The money game

The 1960/61 season was certainly a memorable one.

My first game at the Recreation Ground in October 1960 was pretty quickly followed by an extended run in the FA Cup. Somewhat surprisingly Aldershot featured in the fourth round, with the Shots taking Stoke City to a second replay, before losing out at Molineux, the day after my eighth birthday.

And sandwiched in between these two ‘historic events’, on the 18th January 1961, the salary cap for professional players was abolished in England.

The Football Association in England agreed to the employment of professional footballers in 1885, and almost immediately Blackburn Rovers registered their players as professionals with a total annual wage bill of £615.

As the economy recovered after the Second World War and continued to grow through the swinging 60s, a new footballing world was created as a result of Jimmy Hill being appointed chairman of the Professional Footballers Association in 1957…but even the, at times, arrogant Hill acknowledged that his achievements were in part underpinned by the role played by Welsh international Billy Merideth almost fifty years earlier.

Born in Chirk, near Wrexham, Merideth  played over 350 games for Manchester City, along with more than 300 for United ...but despite being a truly great footballer, off the field Billy was also the driving force behind the establishment, in 1907, of  the first Professional Football Players Union in England – the AFPU.

For more than 75 years professional footballers were ‘owned’ by their clubs and suffered employment conditions well beyond today’s comprehension. But in the season when Tottenham Hotspur won the ‘double’, Fulham's star player 'Johnny' Haynes became the first English player to earn £100 per week in wages.

I was too young to see Haynes play during his best years…and when I did get to watch him I can’t say he excited me like Jimmy Greaves. But it was to be just seven years later when  a truly great player, George Best, raised the bar yet further... his salary was reported to be ten times that of Haynes - £1000 per week; giving George plenty of cash to invest in his Manchester night club, Slack Alice’s….’George, where did it go wrong?’

And today Gareth Bale was reportedly offered £1m per week to play in China…note to  Gareth – there are now more than 500 golf courses in China, so you should be ok if Zinedine Zidane manages to find the key to the backdoor at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu. 
 
Haynes was just a good player who got lucky...and Bale, a good player who got very lucky.