Rome Wasn't Built in a Day, Chapter 9; Most people called it "the slavery contract"
By the end of the 1950s, the footballers of Britain were starting to fully understand their value within the game, but gap was starting to open between the haves and the have nots.
9. Most people called it “the slavery contract”
By the end of the 1950s, the footballers of Britain were starting to fully understand their value within the game. When John Charles, one of the finest forwards of his or any other generation, left Leeds United in 1957, it wasn’t to another English club.
The Italian giants Juventus had offered Leeds £65,000 for his services, almost double the British record transfer fee at the time, and the club’s financial position didn’t really give them much alternative but to accept. The previous September, the main stand at Elland Road had burnt down and Leeds needed to fund its replacement. The estimated cost was £60,000.
There was a very powerful reason for Charles to accept the offer, as well. He received £10,000 signing on fee over the two-year period of his first contract and a modest weekly salary, lavishly topped up with bonuses and a luxury apartment.
By the time he returned to Leeds in 1963, he was said to be on £140 a week, or £7,000 a year. And he wasn’t the only one lured by the Lira. When Jimmy Greaves left Chelsea for Milan in 1961, it was for £140 a week and a £10,000 signing-on fee. Denis Law and George Baker, who signed for Torino the same summer, were offered similar financial inducements.
The maximum wage was to blame, of course, even though it had gone by the summer of 1961. It had been in place since the start of the century, but throughout the 1950s it came to be increasingly questioned. After all, the post-war years had been kind to professional football, and even though attendances had plateaued in 1949 and had been declining slightly since, the players themselves had seen precious little of the money coming into clubs from increased commercial activity and these huge crowds.
The amount of the maximum wage increased steadily throughout the 1950s - from £14 a week in 1951 to £20 in 1958, but the feeling remained that someone must have been getting wealthy off football’s boom years, even if it wasn’t the players themselves.
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