The Remaster: the maximum wage and retain & transfer - a match made in hell, for players

Professional footballers in the 21st century enjoy lives of comfort which would have been unimaginable to their predecessors. An article originally published in January 2011 takes up the story.

We’re now all fully conditioned to the financial inequalities of professional football, but this wasn't ever thus. Until the early 1960s, footballers existed in a peculiar form of serfdom, unable to work where they wanted to and with a savage salary cap that didn't even seem to take into account the harsh fact that players, often uneducated and having only ever known one way of life, would usually see their careers grind to a halt by the time they were forty years old.