There are ru­mours of po­ten­tial cuts to come with­in the tech­ni­cal staff of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) which is cre­at­ing un­ease among coach­es and oth­er of­fi­cials.

Guardian Me­dia Sports was re­li­ably in­formed by a source, who is close to the de­vel­op­ments and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, re­veal­ing that some coach­es have even rec­om­mend­ed a cut in their salaries as an al­ter­na­tive, to fir­ing them.

The ru­mours have been cir­cu­lat­ing fol­low­ing a Zoom meet­ing be­tween the chair­man of the FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, Robert Hadad and the TTFA tech­ni­cal staff on April 29.

In Jan­u­ary, a FI­FA/Con­ca­caf team was unim­pressed by the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion’s ap­point­ments of 35 coach­es and oth­er tech­ni­cal of­fi­cials at an an­nu­al salary which was stat­ed by the then chair­man of the Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee Kei­th Look Loy as TT$4,263,000 for this year and at a time when the sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion is sad­dled with a $50 mil­lion debt and no ap­proved plan to pay it back, as well as put lo­cal foot­ball back on a sta­ble foot­ing.

Be­cause of this debt, FI­FA on March 17, en­forced ar­ti­cle 8.2 of its Statutes and ap­point­ed a Nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee on March 27 to run the af­fairs of T&T foot­ball, there­by re­mov­ing the du­ly elect­ed ad­min­is­tra­tion of pres­i­dent William Wal­lace and vice pres­i­dents Clynt Tay­lor, Sam Phillips and Su­san Joseph-War­rick af­ter they were elect­ed on No­vem­ber 24, 2019.

Wal­lace and his team have since tak­en steps to chal­lenge FI­FA’s de­ci­sion by tak­ing it to the Court of Ar­bi­tra­tion for Sports (CAS) in Lau­sanne, Switzer­land. How­ev­er, on Fri­day, Wal­lace's at­tor­ney Dr Emir Crowne ac­cused CAS of be­ing bias in favour to FI­FA be­cause CAS has set the cost of the ar­bi­tra­tion as 40,000 Swiss Frances (TT$276,000), al­though it is ex­pect­ed to take place via video con­fer­enc­ing. FI­FA does not have to pay any mon­ey.

One coach said that coach­es and staff un­der the pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent David John-Williams have not been paid since June, while an­oth­er top of­fi­cial of the TTFA be­lieves there is no need to cut staff since they are all dou­bling up by hold­ing two po­si­tions for the salary of one per­son.

For each team there is a staff of five per­sons, a coach, his two as­sis­tants, a train­er and a man­ag­er, all be­ing paid a salary range from $10,000 to $7,000 each, per month.

Derek King, who is the coach of the Un­der-20 na­tion­al team, is al­so one of the as­sis­tant coach­es for se­nior na­tion­al head coach Ter­ry Fen­wick. The same could be said for An­gus Eve, who is the coach of the U-17 boys' team, as well as as­sis­tant coach to King at the U-20s.

Mean­while, Kei­th Jef­freys, coach of the coun­try’s U-15 team, is al­so a help­ing coach for Eve at the U-17 lev­el.

Richard Hood is the coach of the coun­try’s U-17 and U-20 women's teams. A mem­ber of the tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee that se­lect­ed the coach­es, said staffs for the se­nior women’s team and the U-23 Olympic team were not se­lect­ed be­cause they were not sched­uled to go in­to any ac­tion soon. How­ev­er, he ex­plained that the rea­sons for the way coach­es and staff were se­lect­ed, was to al­low the staff suf­fi­cient time to pre­pare their re­spec­tive team for their tour­na­ment.

He not­ed al­so that the con­tracts for coach­es were done on a short-term ba­sis, say­ing there was no one mak­ing an ex­or­bi­tant salary.  

Hadad, who met with the coach­es col­lec­tive­ly and promised to meet with each coach on a one-on-one ba­sis, told Guardian Me­dia Sports yes­ter­day: "That’s not true. No de­ci­sion on tech­ni­cal staff has been made."

Hadad and his com­mit­tee, which com­pris­es at­tor­ney Judy Daniel and re­tired banker Nigel Ro­mano, al­so promised that the com­mit­tee's first as­sign­ment will be to pay salaries to staff mem­bers who have not been paid for March and April. In Feb­ru­ary, Ramesh Ramd­han had to bor­row monies to pay the staff.