The 47 national coaches who were contracted by the ousted William Wallace-led T&T Football Association (TTFA) and have been unpaid since January can expect to get the final word on when they will be compensated in a couple of days.
This was the message relayed from the T&T Technical Staff members on Thursday after they had given the Robert Hadad-led Normalisation Committee installed by FIFA, the world governing body for the sport after Wallace and his executive was removed from office earlier this year, a one-week deadline to reply to their salary request made last week.
Last Friday, a quartet of coaches inclusive of former national captains, Clayton Morris and Angus Eve as well as Wayne “Barney” Shepphard, and Richard Hood held at a media conference held at Fatima College Ground, Mucurapo Road, in which they give the Normalisation Committee a September 9 deadline for salaries owed to appointed national coaches to be paid to the contracted coaches, 47 of them in total.
Back then speaking as members of what he described as the Steering Committee representing the national coaches in their matter with the TTFA/Normalisation Committee (NC), Eve, the most capped player in T&T football history with 118 appearances said that after dropping off their contracts at the TTFA head office in Couva to advance the process of their payments, they then had a phone call from the NC saying that they would like to meet with them on an individual basis, which they had promised to do about five months ago.
"So we were happy for that,” Eve said. “We did meet with them on an individual basis, each one of the head coaches was able to meet with them and articulate our positions and the meetings were cordial, and very interesting because for them, they are now coming in, and not trying to make any excuses for them, but we did seek to give them a little bit of latitude simply because they didn’t know what they were getting into.
Expressing his frustration with the delay, Eve said then: "It still doesn’t give them any reason for the lengthy delay in not communicating with us, so putting that out of the way, there is something on the table and they now have to go back and talk to the necessary people who are giving the money to them. We have sent in all of our bank accounts information so that we can be paid directly, we have suggested that, and they now have until September 9 to get back to us with the information on what is the remuneration package that all of are going to get.”
Eve, the coach of T&T Pro League’s Club Sando FC as well as Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) team Naparima College noted that the remuneration packages were not finalised based on the fact that they had to go back to FIFA to get the monies to be released.
An optimistic Eve stated then, “We are convinced that we will get something. As I said before, we worked and we have not burdened the government. We could have gone to the government because we haven’t been working since January and we could have burdened the government further, and we thought that it’s better than other persons in the public get those grants, and all we are asking for is the money is too be paid. If we look past the normal FIFA money that is supposed to come in and we just look at the US$500,000 grant that FIFA give for COVID-19 relief it comfortably can pay all of the staff, all of their salaries.”
Pressed to give a figure, Eve said that the total combined salaries owed to the coaches outside of the senior technical team is in the region of $450,000 or a little over that figure.
Contacted for an updated on the matter after the September 9 deadline came and went, the official press release from the T&T National Football Teams Technical Staff members stated: "The Normalisation Committee (NC) has met with the T&T national senior staff and youth team coaches on the 9th September as promised.
"In the meeting (which was facilitated virtually), the Normalisation Committee outlined proposals for the settlement of outstanding payments to technical staff members. The proposal was generally satisfactory, however, nuances in some individual contracts require further engagement.
"The commitment was given by the Normalisation Committee (NC) to return to our group with a final proposal for settlement in a couple of days.
The release ended: "We believe there is good reason to be optimistic of this process being completed within the time frame suggested by the Normalisation Committee. This optimism is borne out of the productive and transparent nature of the meetings between both parties thus far."