This article describes the concept of Notifications in the FIFA Connect ID Service. It lists notifications by type, gives instructions on how to sign-up for them and discusses potential benefits for the Member Association.

Introduction

In the beginning of 2022 almost all Member Associations are integrated with the FIFA Connect ID Service and - by the means of the Connect ID Service Bus - with each other. For the first time in history there exists an opportunity to keep all the players' data synchronised between different - previously isolated - Football Management Systems (FMS). The benefits are profound - less data duplication, increased accuracy in generating player's passport and in turn better distribution of solidarity and training compensation.

Note that in order for the Notifications to function properly in all cases, an MA needs to inform the Connect ID Service about all the FIFA_IDs they store. Read more on this in the data holders article.

Notifications & messages concept

In order to allow Member Associations achieve these benefits, Connect ID Team created the mechanism of Notifications. Notifications are entities which are automatically created in the Connect ID Service in response to certain events. Let's take an example of John Smith, who started as a football player in England, then transferred to Norway and finally settled down in Sweden. Let's imagine that after John Smith transferred to Sweden, it was realised that his date of birth was entered incorrectly in England and this error propagated to both Norway and Sweden. Let's see how the correct workflow of changing the date of birth looks like and how the Connect ID Service helps achieve the eventual consistency of data:

• Swedish MA corrects the mistake in their FMS
• this change propagates to Connect ID Service automatically
• as the date of birth change is an important event according to the Connect ID Service business rules, a Notification is created there
• Connect ID Service knows that there are 3 Member Associations who are so called data holders i.e. they have John Smith's record stored:
  • English MA
  • Norwegian MA
  • Swedish MA
• since Swedish MA is an acting MA (they know about the change already), Connect ID creates a Notification in the context of both English and Norwegian MAs

Notifications can be found in the Admin Console: https://console.id.ma.services/Notification, however we cannot expect MAs to come and check every day if there are notifications concerning them. A much better way for the Member Association is to subscribe to receive messages when notifications concerning them appear in the Connect ID Service. If MA subscribes, it will receive a message automatically without ever needing to go to Admin Console.

Delivery methods

There are two ways for the MA to receive messages about important events concerning their players: email message and service bus message. Let's take a look at both types.

Email message

For this type a message is delivered via email and needs to be acted upon manually. If MA is subscribed with a specific email address and a specific notification type, they will receive an email when a notification of a given type is generated in their context. Using our example from the previous chapter, both English and Norwegian MA should receive emails about the changed date of birth because they are subscribed and notification has been generated in their context (since they are data holders). At the same time, Sweden will not receive a message even if they are subscribed, because notification DataOfBirthChanged was not generated in their context (since they are an acting MA and know about the change already).

The contents of the email message depends on the notification type. To use our example again, the email about the date of birth change will contain:

• FIFA_ID of the player
• date of birth before the change
• date of birth after the change
• exact date & time of the operation

Email delivery is supported for all 11 notification types.

Note, that in order to simplify the notifications roll-out process and cause less work on MA side, it has been decided to automatically subscribe all TMS Managers to the following email notifications:
- Date of birth change
- Person gender change
- Person data update request
- Person merge
- Person unmerge
- Minor International transfer
- Adult international transfer
- Player changed from amateur to pro

If there is a change of TMS Manager in a given Member Association, it will be automatically propagated to Connect ID, i.e. the previous TMS Manager will be unsubscribed and the new one - subscribed.

If you'd like to unsubscribe from the mentioned notifications or subscribe another person from your organisation, please let us know by email at support.id@fifa.org.

Service bus message

Here the message is delivered as a service bus message. The idea is that the message is acted upon automatically or semi-automatically. This approach needs some development on the MA side to implement the automated handling of the message in the Connect ID SDK but the benefit may be that the amount of manual work is decreased.

For our date of birth changing example, we can imagine that Norwegian MA receives a service bus message and handles it in the following way:

• if the player played for Norway more than 5 years before, update the date of birth automatically
• else, allow the human operator to review the change manually

As of May 2022, there are four notification types that supports a service bus delivery: PersonMerged, DateOfBirthChanged, PersonNameChanged and GenderChanged.  

Notification types

The following table lists:

• notification types
• description, i.e. conditions for generating a notification
• specific fields that will be included in the message. Some fields may be available for one notification type but not for the other.
• context, i.e. for which MAs a given notification will be generated

A Data Holder is each MA which stores a record for a given FIFA_ID. Acting MA is MA which executed the operation, e.g. changed the date of birth. In most cases notifications are not created in the context of an Acting MA.

How to subscribe/unsubscribe

Although there are plans to introduce a Notifications self service for the Member Associations, currently the only way to subscribe to receive messages is to write an email to support.id@fifa.org and specify the following:

• Member Association
• notification type(s)
• delivery type for each notification type
• email address for each email delivery