Udinese fight Portsmouth over Sulley Muntari transfer

Udinese are to take Portsmouth to the Court of Arbitration for Sport [CAS] in Lausanne, Switzerland, for failing to pay instalments on Sulley Muntari’s transfer from the Serie A club for £7 million in May 2007.

The Italian team are believed to be owed about £4 million and could ask CAS to rule that the whole amount must be paid. “We can confirm that we are presenting a case to the CAS over the payment of Muntari’s transfer,” a spokesman for Udinese said yesterday.

Doubts over Portsmouth’s claims to have rescheduled transfer debt on foreign signings — specifically Muntari — are understood to have persuaded the Premier League not to lift its transfer embargo on Portsmouth on Wednesday and the wisdom of the decision became clear within hours.

It is the latest in a series of blows to the credibility of the Barclays Premier League’s bottom club, who must decide whether to appeal against a High Court refusal to strike out a Revenue & Customs winding-up petition and have had a writ for unpaid bonuses worth £1.7 million issued against them by Sol Campbell, their former captain.

Muntari, the Ghana midfield player, was part of the Portsmouth squad that won the FA Cup in 2008, at what is now known to have been a considerable cost to a club that could never seriously have expected to bear the high wages and bonuses they paid to Muntari and his team-mates.

He was one of the first of the highly paid players to be sold, joining Inter Milan two months after the Wembley victory over Cardiff City for £12.7 million. That was a profit of more than £5 million and could have gone most of the way towards paying off the outstanding amount of the original fee, but subsequent events have suggested that Portsmouth were not a prudently run business.

As Portsmouth’s need to raise money becomes more acute and the closing of the January transfer window draws closer, Mike Williamson, who has not played a minute of first-team football since joining the club from Watford on September 1, could be the first player to leave Fratton Park this month after a bid of under £1 million from Newcastle United was accepted yesterday.

However, there has been little interest in the high earners that the club would most like to get off their books, such as John Utaka and David Nugent, while interest in Hassan Yebda, the Algeria midfield player who is on a season-long loan from Benfica, will not help to fill the coffers.

Younès Kaboul, the defender, is the most saleable asset, but Portsmouth are reported to have turned down a bid of more than £10 million from an unnamed club in France. If they hope to drive the price nearer to their estimate of £14 million or to convince suitors in this country of his value to other clubs, they risk pricing themselves out of the market. And that may be something they cannot afford to do.