WHEN FOOTBALLERS WERE SKINT: A Journey in Search of the
Soul of Football
JON HENDERSON
Biteback Publishing, 2018, 308
pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Bill Leivers (Manchester City,
1953-1964) wryly recalls to the British journalist, Jon Henderson, in When Footballers Were Skint, how the
football club owner once rewarded the players on the train home from a
successful away game, not with a fistful of sterling for a few drinks all
round, but with a packet of Polo Mints.
His contemporary, Tom Finney (England
regular and Preston North End), reflects tartly on the £50,000 gate-takings which
the English Football Association received from one international fixture at
Wembley Stadium – of which the eleven England players shared just £550.
The chasm between the earnings
of football’s bosses and players was at its widest in the wage cap. Instituted in 1901 at the urging of the smaller,
poorer clubs who feared being unable to compete for high quality players against
the bigger, richer clubs, the maximum wage had crawled from a modest £4 a week to
a still-middling £20 by 1961, not much more than the national average male
worker’s weekly wage.
Tight-fisted employers and
modest wages were the norm for England’s professional footballers as they were
for the working class from which the players came. On humble wages, the machinists, sheet metal
workers, plumbers, joiners, stonemasons, builders labourers and coal miners who
found new careers on the football pitch shared the humble lives of their fans,
using the same public transport to get to matches, and living in nondescript terraced
housing right next door to their fans.
Trolley-bus conductors might
waive the occasional fare but that was the extent of their perks, except for
the bigger names who could eke out a little more from extra-curricular activities
such as (ghosted) newspaper columns, advertising and endorsements.
The businessmen who owned the
clubs were only too ready to exploit the players’ love of the game and their club
bonds. They airily dismissed wages
gripes as unworthy compared to the ‘big honour’ of signing for a First Division
club, or the ‘priceless honour’ of national team selection, or remaining a loyal
one-club player by sacrificially turning down attractive offers from overseas
clubs.
The footballers, however, had
one traditional working class value they could call on to shake loose from the wage
cap – withdrawal of their labour. The
players had carried their trade union principles into their new workplace, as
members of the Professional Footballers’ Association. Under the aggressive leadership of Fulham’s
Jimmy Hill, the footballers’ union members voted to strike on Saturday, 21st
January 1961 against the maximum wage.
The Trades Union Congress, Britain’s
peak labour body, backed the strike by calling on the public (then largely
unionised workers) to boycott any games that went ahead, and letting it be
known that any footballer contemplating strike-breaking might find i hard (under
no-ticket, no-start union principles) to find work once their playing days were
over.
Just a few hours before the
scheduled Saturday afternoon kick-off, the Football League caved and the clubs
all agreed to abolish the wage cap. This
workers’ victory was, says Henderson, on a par with other labour struggles in
Britain for fairer wages.
Since then, adds Henderson
however, “things have gone awry” in the descent of English football “towards
the bloated monument to Mammon it would grow into by the close of the century”. Henderson’s interviewees, all veterans from the
wage-cap era, are unanimous that present day footballers’ wages are ‘immoral’, ‘barmy’,
‘ridiculous’, ‘outrageous’. The average
salary of an English Premier League (EPL) footballer has just topped £50,000
per week (with the superstars coining north of a quarter million each week),
whilst transfer fees have reached obscene levels (Neymar’s record-breaking sale
from Barcelona to Paris St-Germain for £198 million in 2017 is now an aspiration
not an aberration).
Supersonic wage inflation was
turbo-charged by the billion pound deluge of media money for television
broadcasting rights for the EPL, following the revamping of the old competition
structure in 1992. TV money has made
large financial rewards possible for all twenty EPL clubs, much of which goes
to purchasing the most talented players from all corners of the globe to ensure
top flight survival and it continuing monetary rewards.
What the clubs have lost in this
mad march of money, say Henderson’s interviewees, are the community bonds between
the players and their working class supporters.
The EPL’s “plutocrats of today” are footballers who are “not close to the
fans at all”. They are an elite stratum
of international round-ball mercenaries with more regard for their tax-dodging,
off-shore accounts and luxurious lifestyles than for any economic
egalitarianism or wealth-levelling that might benefit their fans. In hindsight, the few dissenters in the players’
union in 1961 who argued for significantly raising, but not abolishing, the
wage cap in 1961 were on to something.
The entire class of ’61,
however, were on to something bigger, and still politically relevant – the
power of trade union combination against the tiny few who profit from football,
whether they did so in the past by keeping wages shackled or by overpaying
today’s super-rich players to keep the TV-rights revenue in the stratosphere. The 1961 wage cap struggle is the necessary
reminder that it is only the skills of the working footballer which make the
football industry possible.
Henderson’s book, despite its
page-padding self-indulgent nostalgia, shows that it is the remorseless logic
of capitalism which drives the contest for the soul of football between working
class community and the profit-seeking forces of commercialism, between those
who truly love the game and those off (and increasingly on) the pitch who see
it as just another path to get rich. Football
is a class game in more ways than one.
