George Eastham: the quiet revolutionary
By the end of the 1950s, professional footballers were largely chattels, the property of their clubs. But with a high profile court case in 1963, all of that was blown away.
When we think of the professional footballer in the 21st century, we tend to think of players earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, living their best lives, and having the freedom to make the decisions that they want to make over how their playing careers pan out.
Professional football is the strangest occupation, one in which there is a window which may last for two decades—if you're extremely lucky—and which could end extremely abruptly in the event of just one serious injury or lack of contract offers. Playing careers can be brief and insecure, and many players really literally don't know how to do anything else. Small wonder, therefore, that players will go where the money is.
But there was a time when players simply didn't have this freedom. Their earnings were dictated by the governing bodies of the game through the Maximum Wage, which was introduced in 1901 as a cap on player earnings, with the stated aim of maintaining competitive balance in competitions and controlling ‘spiralling’ wages.
It was surely just a coincidence that the level at which the wage was set very much benefitted those who owned the clubs, pegged at around the level of what would at the time have been described as a 'skilled tradesman'. In the 1900/01 season, the average professional player earned around £7 a week (£1078, adjusted for inflation to 2024). When the cap was introduced, it was set at just £4 a week. It was an object lesson in players 'knowing their place' within the strictures of the game at the time.
And this wasn't the only way in which clubs effectively kept players as chattels. You might think that, at the end of a fixed-term contract, players would be able to go wherever they liked, but again this wasn't the case. Players, as far as clubs were concerned, were commodities with a financial value, and they weren't going to let them go for nothing.
The upshot of all this was the 'retain and transfer' system, under which a club could retain a player's registration at the end of a contract—which were routinely set at one year only—and prevent them from playing for anybody else unless a transfer offer was made which also included enough of a fee for them to be interested in giving the player concerned up.
By the start of the 1960s, the strains within this system were clearly starting to show. In 1949 several star players, including Stoke City's Neil Franklin, who was considered by some to be among the best defenders in the world at the time, were tempted by offers of huge money from Colombia and broke their contracts to leave. It was a state of affairs that didn't seem to do either side any good.
An ill-prepared England team blew out at the 1950 World Cup with Franklin banned, but the players concerned found themselves no better off, finding a string of broken promises and unpaid wages in South America, once they got there. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, players such as John Charles, Denis Law and Jimmy Greaves were finding that the contract offers coming from abroad were vastly outstripping those being made under the Maximum Wage in England.
The Maximum Wage fell in the summer of 1961 under the threat of strike action by the Jimmy Hill-led Professional Footballers Association. Almost immediately, Johnny Haynes of Fulham became England’s first £100 a week player, the equivalent to about £2,800 a week adjusted for inflation to 2024. But what about retain and transfers? Because without the ability to move more freely at the end of their contracts players would continue to remain chattels, the property of their clubs with few actual rights of their own beyond, “Well, don’t play football any more”, if they raised objections.
George Eastham was a talented young player who’d started his career in Northern Ireland in 1953 with Ards, where his father was the manager. He signed for Newcastle in 1956 and made his debut for them against Luton Town a couple of months into the new season. By 1959, he was an England under-23 player with high hopes of picking up his first full cap. But when Arsenal made him an offer to move south, Eastham decided to accept the offer and leave Newcastle, requesting that he be allowed to move at the end of his contract, an offer refused by the club.
So in the summer of 1960 Eastham went on strike and even moved to Guildford in Surrey to work for Ernie Clay, who would later be the chairman of Fulham, where he found that he was earning more as a cork salesman than he had been earning as a player. Newcastle finally relented in October 1960 and allowed Eastham his move to Arsenal.
But when the PFA won their battle the following summer, they decided to support Eastham—who by this point, having got his transfer, was fighting for a point of principle alone— to the tune of £15,000 in a court claim against Newcastle United that they’d acted unfairly in restraint of trade, with a secondary claim that and the club owed him £400 in unpaid wages and £650 in unpaid bonuses over the time that he’d been on strike.
The case was heard at the High Court in London in April 1963, and the result was a partial success for the player, but with the important aspect of his claim being upheld. Mr Justice Wilberforce found that because Eastham had been refusing to play for Newcastle, he had no valid claim for the back pay that he had requested. But on the altogether more important matter of restraint of trade, he was more successful.
The Court held that the retention provisions operated in restraint of trade. The retention provisions were restrictions coming into operation after employment was terminated, and were not the exercise of an option causing his employment to continue. The retention notice did not have the effect of re-employing the player as he had to re-sign a contract, and before re-signing, he was paid no wages.
These retention provisions, together with the transfer provisions, were found to be more than what was reasonable for the defendants to protect their interests, meaning that retain and transfer substantially interfered with Eastham’s right to seek employment elsewhere and operated in unreasonable restraint of trade and were ultra vires, an action which exceeded the legal scope of the FA’s authority.
It wasn’t a complete victory for the players. Wilberforce had been largely critical of the ‘retain’ part of retain and transfer, and the upshot of this was not, as some had hoped, the end of the transfer market. The newly agreed transfer rules did away with the ‘retain’ but kept the ‘transfer’. Every player's contracts were already a matter of free negotiation between the player and the club, without the binds of the maximum wage.
But the changes came once a player’s contract had expired. From 1963 on, clubs could only renew them on terms that were no less advantageous to the player than the old ones had been, and the new contract had to last for at least the same time period, unless both parties agreed otherwise.
If the club was unwilling to do that, the player was entitled to a free transfer; if the club decided to offload the player, the original contract would continue to run until the transfer had been completed. Disputes would be referred to the League management Committee and to an independent tribunal incorporating League and Union representatives if agreement couldn’t be reached.
George Eastham’s time at Arsenal was not especially happy. He ended up staying at Highbury for three years before transferring to Stoke City, though he did make more than 200 appearances for them over six seasons. His England debut came in May 1963 against Brazil and he was picked for the 1966 World Cup finals squad, although he didn’t play a single minute in the tournament. Non-playing squad members didn’t receive winners’ medals, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Eastham received one, following an FA Campaign.
Arguably the highpoint of his playing career came right at its end, when he scored the winning goal for Stoke in the 1972 League Cup final at Wembley. “The old man has done it!”, shouted commentator Brian Moore as Eastham celebrated his goal. Eastham was four years younger than Moore. He was given an OBE in 1973 and retired as a player the following year. He had a brief and fairly unhappy spell as the Stoke manager in 1977, but retired from the game altogether thereafter.
Footballers wouldn’t really receive full freedom until the Bosman ruling of 1995, but George Eastham’s strength in seeing this case through was a pivotal moment in the shift in relations between players and clubs which led us towards where we are today. No longer treated as no more than ‘skilled tradesman’, no longer tied to one football club for as long as that club wanted them, whether they wanted to be there or not. Upon his passing this week, the players of 2024 have much to be thankful to him for.
Accompanying image from Flickr Commons.