In South America, though, and particularly in Brazil, supporters of the T.P.O. system say it has been critical to the professional game’s survival. From January 2011 to June 2014, according to FIFA transfer records, Brazilian clubs moved 2,311 players for fees totaling $579 million — staggering totals that come under a particularly sharp light when one considers that about 90 percent of players in the Brazilian league are co-owned by clubs and investors. Cruzeiro, the current Brazilian champion, recently used a starting lineup in which the rights to nine of its 11 players were partly owned by outside investors.

The highest-profile transfer involving T.P.O. in recent years was Neymar’s 2013 move from his Brazilian club Santos to F.C. Barcelona in Spain. In that deal, Barcelona paid a transfer fee to Santos that was initially reported to be about $76 million — a figure that remains in dispute. But Santos did not receive the entire fee; several years earlier, it had sold shares in Neymar to a variety of investors as a way to reap a more immediate dividend on his projected value and to finance a richer contract for Neymar, thus enticing him to stay with Santos a bit longer.

In the end, Santos was said to have paid out more than 40 percent of Neymar’s transfer fee to investors. To make things even murkier, it was revealed later that Barcelona actually paid much more than was initially thought, but sent some of the money to a company owned in part by Neymar’s father. The entire case wound up in court, with Barcelona making a “voluntary” payment of more than $18 million to cover unpaid taxes on the deal. The affair may have been the final straw for FIFA.

“It is ridiculous to own 50 percent of a player, and from a moral point of view, it is crazy,” said Theo Van Seggelen, head of the international players’ union known as FIFPro. “But it is also bad for clubs. It causes financial problems. The consequence is that a lot of money is leaving football and is going into the hands of people who have no involvement at all.”

Some investors had even gone as far as starting their own teams. Traffic Sports, a marketing company that has a variety of soccer businesses and that has long operated a player investment fund, owned a development club in Brazil, Desportivo Brasil, as well as a Portuguese team, Estoril, which it used as a way to bring talented players to Europe.

In an interview last year, Frederico Pena, the chief executive of Traffic’s soccer division, described the path of one player, Ismaily Gonçalves dos Santos, who was discovered at a tryout in Brazil. Impressed with his potential, Traffic signed the teenage dos Santos and placed him in its Desportivo academy. In 2009, he went on loan to Estoril. Three years later, another Portuguese club, Braga, bought 60 percent of dos Santos’s rights from Traffic for about 200,000 euros, with Traffic keeping 32 percent and Gonçalves (and his agent) keeping 8 percent.

“He played seven months for Braga and was sold to Shakhtar Donetsk for 4 million euros,” Pena said. “Everyone got paid out. In this business, that’s a big success story.”