It was hard and I will be a borderline pass or fail, says agent who sat the exam at London’s ExCel centre – with some estimating that only around 20 per cent will pass!
- FIFA have decided to reregulate the agency industry after deregulation in 2015
- Hundreds of agents descended on the ExCel centre in east London to sit exam
- Same exam in 2015 had pass rate of 20 per cent – raising fears of similar ratio
It was hard. Everyone got a mix of questions, so no two papers were the same. I feel like I’ll be a borderline pass or fail. I completed the mock exam with 10 minutes to spare — and passed, just — but this went right to the wire.
It wasn’t ideal when the exam was delayed by more than half an hour. Apparently, around 250 people who registered had not paid and did not show, so they had to be removed from the system first.
The problem is that half the questions just aren’t relevant to your day-to-day workings as an agent. The whole thing feels like a move to reduce the number of agents, given how difficult the test is compared to other sports.
The FIFA exam comprisesed 20 multiple choice questions and has a pass score of 75 per cent
The exam comes after FIFA’s decision to re-regulate the industry, after its deregulation in 2015
Agents must hope they have successfully navigated the hour-long, rigorous exam in order to keep their licence, with hundreds of them left sweating over their futures in the game
Some questions had multiple answers from the options available, so even if you get it partially right, you are wrong. I spoke to one agent who had done hours and hours of revision, but he didn’t feel it had made much difference. It is a very hard exam to revise for, because so much of it is so obscure.
You could use the ‘Control F’ find function to locate the relevant passages in the study document, but that didn’t work for all the questions. You still needed to work out the right answer, with only three minutes per question on average. There were a lot of people talking about September’s resit afterwards, so that gives you an idea of how confident they are.