The International Football Federation (FIFA) and the International Federation of Professional Footballers’ Associations (FIFPro) began to pay compensation to the players of the bankrupt clubs. The fund, to which FIFA has allocated a total of $ 16 million until 2022, has approved more than a thousand applications of football players from all over the world. We are talking about players who did not receive salaries both during the coronavirus pandemic and earlier. In particular, the players from the ruined Perm “Amkar”, Krasnodar “Kuban” and “Tosno” sent applications for financial assistance to the fund.
FIFA announced that the player assistance fund, which it created in partnership with FIFPro a year ago, has approved more than 1,000 applications. He will pay compensation to players who are unable to receive their salary “properly” due to the financial problems of the clubs. It does not matter if the clubs ceased to exist due to bankruptcy, withdrawal from the association or loss of professional status.
The International Football Federation has allocated a total of $ 16 million for the project, of which $ 5 million is allocated to help the players who suffered from July 2015 to June 2020, $ 3 million – from July to December 2020. Another $ 4 million is planned to be paid to footballers who will find themselves in a similar situation in 2021 and 2022.
According to the FIFA report, Russia was among the countries most affected financially. It took the third place (players were not paid $ 566 thousand) after Greece ($ 1.4 million) and Turkey ($ 692 thousand).
Of the 69 applications made by Russian footballers, 67 were approved. Payments will be received, for example, by the players of Perm “Amkar”, which was declared bankrupt at the beginning of November 2018, and the Krasnodar “Kuban”, which went bankrupt in the same year. The ex-footballers of “Tosno” were also lucky, which also could not deal with debts and was disbanded three years ago.
And although the fund, noted the legal director of FIFPro Roy Vermeer, will allow the players to return “at least part of their salaries”, the structure is not fully capable of covering the debts of the clubs to the athletes. In total, according to Mr. Vermeer, the players requested more than $ 60 million from the fund, which is almost four times the amount that FIFA allocated until the end of 2022.
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