Chicken Lovers

TIRANA, Albania — Sebino Plaku, a player for the Polish professional soccer team Slask Wroclaw, sat across a small desk from the club’s president and vice president.

It was Aug. 28, 2014. The two club officials, Mr. Plaku said, presented him with a document that was an “annex” to his contract with the team. The team, the executives told Mr. Plaku, wanted to immediately reduce his monthly salary by more than 50 percent. They told Mr. Plaku, an Albanian, that he had 20 minutes to decide whether to accept.

Then, Mr. Plaku said, the president — speaking Polish and using the vice president as his English interpreter — delivered a message: “If you don’t sign this,” he said, according to Mr. Plaku, “we will destroy your career.”

Mr. Plaku refused. What followed, he has claimed in an arbitration case against the club, was roughly five months of isolation, humiliation, psychological abuse and intimidation, all of which combined to derail his professional career.

According to player advocacy groups, Mr. Plaku’s case is emblematic of a widespread labor issue in Europe in which players are given the choice between bending to their employers’ demands or enduring harsh, punitive training regimens. The practice is known by the catchall term training alone, and it is regarded as soccer’s version of solitary confinement.

“It is physical torture and it is psychological torture,” said Dejan Stefanovic, a former player who now leads Slovenia’s players’ union. “And it happens everywhere.”

Accusations of players being forced to train alone have been reported in virtually every country in Europe — from marquee teams like Chelsea andManchester United to minor ones like Slask Wroclaw — and player advocates say the cases that go unreported are most likely innumerable given that many players stay quiet for fear of losing their positions altogether. Typically, clubs that separate players from their teammates do so over money — because the player will not sign a contract extension, or he refuses to allow the club to terminate a contract early or modify its terms.

In Poland, training alone is so common it even has a nickname: the Coconut Club, named after Daniel Kokosinski, a player who endured the treatment in 2009. (“Kokos” means “coconut” in Polish.)

Mr. Plaku said he had been forced to train three times a day (alone, and often without time to eat between sessions); required to do excessive running; fined thousands of euros if he was even 30 seconds late for a training session; and made to take part in demeaning activities like changing in the boys’ teams’ locker room or standing in the city center for hours to hand out newspapers.

Slask Wroclaw, which is based in southwest Poland, has defended its actions by saying that Mr. Plaku’s fitness was not sufficient for him to be a part of its top team any longer. (Mr. Plaku, 30, who is currently playing for a first-division club in Albania, dismissed that claim as “ridiculous.”)

Slask Wroclaw’s president, Pawel Zelem, did not respond to questions about his involvement in the case. Krzysztof Swiercz, a spokesman for Slask Wroclaw, agreed to a brief telephone interview in which he said that the club had “nothing to blame ourselves for.”

“There are many professional players who train twice or thrice a day and never complain; they are professionals in every way,” Mr. Swiercz continued. “There are people who work in factories for 13 hours a day and get paid 1,000 zlotys per month, and they don’t complain. So do you really think Plaku has anything to complain about?” The amount of Polish zlotys he referred to is equivalent to about $263.

Mr. Swiercz added that on Sundays — “as the law states” — Mr. Plaku had the day off.

A tribunal for Poland’s soccer federation ultimately dissolved Mr. Plaku’s contract with Slask Wroclaw but did not assign blame, which allowed the club to avoid paying Mr. Plaku the balance of his salary (about $222,000 in lost wages). Mr. Plaku has appealed, taking the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international organization that adjudicates cases related to athletics. A decision is expected as soon as this week.

In Western Europe, accusations that clubs have treated players in a similar manner are common. Nicolai Boilesen, who was the captain of the Dutch club Ajax last season, was separated from the first team this year after refusing to sign a contract extension. Ajax’s coach, Frank de Boer, has been quoted as saying: “Nicolai made his choice. If you do not accept the offer that we make, then you have to suffer the consequences.”

In Eastern Europe, the problem is more pervasive. Results of a 2012 player survey conducted by FIFPro, the international players’ union, found that in 12 Eastern European countries, roughly one in six players reported having been forced to train alone, while about 40 percent of players in Poland specifically said they knew of at least one such incident.

Mr. Stefanovic, the Slovene player representative, said the survey offered only “a hint” of how common such intimidation tactics were. He cited the case of the Serbian midfielder Andrija Zivkovic, one of the continent’s most promising young players, who starred at the FIFA U nder-20 World Cup last year and was a centerpiece of the decorated team Partizan Belgrade.

Earlier this year, Mr. Zivkovic, 19, refused to sign a contract extension with Partizan after drawing interest from richer clubs abroad, Mr. Stefanovic said. He was summarily sent home from the club’s training camp and has since been barred from practicing with the first team.

“He’s literally running circles by himself,” Mr. Stefanovic said. “If this happens to one of the best players, imagine what is happening to the other poor guys.”

Much of the problem, Mr. Stefanovic said, is a lack of standard professional contracts for players. Mr. Stefanovic said that in Romania, for example, players are typically assets of the club, which means that even if a club goes bankrupt, players are not allowed to find new clubs because all assets are frozen.

Mr. Stefanovic added that as far back as 2011, FIFPro, which represents players’ interests but lacks collective bargaining power or leverage with individual leagues, had asked European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, to consider making standard contracts a requirement. The union has seen no progress, he said, adding, “The problem is getting worse, not better.”

According to Maciej Krzeminski, a lawyer for the Polish players’ union, Mr. Plaku’s case is typical. Mr. Plaku was a star growing up here and played for Albania’s national youth teams.

Early in the 2014-15 season, after Mr. Plaku sustained a minor injury while playing for Slask Wroclaw, he said he was called into Mr. Zelem’s office for the meeting in which he was told to sign the reduced-value contract. After he declined, he said, the intimidation from the club began.

Running and physical exertion were constant, he said, but psychological punishment was significant as well.

Most days he was at the club 12 or 13 hours, stopping only for short breaks between sessions. He was not allowed to eat with the first team. Some days he was allowed to play with the reserves, but when he scored two goals in one match, he said, he was pulled from the game and the coach told him, “Sebi, if you score too many goals, it’s not good for me.”

Mr. Plaku was separated from his team for about five months, he said, before his contract was terminated by the Polish federation in February 2015. At that point, he was free to sign with another team, but the transfer window in Europe was closed until the summer. The damage to his career had been done, he said.

“Now I am close to 31 — it will be difficult to make a step forward,” he said.

He shrugged. “I thought it was going to be the best part of my career,” he said. “It turned out to be the worst.”