With the sports industry having ground to a halt amid the coronavirus pandemic, the financial impact on football clubs, and therefore the transfer market and players' contracts, is likely to be significant. 

A study by world-leading auditing firm KPMG this week estimated that cancelling the rest of this season would cost clubs across Europe's top five leagues as much as four billion euros (4.33 billion U.S. dollars) in lost revenue. 

The knock-on effect could be enormous, trickling down to smaller clubs worldwide. 

"Given the international situation, clubs are going to be less inclined to pay the kind of sums we look for," admitted Monaco's vice-president, Oleg Petrov. 

Monaco have raked in huge sums in recent years from selling players like Kylian Mbappe, who went to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) in 2018 for 180 million euros.  

Clubs expect substantial losses, players may be out of contract 

UEFA's commitment to ending the European season by June 30 is surely partly because it is common practice for contracts to run until that date. 

Players like Manchester City's David Silva, Willian at Chelsea, or PSG's Thiago Silva and Edinson Cavani, will be free to leave on July 1 even if the season has not been completed. 

Young players who are out of contract are also a problem, points out David Venditelli, a French agent whose company Score represents Arsenal's Alexandre Lacazette among others. 

"Things are on hold for these players who are in a precarious position. They are the ones who are the most in danger," he says. 

Jonathan Barnett, whose clients include Gareth Bale, said "We all have the same problems, with uncertainty and things. We're not thinking about the summer or transfers because we don't know how far this thing is going to go.” 

"We will see a transfer period we have never experienced before," the RB Leipzig's CEO Oliver Mintzlaff is predicting. 

FIFA has set up a working group which could amend rules on transfers and make changes to "protect contracts for both players and clubs", but clubs are already having to take drastic action to stave off financial disaster. 

Some French sides, including Lyon, put their players on short-time working as a means of saving money. Swiss outfit Sion cancelled the contracts of nine players who refused to go on temporary unemployment. 

NBA uncertain about salary payments after April 1 

The NBA plans to pay full salaries to players as scheduled on April 1 but could begin cutting salaries to recover money from canceled games by April 15, according to reports. 

Citing a league memo shared with NBA clubs on Friday, ESPN said the league might soon begin recovering salary based on a "force majeure" clause in its collective bargaining agreement with players. 

The memo said the league will inform teams about its plans before the April 15 payment date. That's the day the league's regular season was set to end before the schedule was suspended by the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Under terms of the NBA-union deal, the league can withhold a percentage of a player's salary for a catastrophic situation that forces games to be canceled, including a pandemic. 

NBA owners, preparing for major financial losses if the season does not resume, have reportedly been seeking arena dates into August in hopes of bringing the 2019-20 campaign to some sort of conclusion.

(With input from agencies)