The world’s soccer governing body, FIFA, has fined Ukrainian football club Tavria Simferopol $100,000 (about N16m) over an employment dispute with a Nigerian player and banned the club from registering any new players before the winter transfer window of 2013.
On Oct. 25 FIFA’s Dispute Resolution Chamber ruled Tavria should pay Abdulwaheed Afolabi $100,000 in outstanding remuneration and compensation for breach of contract.
“Furthermore, a ban from registering any new players, either nationally or internationally, for the two next entire and consecutive registration periods was imposed on the Ukrainian club for having breached the relevant contract without just cause,” read FIFA’s decision, delivered to Tavria on Nov. 6.
In turn, Tavria’s official website announced that the club intends to appeal the decision at the Court for Arbitration in Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland.
This summer, Afolabi, a 20-year old Nigerian national, left Tavria unceremoniously and eventually appeared at a Russian soccer team. In August the disciplinary committee of Ukraine’s Premier League banned the player for six months from playing football and fined him $540,000.
Afolabi had argued he had the right to terminate his contract anytime with the club, and had complained about his salary not having been paid in full. However, Tavria disputes his account.
A survey of Ukrainian soccer players conducted by FIFPro, a global organization representing professional footballers, in February found that 15.5 percent had experienced delays in the payment of their salaries, while 7.6 percent had been approached to consider match-fixing. That means that, on average, almost two of the 22 players on the field will have been offered the chance to fix a game’s result.
“A player who has to wait for his money has a greater chance of being approached to manipulate a match,” the FIFPro report reads.
These issues have been brought to the spotlight by a recent hearing over match fixing between two Ukrainian clubs at the Lausanne arbitration court.
The court will decide whether a 2008 match between Kharkiv Metalist and Karpaty was fixed. Metalist won the game 4-0. In August 2010, Ukraine’s football federation found the match was fixed, and fined and banned the players and club officials from the two clubs in addition to deducting 9 points from each side.
In their decision, FFU officials pointed to a video made a few days after the game that surfaced in Ukrainian media in 2010.
The video allegedly shows Karpaty defender Serhiy Lashchenkov telling the club’s honorary president Petro Dymyinsky how the game was fixed. A voice, allegedly Lashchenkov’s, says in the recording that he took $110,000 from Yevhen Krasnikov, Metalist’s sporting director and, along with other senior players, talked his teammates into taking $10,000 each to lose the game.
The court is yet to deliver its verdict from the February hearing.
In October, several players from Metallurg Zaoporizhya complained to Ukrainian media that the team hasn’t t received salary payments for the last six months.
Metallurg’s official website, denied the salary delays and said every soccer player on the team is receiving timely salary payments based on the terms and conditions of their respective contracts.
