Football Business
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU, M.P.
EVERY Saturday afternoon during the season a million or so men and women watch professional football. Many more, perhaps with one eye on their duplicate pools coupon, wait breathlessly by their wireless for the results. No sport, not even racing, arouses so much interest; yet there is no sport about which the interest is so ill-informed.
Even those of us who are real fans, who go to the matches and who argue about them through the following week—know only what we see. We see the players trot on to the ground, we see them play and, at the final whistle, we see them trot off again. But we know and care little about the details of the organisation without which there would be nothing for us to see. We have no idea how or why the light goes on when we press the switch. We only know that, as a rule, it does, and are content to leave it at that.
For such as us the report of the Committee set up by the Minister of Labour to investigate some aspects of Association Football was certainly a revelation. It may also have been a shock. For the report shows that this great entertain- ment industry which gives so many of us so much pleasure maintains itself by at least one practice which I can only des- cribe as repulsive. Most people who follow football at all have heard of the transfer system. They read in the newspapers of players being transferred from one club to another for twenty, twenty-five, even thirty, thousand pounds, and are vaguely shocked that men should be bought and sold like cattle. The reality of the transfer system is worse even than the appearance. It resembles not merely a cattle-market but a slave-market.
A professional player today signs' a contract with a club for one year. He undertakes to put his playing services at the disposal of that club for the year, and the club in return agrees to pay him a stated sum in wages, plus other possible sums in the form of bonuses. So far this is like any other contract. But now comes the difference. When an ordinary contract expires it expires for both paAies to it. When a football con- tract expires, it expires only for one party to it—the club, The player is still bound by it. When the contract expires, the club may dispense with the player, whether he wishes it or not, but the player may not dispense with the club unless the club wishes it.
Here are some examples of how this contract works. The first, a good one, is where club and player get on well together. When one contract expires, club and' player sign another one, and go on doing so for years. The great Billy Smith, for example, stayed with Huddersfield for, I think, twenty years. The second example, also a good one, is where a club no longer wishes to retain a player and gives him the fullest possible chance to sign-on for another club. To do this, the club gives 'the player a ' free " transfer. That means that any club which signs-on the player can do so without having to pay money to the first club. This ,is done at the end of every season for many indifferent players, and occasionally, by mistake, for good ones. Huddersfield Town once gave a " free " transfer to Ephraim Dodds, who later played for his country.
Now, as a third and bad example, take a player who, when his contract expires, wishes to move to another club though his own club wishes to retain him. The player may want to move for personal reasons—to be nearer his home or to get away from team-mates with whom he out of sympathy—or for professional reasons; he might have a better chance in another club of winning a place in the first team or of getting the maximum wages allowed by League rule. But his club may flatly refuse to let him go. If the player still refuses to sign' a new contract, he not merely gets no wages from his present club but is prevented from earning wages or playing football with any other club in the Football League. He must either submit, starve or earn a new living at a new job.
Alternatively the club may take a less drastic but equally uncomfortable attitude. It may agree to let the player go- at a price. It puts the player on the " transfer list " at a fee of, say, £15,000, which means that before another club may sign the player it must pay £15,000 to the first club. Quite possibly clubs which are able and willing to pay the player £14 a week maximum wages are unable to find £15,000 for the right to sign him on. The player may appeal to the ruling body of the game against the size of the fee placed on his head. But appeals take time, and meanwhile he is without wages and without a game. Such a system exists in no other industry or profession. In journalism, for example, when my contract with a newspaper expires I am free to try to renew it or to go to another paper. If I do decide to go, the first newspaper cannot demand compensation—a " transfer fee "—from the newspaper to which I go. But professional footballers are bound by a relic of the feudal system in what sometimes looks very like slavery.
One of the worst sufferers from this system is a man who is also one of the greatest footballers of Illy generation—Peter Doherty; now manager of Doncaster Rovers. When the last war broke out Doherty was with Manchester City, and the City, like all other clubs, immediately cancelled their players' contracts. Instead of continuing to pay the regular weekly wage, the club substituted a match fee of 30s. Doherty was unable to support his family on this, and was unable, pending his call-up, to find an outside job in Manchester. But he was offered a war job in Scotland. As soon as the club heard of this, an official told Doherty that he was still a City player, and that if he persisted in going to Scotland, City would see to it that he played no football there. Doherty stayed in Manchester. On another and earlier occasion Doherty had suffered from the reverse effect of the transfer system. He was compelled by it to move from a club when he wanted to stay. He was playing with Blackpool, and was settled and happy there, when the club told him that he was to be transferred to Manchester City. He prote'sted, but was told : " It's no good, Peter. You'll have to go. We need the cash."
What does the Ministry of Labour tribunal propose to do about this ? It proposes merely that transfer fees shotfld be limited to £15,000, and that the fee should be divided equally between the selling club, the Football Association and the Players' Benevolent Fund. I do not think that this suggestion would ever' be carried out, even if it were nominally accepted, because in football today there is, besides a slave market, a considerable black market as well, and the unscrupulous and wealthy club would soon find ways of paying, under the counter, more than the stipulated maximum .to induce poorer clubs to part with their stars. But even if accepted and honestly worked, the suggestion would not remove the really obnoxious features of the transfer system. The only solution I can think of—and this was put to the Tribunal by the Players' Union—is for professional football to be treated like any other industry. That is to say that a player, subject only to provisions for a minimum wage, should be free to negotiate the best tern is he can with a club under a contract to run for a period which both parties agree—whether it be one year, three years, even ten years. This contract would be binding at law to both parties for its full term, but, when it expired, both parties would be free either to negotiate a new contract or to part.
There are many difficulties about this There are other interesting features in the report, but the only recommendation in it that seems to me worth while is that the Football Association and the Football League on the one side and the Players' Union on the other should really get down to it together again and try as grown up men to remedy the obvious evils from which the game is suffering. If the two sides really cannot agree, then the rest of us, i.e., the Government, really will have to do something. We have no right to continue drawing blind unthinking pleasure from some- thing which has in it such evil elements.
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