Jack Anderson: Transfer sagas evolve from Eastham to Bosman to Rashford
Belgian Footballer Jean-Marc Bosman looks on at Benfica on April 25, 1996 in Lisbon, Portugal. Bosman, whose judical challenge of the football transfer rules led to the Bosman ruling in 1995. This landmarkjudgment completely changed the way footballers are employed, allowing professional players in the European Union to move freely to another clubat the end of their term of contract with their present team. Picture: Getty Images/Getty Images
FIFPRO are the global representative body for national professional football associations. They advocate for players’ rights in both the women’s and men’s games – pay equality, workload issues, contractual disputes, the day to day of any union. In 2015, FIFPRO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its foundation with a series of events. One of them was a conference on legal issues in football.
The star of the event was Jean-Marc Bosman, whose legal victory 20 years previously, in December 1995, at the then European Court of Justice, tilted the balance of power in football from club directors to players. The reason players at the top level earn as much as they do today is because of Bosman. The court case, which essentially introduced free agency in football transfers, combined with ballooning broadcasting rights to fuel the astronomical rise and rise of the football transfer market (and associated player wages).
Six months prior to the Bosman ruling, the British record transfer fee was the £8.5m that Liverpool paid Nottingham Forest for Stan Collymore; six months after Bosman, Newcastle paid £15m for Alan Shearer, the first time a British club had set a world transfer record since 1951, which, if you need a question for your New Year’s quiz, was Jackie Sewell from Notts County to Sheff Wed for £34,500 (nope, me neither).
At the FIFPRO conference in 2015, Bosman cut a nondescript, lonely almost bewildered figure. He was delighted with the adulation of conference delegates but seemed to know that his status in the game would only ever be bibliographic and never iconic.
Bosman was asked if he begrudged the players of today – one of the biggest transfers in 2015 was Bosman’s countryman, Kevin De Bruyne, to Manchester City for £55m. He did not, and replied, “clubs of today have the choice whether to pay such fees for players; during my career, players had little choice as to when and to whom they could be sold.” I saw Bosman speaking in 2015 because I also attended and spoke at that FIFPRO conference. My schtick (very much off-centre stage) was on match-fixing, arguing, contrary to what some were saying at the time, that it was not an entirely new phenomenon in football.
By way of illustration, I spoke about a match-fixing ring in English football in the mid-1960s in which two English internationals, Tony Kay and Peter Swan (both at Sheffield Wednesday) were convicted and imprisoned for fraud relating to illegal betting.
I finished the speech and sat down to the usual desultory applause. An elderly, dapper gentleman was sat beside me and said, “I knew the Wednesday boys.”
And for the next hour or so I chatted to George Eastham. I really should have recorded the conversation because he spoke so evocatively about football in England in the 1960s, just after the maximum wage had been abolished but when power still lay firmly with the clubs. He reminisced about how and why some players (not him) were tempted to top up their earnings with betting scams– mid table, end-of-season-games were especially vulnerable to players’, ahem, arrangements, allegedly.
Eastham, a member of England’s World Cup winning squad of 1966, played for, among others, Newcastle, Arsenal and Stoke. The reason he was at the FIFPRO conference was that in attempting to leave Newcastle at the end of the 1959-60 season, the club had refused his request, invoking the retain and transfer rule. The retain and transfer rule in football – and it really wasn’t until the Bosman ruling in the mid-1990s when it was finally repealed – meant that even when a footballer (as an employee) had completed his contract, the club (as employer) could retain the employee’s registration and refuse to allow them to transfer to another club unless an agreeable transfer fee was paid.
It was a feudalistic system and Eastham challenged it in court. As he awaited a court date, he, in effect, went on strike and did not play football for months until Arsenal stepped up in late 1960.
In 1964, the English High Court eventually ruled in his favour, holding that football’s then transfer system was an unreasonable restraint of trade. It was a seminal moment for footballers’ rights, allowing greater contractual mobility and hence greater bargaining power for players.
Eastham was typically modest about his role in all of this. But like many players of his generation (Johnny Giles has often said this as well) gently reminded the conference audience that, although the salaries of footballers today tend to be excessive, the football industry he grew up in could be equally as oppressive towards players. Players were often no better than a piece of meat to be bought and sold (and sometimes left to rot) as directors saw fit.
The legal battles that Eastham and Bosman engaged in continued over the past year in the European Courts when a matter involving a retired French footballer, Lassana Diarra, resulted in a declaration that parts of FIFA’s transfer regulations are anti-competitive and overly restrictive of the free movement of players.
It is harder to have as much empathy with the legal machinations of today than of Eastham’s time. Contemporary football transfer cases are often a bit like corporate executives, on packages worth multiples of their workers’ salaries, litigating over the loss of bonuses. If Marcus Rashford, an otherwise likable footballer, cannot see the irony (at Christmas time in a country once more on the brink of recession) of publicly declaring his unhappiness at Manchester United, where he is currently on £325,000 a week (that is, 44 times the average week salary of a full time employee in the UK), is football even real anymore?
Geoge Eastham encountered the cutthroat, commercial side of football and came out the other side of litigation, benefitting thousands of footballers thereafter. He was clear eyed and unsentimental about football the industry. But he also knew the power of the game and when living in South Africa in the 1980s, while others toured it to play rugby, he, a staunch anti-apartheid critic, coached black footballers.
George Eastham died on 20 December, aged 88. His off-field success should not overshadow his on-field talent, especially his stint at Stoke, his 19 caps for England and his time at Arsenal. Looking at the Arsenal webpage, they describe his key playing attribute as having been, “Blessed with a left foot which wouldn't have looked out of place on the end of Liam Brady's leg.” The highest of praise for the nicest of men.
