Panathinaikos players failed to show up for training on Monday in protest at unpaid wages while Olympiakos named Portuguese Pedro Martins as coach for next season.

According to Greek media reports, Panathinaikos players have told club president Vasilis Konstantinou they will not return to training unless they are paid at least up to the end of December.

They were last paid in October, the reports said.

Last week the Greek Super League hit the club with a three-point penalty for failing to pay off their debts to former defender Jens Wemmer.

Panathinaikos owe the German 498,322 euros in unpaid wages.

Having already been hit by a two-point penalty earlier in the season over crowd trouble, the 20-time Greek champions, who have fallen on hard times recently, dropped to 11th in the 16-team league.

They have been in financial difficulty since wealthy media and ship owner Giannis Alafouzos abandoned the club at the start of the season.

Meanwhile, their bitter domestic rivals Olympiakos ended a chaotic few weeks by naming a new coach.

Martins, 47, replaces Spaniard Oscar Garcia, who quit last week after club president Evangelos Marinakis sent the entire first team squad on holiday as punishment for under-performing.

Garcia had been in the job only three months.

His former assistant Christos Kontis will coach the team for the rest of this season.

Marinakis, who also owns English club Nottingham Forest, vowed to call up players from the club’s under-20 team to play the remainder of the season, while he fined the first-time squad 400,000 euros ($490,000).

With four games left, Olympiakos’s hopes of winning a record eighth straight title are virtually over as they lie nine points behind leaders AEK Athens.

le/bc/dmc

© Agence France-Presse

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