Given the depths of human behaviour currently being plumbed by many players - do I really need to name names? - now couldn’t be a more difficult time to cast professional footballers in the role of victim.

But a savage report, compiled by world players’ union FIFPro and released on Wednesday, does just that. The 178-page document, entitled “FIFPro Black Book Eastern Europe”, paints a shocking picture of football across the region, in which players contracts are disregarded, their personal safety threatened and their financial security undermined by clubs and, by extension, national football associations.

The rationale for the study is not merely to elicit sympathy for the plight of players, but to alert those who seek to protect the integrity of the game to a logical hypothesis: players who do not receive their wages on time, do not receive their agreed bonuses, and whose employment rights are continually undermined, are more vulnerable to engaging in match-fixing.

FIFPro interviewed 3,357 professional footballers across 12 different countries in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe, and the data seems to stack up. One in ten of those interviewed admitted to having been approached to fix a match - but among the 1,290 players who admitted that their salaries were not paid on time, 55% had been approached to fix a match. The same pattern emerges from the 366 players who admit to being subject to violence (38.6% versus 8.1% of total responses) and the 488 players who say they have been forced to train alone by their club (31% versus 13.3% of total responses).

Thus, aside from the already stark fact that at an average football match across Eastern Europe there are nine players taking to the field who regularly don’t receive their wages on time (if at all), and maybe three of them will have been intimidated by their club in some form, at least one of the players may have been tapped up to fix the result of the game.

One hopes that the FIFPro report will set the ball rolling for a concerted effort to clean up the game in the region. But from my own standpoint as a follower of football in Russia, the report is more intriguing - or should that be worrying - for what it doesn’t say than for what it does.

Taken in isolation, the results of FIFPro’s 177 interviews with players from Russia tell a rather contradictory tale, in which players are keenly aware of the problems highlighted by FIFPro, but do not admit to experiencing them themselves.

Just over 15% of players said they did not receive their wages on time - 15% too many, but better than the average across the region. One suspects, however, that this figure is an under-estimate of the true scale of the problem. Currently at least two clubs in the top two divisions - FK Tom and FK Nizhny Novgorod - are staving off the threat of liquidation. As of December 2011 Tom’s players had not been paid since June. Amkar are another club in trouble, and their plight prompted the Russian players union to issue a condemnatory statement last month on the financial problems affecting Russian football. Last summer at another Premier League club, Volga, players were told to expect a delay in the payment of two separate tranches of their wages until 2012. First Division side Baltika are under a transfer embargo over debts owed.

Similar problems have in the past affected Krylya Sovetov - one former player, Jiri Jarosik (once of Chelsea and Celtic), alleges he still hasn’t been paid money owed to him since he left the club in 2010 - and the now defunct clubs Saturn and Zhemchuzhina-Sochi. Just this week another club, SKA Rostov, who play in Russia’s third tier, have come under threat from their creditors. These are only the clubs (eight of them out of 36 in Russia’s top two divisions, or 22%) that publicly declare financial difficulties - the true figure for those not receiving their wages on time could be much greater.

The same applies, more compellingly, where violence and intimidation are concerned. Not a single Russian player admitted to being the victim of violence. This, despite at least three high-profile cases in the last year of players - former Kuban midfielder Nikola Nikezic, Krasnodar’s Spartak Gogniev and Zenit’s Danko Lazovic - being physically threatened by, respectively, their club management, opposition fans and officials, and the police force. In addition only eight said they had been forced to train alone by their club - though, perversely, 79 players (44.6% of the interviewees) knew of team-mates who had.

And match-fixing was another issue where players showed an awareness of a problem, but did not admit to it directly. ‘Just’ 10.2% (one in ten! God help us all) say they have been approached to fix a match, though 43.5% say they know of matches in the Russian league that have been fixed. The evidence provided all adds up to the same message - Russian players know these abuses go on, but not involving them. This is despite many years, hundreds of hours of TV and radio discussion and acres of newsprint in which the problem of match-fixing has been explored from top to bottom in Russia. Some estimates put the proportion of fixed matches in Russia’s lower leagues at 40%.

Most damning of all is that of the 177 players based in Russia who were interviewed, not a single one agreed to be interviewed in person by their union - with the likely consequence of relinquishing their anonymity and inviting an investigation - about the issues that were affecting them. Cowardice? Actually, that silence speaks volumes.

“Many hundreds [of players] recoiled at the thought of making a complete statement about what had happened to them,” the FIFPro document states. “Many players admitted they were scared. FIFPro and its union employees listened to players tell their story in tears and, at the same time, insist that their story had to remain absolutely confidential…It is the tip of the iceberg.”

Perhaps that fear explains why Spartak Gogniev still refuses to speak to the media or press charges following his savage beating in Grozny last autumn. Perhaps that fear also explains why former Russia international Vadim Evseev, after making unspecificed accusations of match-fixing, says he will only testify under the protection of a court of law, or why none of the reasons for Lokomotiv Moscow’s sacking of manager Yury Krasnozhan last year (amid whispers of fixing) have ever come to light.

Either that or it’s all conspiracy theory. Make your own mind up. But when it comes to Russia’s footballers I for one feel great sympathy indeed.