While we cheer for Dinamo, Rijeka, and Hajduk in the Croatian First League, Istra 1961 players are unpaid, and Cibalia fights hopelessly against HNS.
The autumn portion of the Croatian First League (HNL) has come to an end, and while most clubs in the league embark on holiday and spring preparations, Istra 1961 and Cibalia face months of uncertainty and fear for their club’s survival, reports Goal.hr on December 19, 2017.
Istria 1961 and Cibalia are two clubs in the Croatian First League whose season is marked by financial difficulties, and their fight for points is overshadowed by their struggle to survive.
An unsettling and unsustainable situation for both clubs, the sad story can be best explained by the recent respectable move of Dinamo players who have chosen to stand in solidarity with Istra 1961. If you recall, the Zagreb club collected money for the Istrian footballers who have not received a wage since the beginning of the season. An even darker side to this story is that the potential for new club ownership is still far out of sight, leaving the fate of these two clubs in serious question.
“I do not know if the match against Osijek was the last in the Croatian First League, and if it were, it would be a disaster not only for this club but the whole of Istria, as well as for all of Croatian football. But it is impossible to live like this, and I have said it many times – massive props to my players. From June until today they have received no salary, and those who came in August did not even get a penny,” said Istra 1961 coach Darko Raić-Sudar, who is honored to lead a team of players that have given the most of themselves during the toughest days of their career.
NK Istra 1961 Facebook
“We live through friends of the club and the family members. We have a man that drives us to the games, even though we have not paid him anything, the players live in the apartments where they do not have to pay, and they are not thrown out, they feed themselves around. The fact that the players have not received a salary is not even the worst, they would still have to pay all the benefits to the state because they have the status of a business,” added Raić-Sudar, who is aware that the only solution is a new foreign investor – the city is not able to financially support its only First League team.
American investor Michael Glover became the majority owner of Istra 1961 in June 2015, and although he promised financial investments and the reorganization of the youth ranks, in the end, he only left the club with debts.
The players received their last salary in June, making it no surprise that seven of the club’s top players left in the last two months. It became even more evident after the club announced the arrival of an Austrian entrepreneur set to take over in November, but once the time came, they were nowhere to be found.
The first players to leave Istra were Risto Mitrevski and Sandro Gotal, followed by the departure of Ivušić, Bertoše, Kitanovski, Ofosua and Puclina – marking the departure of seven players in Istra’s starting lineup from the first to the last match of the first half of the Croatian First League. Only Gojković, Prelečec, Matjaž and Makismović remained in the standard primary eleven.
Considering the financial situation has devastated the club, Istra has done well this season so far, completing the first half of the season in the eighth position, outside of the elimination zone. The club has also achieved several impressive results, drawing with Osijek twice (1:1), Dinamo (0:0) and Rijeka (1:0).
“We hope that somebody will come and take over the club. In that case, it will not be easy because a lot of our players have left, and we’d have to get a dozen new players. That would be the best case scenario; then we could move on,” Raić-Sudar concluded after his last game in 2017, with the hope that by the beginning of the spring part of the championship, the situation at the club will at least slightly improve and there will be more acceptable conditions to work.
Similar problems are also had by Cibalia whose players wages have been delayed since last season. The situation has become even more unstable after their 3:2 defeat against Inter last weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v=2TEzsZI68hM
The players and the professional staff of Cibalia admitted that they could not refrain from tears in the locker room then and, after the match, in protest of the unjustly awarded penalty for Inter, they joined their fans and posed with an anti-HNS sign. The Vinkovci club believes that the referees have been against them for a long time, depriving the team of more than ten points since last season.
HNS, of course, could not bite their tongue, and retaliated with a press release that the federation paid the Vinkovci club a cash amount of HRK 400,000 from TV rights and sponsorships for the 2017/18 season to help them during their financial difficulties. The funny thing is – that money belongs to Cibalia anyway.
The conflict between Cibalia and HNS will undoubtedly continue in the spring when the Vinkovci club fight to stay in the league (they are currently in ninth place with 17 points, just as Istra). Cibalia also looks for a buyer to revitalize the club by a financial injection, but such a savior, for the time being, is not in sight.
Translated from Goal.hr
