The past week saw yet another saga relating to money (or lack thereof) and Maltese football.

This time it was Sliema Wanderers, one of Malta’s most storied clubs, which was in the news.

It is unusual for Sliema to be associated with such a negative situation, but a takeover led by Jeffrey Farrugia – who is the Maltese football administrator definition of a journeyman, having gone through most of Malta’s top clubs – under the pretence that some big money sponsor from North Africa was going to bankroll the club led us to where we are today.

That sponsor  was a conglomerate named Catco Group – yes, the same Catco Group that used former PN leader Adrian Delia to front a €500,000 donation to Dar tal-Providenza over Christmas.  That donation however is not the subject of this editorial: the subject is that this donation was presented at a time where none of Sliema’s players had been paid for the whole season, which would have started for them in around July.

There has since been an exodus in the Sliema administration which culminated when Farrugia finally stepped down this week, and the players themselves gave a short press conference to explain the hardships they went through.  It’s good to keep in mind that not every footballer makes Cristiano Ronaldo money – and for many players, going without salary for over six months now left them on the brink of poverty.

This is not the first time – and it probably won’t be the last – that such a situation in Maltese football has happened.

In analysing it, we can break it down into two distinct parts.

The first is how, once again, a club was taken over by a third party under the pretence that it will be bankrolled by a far-flung sponsor in order to bring the glory days back to it.  As it turns out, it’s very rare that any such massive foreign investment in Maltese football ever does pan out.

Sliema is one such example, but before them we can look at the case of Naxxar Lions: they were taken over by Syrian billionaire Yahya Kirdi.  Much promise was made on strengthening the club’s squad and even building a new sports complex – however Naxxar were relegated from the BOV Premier League, the club’s players ended up training in a communal 5-a-side pitch in the middle of a playground, and Kirdi left and sued both the club and the MFA for €600,000 in a Canadian court over the damages he suffered during his tenure.

Much was said about the MFA’s due diligence on owners back then, but clearly if something changed since then – it has not had any effect in preventing the situation at Sliema.

The second part is on the failure to pay salaries.  The fact that Sliema’s players went for so long without a salary is something which is scarily common.  The most recent Fifpro football employment report, which was admittedly from 2016, found that a staggering 79% of players had received a late salary payment in the previous two seasons.

Can you imagine the outcry if any other industry – the Gaming industry, the manufacturing industry, the construction industry or whatever else – paid 79% of its workers late?

However, when it comes to football, certain clubs seem to think its fine to ignore the basics of employment law and contractual obligations.

It’s very easy for the layman to see Malta’s national FIFA ranking and simply discard any footballing prospect for the country on that basis. The main symptoms for Malta’s lowly placing on a global scale are however not core footballing ability – they are structural issues, such as the two detailed above, which hold the sport back.

Before there is more diligence over who exactly can run a football club, and before there is a clampdown on the clubs who fail to pay their players as per their contractual obligations – then there is little hope of Maltese football on a domestic level moving forward.