Heartland Football Club Players Cry Out Over Nine Months Unpaid Salaries

**This is a sponsored post by Sports journalist, Faith Onwukwe**

The players of Nigeria topflight division side, Heartland Football Club, Owerri, are being owed outstanding salaries by the club’s management.

The players are being owed salaries since May 2021 to December 2021 respectively. The players and coaches have not been paid their 9months salaries and its becoming alarming and frustrating and information reaching us has it that the Governor, Senator Hope Uzodinma, has signed off 13 months salaries for the team.

The big question now is, why are the players not paid till this time? or does it mean that the State’s Commissioner for Sports is not aware of the approval? Or are they helping the players to keep their monies in a safe?

It is so alarming and worrisome that the players of Heartland Football Club presently in the league are underperforming in their league well matches so far this season.

These players need to be paid but unfortunately no one is speaking out or calling out the team’s management over the unpaid salaries of these players both the fans and every stake holder involved, all they want is for the lads to play and win matches with empty bellies and dry pockets.

The current state of affairs at the club is nothing to write home about, and they are just playing with the hope that one day, they will be remembered. The players on their part dare not speak up for the fear of being fired from the team.

Let’s reason this together, how can someone call himself a professional football player and left everything other activities just to focus on playing the game and for 9 solid months, they’re not paid? These players have responsibilities on their sleeves and got bills to settle.

Most of them are married with kids, aged parents and siblings to cater for, and instead of them being the ones to send money back home, reverse is now the case.

This is preposterous, appalling and a total breach of contract by the employers to their employees.

This is a call to the League Management Company (LMC) to react look and ensure that the big actors involved, gets what is rightfully theirs.

And if the management finally decides to pay, it should cover both the old players, the new ones and those players they parted ways with barely a week before league kickstarted, with reason being that they were all under a contract with Heartland Football Club.