Legal proceedings are set to be launched against the owners of the former Super League club Toronto Wolfpack in a bid to recoup unpaid player salaries in excess of £1m, almost four years on from the club’s demise, the Guardian can reveal.

The Canadian club withdrew from Super League in the summer of 2020, citing financial difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic as their primary reason for being unable to continue. That left their playing squad, which included Sonny Bill Williams, in effect unemployed, and many of those players have been attempting to reclaim six months of unpaid wages for the remainder of the 2020 season without success.

Toronto’s former owner, David Argyle, was making “goodwill” payments of £1,150 to players while promising to pay them what they were owed for more than two years but now the matter is finally heading to court. The Rugby League Players Association, a branch of the GMB Union, which represents rugby league players in the UK, has written to Argyle with support from the Rugby Football League to confirm it will be taking legal action in a bid to reclaim the money owed to players in full, which is believed to be in the region of £1.2m.

The head of the RLPA, Garreth Carvell, warned the Guardian this action could happen almost two years ago. “Where our members are owed wages, there is no way we’ll give up fighting for them, no matter how long that takes,” he said. “We are, along with the RFL, at a stage where we will have no choice but to take legal action should there be any more delays.

“This may prove to be a long, drawn-out process for our members.” The legal process could still now take a lengthy period to resolve, but the hope is that those Toronto players, many of whom had multi-year contracts and were unable to source full-time playing contracts after the club’s sudden demise, now receive the money they are owed in full having been promised it repeatedly over the past few years.

“We aren’t Premier League footballers,” the club’s former winger, Matty Russell, who now plays for Warrington, said to the Guardian in 2022. “This is money that guys need to feed their families which has just never materialised. We need it.” Some of the players are owed tens of thousands of pounds and have since taken jobs away from the sport.

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Toronto arrived in rugby league in 2017 amid a blaze of publicity, becoming the sport’s first transatlantic club. They began life at the bottom of the game’s professional structure, starting in the third tier, League 1, and winning it in their first season. They were promoted to Super League in 2019 and recruited a number of high-profile players, with Williams the biggest of them, the New Zealand dual-code international signing a two-year deal before their first season in the top flight.

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But during the pandemic, Toronto withdrew from the competition in July 2020. They were rejected for readmission for the 2021 season before deciding to cease operations in November 2020. A reincarnation of the Wolfpack has since appeared in the North American leagues, but has no connection to Argyle or the original ownership group.

Argyle has been approached for comment by the Guardian.