the ownership between TMS and the rightful owner - Belgian NRS.