With the club making contract offers to six players this morning, the question of whether the players can walk away without compensation to the club has arisen.
The following is from an article from the Law In Sport website written by John Shea, an FA registered lawyer under the Football Agents Regulations, a few days ago.
In the article, Shea considers what grounds - under FIFA law - players could seek a termination of their contract. It comes down to one thing:
Just Cause
Non-payment of wages can constitute just cause for termination of the contract given that a club’s obligation to pay a player’s wages is its main obligation as an employer and if this obligation is breached, it can cause the employee’s confidence in the employer to perform the terms of the contract to be lost. It is common for the parties to agree when the player is entitled to terminate his contract by stipulating this in the contract. For instance, in the standard Premier League contract, the player is entitled to terminate his contract if the club has failed to pay any remuneration due to the player within fourteen days from the date on which the player has provided notice to terminate the contract. In the absence of such a clause, jurisprudence from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (“the CAS”), see below, confirms that a player must satisfy two conditions in order to prove that he had just cause to terminate the contract as a result of unpaid wages.
First, the outstanding payments must not be trivial or insubstantial thus they must have been in arrears for a considerable amount of time and/or add up to a considerable amount. The RSTP commentary provides an example to illustrate when non-payment of wages is serious enough to constitute just cause to terminate the contract by referring to a situation where a player has not been paid his salary for more than three months. The RSTP commentary points out that:
“The fact that the player has not received his salary for such a long period of time entitles him to terminate the contract, particularly because persistent noncompliance with the financial terms of the contract could severely endanger the position and existence of the player concerned.”
Secondly, the player must warn the club that it is in breach of contract for failing to pay his wages and that he is considering terminating his contract unless the outstanding sums are paid. It is important for the player to warn the club in writing in order to easily prove that the warning was made and to not delay in making the warning otherwise he could be deemed to accept the late payment that could make the termination unreasonable.
The full article is at http://www.lawinsport.com/blog/john-shea/item/unpaid-players-wages-the-legal-position