GENEVA: FIFA won its latest ruling on Monday in a multi-case international battle by soccer players’ agents to block rules that would govern their industry and cap their fees.

CAS said it had “completely rejected” the arguments put forward by the Zurich-based Association of Professional Football Agents (PROFAA), which brought the case.

FIFA said the ruling “fully confirms the legality, validity and proportionality of FIFA’s Football Agents Regulations”.

However, it is not clear how the ruling by the Swiss Sports Court will affect cases at the national level in progress and brought by agents in various countries, including Switzerland, as well as a complaint submitted to the European Commission in Brussels.

FIFA last year approved the agent rules that are set to come into effect on Oct. 1 after thousands of agents around the world had the opportunity to take a $600 test in April or September organized by the national soccer associations.

The most controversial aspect of the rules limits an agent’s earnings to 10 percent of the transfer fee when he is acting for the selling club.

Elite agencies have earned tens of millions of dollars from the transfers of players such as Erling Haaland and Paul Pogba, and FIFA said the agents secured $622 million in international cross-border transfer deals in 2022.

FIFA also wants to restrict agents to taking 3 percent of a player’s salary when those earnings are more than $200,000 per year, or 5 percent when a player earns up to $200,000. These limits will be 6 percent and 10 percent, respectively, when the agent is acting on behalf of both the player and the club that signed them.

FIFA also wants to prevent players’ agents from representing both buying and selling clubs on a transfer deal.

PROFAA said it was “deeply disappointed” by CAS’s decision and the impact it has had on the livelihoods of thousands of clients.

Its president, Paddy Dominguez, said in a statement that the group “will continue to support any and all lawsuits against these regulations, specifically the introduction of commission caps.” Dominguez is a member of a FIFA-appointed working group announced in February to consult with the agent industry.

That FIFA group doesn’t include some of the industry’s top agencies who have said for several years that they were not properly consulted on shaping the rules.

Fifa also wants agents’ fees to be paid through the football body’s Paris-based financial clearinghouse, which aims to bring more transparency to a global transfer market that has long been opaque.

At the CAS hearing, the proxy group’s argument about privacy and data protection was among those rejected in a series of “interim conclusions”.

FIFA also convinced CAS judges that the rules did not conflict with EU laws relating to competition and freedom of movement and that it was not a cartel under Swiss competition law. The court also agreed that FIFA’s rules do not conflict with the laws in France and Italy and do not conflict with the Football League’s collective bargaining agreement.

“The award confirms FIFA’s position that the (agent rules) are a reasonable and proportionate regulatory measure that helps resolve systemic failures in the player transfer system,” the Football Association Board said in a statement.