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Q&A: Alexandra Gomez Bruinewoud, FIFPRO Legal Director

01 Apr, 2025
Q&A: Alexandra Gomez Bruinewoud, FIFPRO Legal Director

Born and raised in Uruguay, a country so football-obsessed that "half of the daily news broadcast is dedicated to football!" Alexandra Gomez Bruinewoud has been passionate about the game virtually her whole life. After studying law in Montevideo and then Rotterdam, she realised she could inject this love of sports into her legal career by representing players, working on contracts between agents and football players, and campaigning for better treatment of football players by clubs and federations. 

Since 2013 she has worked for FIFPRO, the Netherlands-based representative organisation for 65,000 professional footballers worldwide. As Senior Legal Counsel (now Legal Director), Gomez Bruinewoud continually strives for improved welfare and working conditions throughout the game, ensuring that footballers have rules and structures in place to protect their contracts, pay, working conditions, health and safety. We caught up with her to discuss this role and explore the key improvements to the game she's been campaigning for.

What surprised you most about working at FIFPRO?

"When I came to the Netherlands to do a Masters in International Commercial Law, I decided to take sports law as an optional subject, just for fun — I had never seen [sports law] as a possible job I could dedicate myself to. I saw the labour aspect of it between a player and a club, but I was not familiar with all the intricacies of the transfer system and registration periods. When I started working in FIFPRO, what caught my attention most was how big the non-payment of salaries was in football.

I knew the industry as a wealthy industry, so I didn't expect to see so many players not getting paid at the end of the month. It's not normal that almost half the professional players in the world are not getting their salaries on time, they get paid one, two, three, six months late. People tend to ignore that and focus on the Ronaldos and Messis who make a lot of money and have a beautiful life."

Taking the UK as an example, how common is it to find players who are waiting three to six months for late salary payments?

"The Premier League is really well taken care of, partly due to the good work of the PFA at national level, but in the lower divisions you have issues. You have the case of Moses Swaibu, who's doing a great campaign on match-fixing. He fixed matches, and he went to jail. Jail made him think about what he was doing, but he did it because he was not getting paid.

Maybe you would not expect that in England but it happens in the lower divisions. The governing bodies insist that they want integrity in the game and to fight against match-fixing, but if you wanna fight against match-fixing, pay the salaries of the players!"

Source: FIFPRO

What are your main responsibilities as Senior Legal Counsel at FIFPRO?

"We do so many different things, so you can never be bored. One part [of the role] is to support our unions; FIFPRO is composed of 70 different unions around the world, those unions are our members, so every time they have a question, an issue, or a problem, we assist them. It could be [about] their own administration, including checking their statutes are okay, are they compliant, are they best practice?

It could be giving them tips about how to have the best collective bargaining agreements. [Also] negotiation of their standard contract, or implementation of a national dispute resolution chamber at federation level. If they have a very complex case, we also discuss it with them. But also, because we have 70 members around the world, many players fall outside of our scope, and we don't let these players down.

If they reach out to us and their country doesn't have a union, we help them directly, and we prepare cases directly for these players before FIFA's DRC (Dispute Resolution Chamber) or CAS (the Court of Arbitration for Sport). We also participate a lot in the negotiations for FIFA, we provide the legal assessment for these negotiations, with FIFA and with the confederations as well. For example, at the moment, it's clear what the implications of the [Lassana] Diarra case are within the regulations of FIFA, what we would expect FIFA to implement… we also have a creative part where we say 'What is missing within the regulations?', for example when we were dealing with the maternity regulations [for female players].

We realised this was a gap and that it was super important to fill it, so we created our own policy and proposal for regulation to send to FIFA, and that was the basis of the protections that the players have today."

Last year, Milan Women introduced a set of groundbreaking maternity regulations for players, after years of campaigning from FIFPRO. Can you describe that landmark moment?

"This is how we'd like all clubs to react. It's something we've been pushing for, to have the extension of the contract in maternity cases. When we proposed the protections back in 2020 to FIFA, we explained that it was crucial to have an extension of a contract when the player became pregnant, because the average length of a contract in women's football is only one year, so we cannot feel super proud that we have protected the rights of female players in maternity if we do not extend their contract.

If you have a one-year contract, your pregnancy will last for nine months, so you need to get pregnant the day you sign the contract to benefit from maternity leave, which is ridiculous! We can have discussions about how long the contract extension should be, but you have to have some extension. We were super happy that AC Milan decided to be progressive and coherent… it's about being smart and realising that good players can choose their clubs, and they won't choose a club that doesn't respect them."

What else can be done to give female footballers greater equity with their male counterparts?

"We have been working for years on a top-down strategy. First, we pushed for equal conditions in everything except for the prize money — we also pushed for the prize money, we didn't get that, but all other conditions now are the same for the men's and the women's World Cup. It blows your mind to think that previously it was not, because there's no justification for FIFA treating men and women differently; at club level, you have the financial aspect, so if women's football in some teams is not making much money, there is an argument that you cannot invest as much… but FIFA is a not-for-profit organisation, one of the richest organisations in the world, with very clear statutes on not allowing any sort of discrimination, including gender discrimination.

There's no link between revenue and prize money in the World Cup, the prize money comes from the general money FIFA has, so it was unbelievable that they would not provide the same conditions. We're still pushing there, but having the same conditions brings the game to a different level; players can travel to the game in business class so they're not destroyed physically when you arrive, they have the same amount of doctors, masseuses, nutritionists… this is massive.

We also requested direct payment instead of having payments allocated to federations like in men's football, because even at the Women's World Cup there are many amateur players, and even some of the professional players have super low salaries, so it makes a huge difference receiving a direct payment. Pushing on the World Cup will not help the majority of players, but it's something actionable and we think it will trickle down slowly to the rest."

How do you view the issue of fixture congestion and its real-life impact on players?

"At FIFPRO we consider this part of the labour conditions, because it's about how much you will work. In any other job, you wanna know how many hours you will work, but what has been happening in recent years is different governing bodies have been creating new tournaments without considering how it impacts the work of the players. As a coach, very understandably you wanna play the best players, so those best players are being played one time after another.

This leads to exhaustion and injuries. We have been trying to be in the room to negotiate with FIFA and the confederations when they create new tournaments, but this has not been possible. We also have players who are playing too little, which is a problem. In some countries, the tournament and the league lasts two months, and what do you do the other ten months? You can't even have a normal job because how could you tell them you can't work for two months of the year?

We recently supported the Wales women's national team in the negotiation of their collective agreement with the federation, and the agreement stated that the federation would commit to using all FIFA windows… at national level, if you don't get them together regularly, it's not going to be magical!"

You recently spoke at the FIFPRO Legal Conference. What was on the agenda?

"We wanted to explain to our members what the Diarra case could potentially mean, because in our view the decision is very clear in that it challenges the criteria being used in Article 17 of the FIFA regulations. Article 17 regulates what will happen in case of a breach of contract by the player or by the club, and the challenge is, what happens when the breach of contract is by the player (which is in the minority of cases) without just cause?

How do you conclude the compensation to be paid to the club? This is a very important case; for many years, FIFPRO has been advocating that it is not correct to have criteria as stated in Article 17, because it's not possible for a player to calculate and foresee what the consequence will be if he or she decides to terminate the contract without just cause. Sometimes life happens, and some things are more important than your job.

Your mother or father could get sick, and you wanna take care of them, and you ask for authorisation from the club and the club says no, so you leave — that's just one example. It's not correct that if a club terminates a contract without just cause and has to pay compensation, they know the maximum they will have to pay, but for the player, it's impossible to know because of the vague criteria in the regulations… it can go from the rest value of your contract (what the club would've paid to you as salaries for the rest of your contract) to a much bigger amount taking into account the transfer fee when they hired you, the replacement costs… so in our view this decision is super important."

What are the most important skills needed for your job at FIFPRO?

"It's very important to understand the labour side of it and the human rights side of it. To think of the player as a person and then a worker after that. Players are first human beings with human rights and legal rights, and then they are your important assets. The players don't set their own valuation, they just play, but the clubs decide there's this system where they buy the registration rights for the players. You need to be patient when you hear people talk about players as if they are commodities.

And you need to have the willingness to keep on explaining why we do what we do, why it's important to protect the rights of the players, and how this is the best thing you can do to develop the game, because from an employer perspective, the happier and better-taken care of the employees are, the better job they'll do, and you will benefit as well."

What practical advice would you give to people thinking about pursuing a career in sports law?

"I always say to my students when I lecture: read the regulations for yourself before reading what someone says that the regulations say. Even before reading what some super duper mega lawyer has to say about the regulations, read them for yourself, and try to judge them for yourself. Is this good? Is this not good? Then of course read, listen, go to conferences, exchange ideas… there are a lot of repeaters in the industry and not so many innovative thinkers."