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Trinidad & Tobago's 2006 World Cup squad suspect their national authorities are engineering a fresh way out of paying match fees from the tournament.
Jack Warner, the special adviser to the Trinidad & Tobago Football Federation and a vice-president of Fifa, has been involved in a legal wrangle with players such as Shaka Hislop, Dwight Yorke and Stern John, over unpaid match fees.
An arbitration panel in London has already upheld a claim from Mike Townley, the solicitor for the Soca Warriors, that a verbal contract struck between Warner and the players awarded them 50% of the revenues accruing from World Cup activities.
But the players have yet to receive anything and do not know how much they are owed since no independent audit has been carried out. T&T government figures, though, suggest the debt could be as high as £20m. Now a bill has been tabled in the T&T parliament, of which Warner is a member, proposing the creation of a new football association to which all the old one's assets would be transferred.
Although the bill states "all legal proceedings … shall be continued on after the commencement of this Act by the federation", Townley contends there is sufficient leeway written into it to prove the new entity would not be liable. "They owe the players and they are seeking to avoid it," said Townley, who has written to the T&T parliament requesting the rejection of the bill.
Warner, who is understood to be in Mexico with the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, did not respond to calls yesterday but is previously reported to have accused the players of "holding a federation to ransom because of greed".
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