The Maximum Wage and Retain & Transfer: A Match Made in Hell for Players

Wayne Rooney earns more in a week than the entire Blackpool squad combined. It is an extraordinary fact, one thrown into sharp relief by last night’s Premier League match, but it is a product of a revolution that took fifty years to arrive. Before the 1960s, English footballers were held in a peculiar state of serfdom by a brutal salary cap and a contract system that tied them to clubs for life.

This world was born almost as soon as professionalism itself. After Darwen FC began paying players in 1879, money flooded into the game. By 1893, smaller clubs were already demanding a wage cap to stop their bigger rivals from poaching talent. It was Derby County that made the first appeal, but the Football League only acted in 1901 at the behest of Stoke City, setting the maximum wage at £4 per week and banning bonuses outright.

For the game’s stars, it was a savage pay cut. Sheffield United’s goalkeeper William Foulkes was already making £3 per week in 1896, with handsome bonuses on top, making him a wealthy man for the era. The new rule was a victory for smaller clubs concerned about the growing financial disparity, but it crushed the nascent Association Footballers Union. Founded in 1898 and supported by the top earners, the union folded when it failed to stop the cap. Most players earned less than £4 a week anyway and had little appetite for a strike.

The Slavery Contract

The maximum wage alone was enough to ensure a footballer would never be rich, but the retain-and-transfer system, introduced in 1893, made things worse. It allowed a club to keep a player’s registration even after his contract expired, without any obligation to pay him. A player was tied to a club until it decided otherwise, effectively selling him for a transfer fee. He had no freedom of movement.

The one significant challenge to the system ended in disaster. In 1910, journeyman Herbert Kingaby sought to leave Aston Villa. When Villa refused to release him without a fee, he joined Fulham in the Southern League, which did not use the retain-and-transfer system. But a year later, the Southern League adopted the system, and Kingaby’s registration reverted to Villa. His new club, Leyton Orient, could not afford the £350 fee Villa demanded.

Kingaby sued, but his case collapsed in court. He argued Villa acted out of revenge, but the law stated that motive cannot make a lawful act unlawful. Had he argued that the entire system was an unfair restraint of trade, he might have won. He did not, and retain-and-transfer remained for another fifty years.

A Union Reborn

A new union, the Association of Football Players’ and Trainers’ Union (AFTPU), rose from the ashes in 1907. Led by Manchester United’s Charlie Roberts and Billy Meredith, it threatened to strike. The authorities threatened members with expulsion from the game, and for a time it seemed the 1909/10 season would begin with mass bans at United and Sunderland after their players refused to renounce their membership. A compromise was reached, but it was a defeat for the players. The maximum wage remained, and union activists found themselves overlooked for England selection.

Meredith saw the problem clearly, in words that still ring true today:

The unfortunate thing is that so many players refuse to take things seriously but are content to live a kind of schoolboy life and to do just what they are told… instead of thinking and acting for himself and his class.

Roberts, who had already annoyed the FA by wearing shorts that were actually short, was similarly disappointed. Their fight, however, was not over.

The Dam Breaks

By the 1950s, the system was an anachronism. The maximum wage had risen to £20 per week, but the average industrial wage was £15. England’s finest centre-half, Neil Franklin, earned just £12 a week at Stoke City. In 1950, he broke his contract and signed for a club in Bogota for a £5,000-per-year deal, earning himself an FA ban. The move was a disaster, but it showed the door was unlocked. Top players like John Charles left for Italy, where Juventus paid him £25,000 a year in 1957. At the same time, Manchester United and England’s Roger Byrne earned around £1,600 a season.

The drain of talent was undeniable.

In 1960, the PFA, now led by Jimmy Hill, voted to strike. At the last minute, the Football League capitulated. In January 1961, the maximum wage was abolished. Fulham chairman Tommy Trinder, a comedian by trade, had previously boasted that his star player Johnny Haynes was worth £100 a week, never believing he would have to pay it. Haynes walked out of the boardroom with the first £100-per-week contract in English football history.

Two years later, the retain-and-transfer system was fatally wounded. Newcastle United’s George Eastham had refused to sign a new contract in 1959 but the club retained his registration, blocking his move to Arsenal. With PFA backing, Eastham took his case to court. In 1963, Justice Wilberforce ruled that Newcastle’s actions were an unfair restraint of trade. The slavery contract was broken, and while Eastham himself did not benefit financially from the ruling, the path to freedom for all players was finally clear.