Russia's football union admitted Wednesday that it is unable to pay the multi-million dollar salary of the national team's manager Fabio Capello and will have to look for alternative sources of funding.

"I am saying with full authority that the Russian Football Union simply does not have the money to pay Capello," Sergei Stepashin, a member of the executive committee of the football union, told Interfax news agency.

"It's not right when a financial renumeration is not paid out to the manager of the Russian national team.

"But when they signed the contract, they should have thought about the sources of financing. And today we need to look for those sources," said Stepashin, who was briefly prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and is the former head of Russia's audit chamber.

"I'm sure that the question of paying out (his) salary should be resolved on November 15 when the team plays a match with the Austrian team. It must be decided by those who were responsible for signing Capello's contract."

"As far as I know, the contract was signed by Nikolai Tolstykh (president of the Russian Football Union) and initialled by sports minister Vitaly Mutko," Stepashin said.

"All in all, it's an extremely unpleasant situation."

Capello was said to be the highest paid coach at the World Cup in Brazil this summer with a reported salary of around 7 million euros, although the national team disappointed fans by exiting in the first round.

The former England manager signed a lucrative new contract in January which covers the 2018 World Cup hosted by Russia.

But sports minister Vitaly Mutko said in August that Capello had not been paid for more than two months, stressing that the football union had to resolve its "internal" problem.

The Italian coach who took charge of Russia's squad in 2012 told Sportbox.ru website earlier this month: "I haven't been paid according to my contract for five months."

"I am getting close to the limit. I am somewhere near," Capello told Sportbox.ru in comments translated into Russian.

The debacle is particularly embarrassing as Russia is already preparing to host the 2018 World Cup with a forecasted cost of 664 billion rubles ($14.4 billion), half of which is supposed to come from private investment and half from the budget.

Russia last month unveiled the logo of the 2018 World Cup with pomp, with FIFA president Sepp Blatter telling R-Sport news agency that the federation "unconditionally supports the staging of the World Cup by Russia".