It was hard and I will pass or fail on the borderline, says an agent who took the exam at London’s ExCel center – some estimate that only about 20 per cent will pass!
- FIFA has decided to re-regulate the desk industry after deregulation in 2015
- Hundreds of officers came to the ExCel center in east London to take the exam
- The same exam in 2015 had a 20 percent pass rate, raising fears of a similar rate
It was difficult. Everyone got a mix of questions, so no two papers were the same. I feel like I’m going to be a borderline pass or fail. I completed the mock exam with 10 minutes to spare – and just passed – but this went straight through.
It was not ideal if the exam was delayed by more than half an hour. Apparently some 250 people who signed up hadn’t paid and didn’t show up, so they had to be removed from the system first.
The problem is that half of the questions are simply irrelevant to your day-to-day work as an agent. The whole thing feels like an attempt to reduce the number of officers given how difficult the test is compared to other sports.
The FIFA exam consisted of 20 multiple choice questions and has a pass rate of 75 percent
The exam comes after FIFA’s decision to re-regulate the industry following deregulation in 2015
Agents must hope they successfully passed the hour-long, rigorous exam to keep their license, leaving hundreds of them sweating about their future in the game
Some questions had multiple answers from the available options, so even if you’re partially right, you’re wrong. I spoke to an agent who spent hours and hours overhauling it, but he didn’t feel it had made much of a difference. It’s a really hard exam to revise for because so much of it is so unclear.
You could use the ‘Control F’ search function to find the relevant passages in the study document, but that didn’t work for all questions. You still had to come up with the correct answer, with an average of only three minutes per question. There were a lot of people talking about the September rematch afterwards, so that gives you an idea of how confident they are.