By 1959 George Eastham, Newcastle United’s gifted Inside Left, had become unhappy with
life at St James’ Park.
Eastham had joined Newcastle in 1956. His first two seasons saw the club finish near
the foot of the First Division and a more general disappointment had begun to fester.
Like so many of his peers, Eastham believed that he was underpaid. He also felt that the
housing that the club had provided his family was unsatisfactory and was irritated that,
with English football still operating under a maximum wage, Newcastle had reneged on a
promise to provide supplementary employment to top up his wages.
Eastham had also been annoyed that the club had prevented him from touring with England’s
u23 side and, in a further affront, that they had started quibbling over providing match
tickets to his father. Upset and keen on a move south to Arsenal, he declined a new contract
and requested a transfer.
Newcastle refused. Eastham made two more requests, but was denied each time, with one club director
apparently saying that he’d ‘rather see (Eastham) shovel coal than play for Arsenal.’
With the Football League still governed by the Retain & Transfer System, that might have
been the end of the matter.
Retain and Transfer dated back to the late 19th century. It was introduced in 1893 as
a means of controlling professionalism and preventing imbalances. It meant, as all future
transfer systems would, that a player could only be registered with one club at any one
time and that, to move, a player needed the permission of the club holding his registration.
The intention had partly been to prevent the game’s talent from migrating towards the
country’s richest clubs. The effect, however, combined with the introduction of the Football
League’s Maximum Wage in 1901, was to create a strategy by which football’s early stakeholders
prevented their employment costs from rising.
Primarily because the Retain & Transfer system had a devious fine print. Unlike today, a
club retained the player after the end of his contract. He was not free to move. If
he refused a new contract on what the Football Association judged ‘reasonable’ terms,
the club was not obliged to release or even to pay him. Furthermore, should he make a
transfer request, the player – again – would relinquish his right to salary.
That was the situation in which Eastham found itself, but his response would alter the game
for ever.
Initially, Newcastle’s refusal to agree to his transfer began a seven-month standoff.
In the middle of the 59-60 season, the now unpaid Eastham went on strike. In a move which
described the times and illustrated the players’ plight, he took a job selling cork in Surrey
and actually earned more.
But the club retained his registration; he could not play football. The situation typified
the problem with Retain & Transfer. As Eastham himself described, in Rebels for the Cause,
Jon Spurling’s ‘Alternative history of Arsenal’:
“Our contract could bind us to a club for life. We had virtually no rights at all.”
A resolution of sorts came in October 1960, when Newcastle finally agreed to a sale. For
a fee of £47,500, Eastham at last became an Arsenal player.
At the same time, the Professional Footballers’ Association – under the leadership of Chairman
Jimmy Hill – was engaged on two fronts. They had been in long term opposition to the
Maximum Wage, which was eventually abolished in 1961, but they had also been lobbying for
transfer-market reform.
The lifting of the wage cap had a positive effect, but – as recorded by Hill in his
autobiography – it was decided by a player vote at a series of a regional PFA meetings
to continue the fight against Retain & Transfer.
The Football League had actually promised further reform it had agreed to the end of
the Maximum Wage in 1961. It hadn’t been forthcoming, though, and while Eastham was
by that point an Arsenal player, he remained less than happy with Newcastle, claiming that
he was still owed up to £600 in unreceived bonus payments.
The PFA sensed legal opportunity, agreeing to fund Eastham’s claim and use it as the
pivot for a case which, ultimately, in 1963, would go all the way to the High Court.
“Since the league chairmen had steadfastly clung to the remnants of the retain-and-transfer
system” recalled Hill, “perhaps a spike of honest-to-goodness law up their backsides
might steer them away from it.”
In the decades after, Current PFA chairman Gordon Taylor claimed that the PFA might have
gone bankrupt had they lost the case. Fortunately, they didn’t.
George Eastham wouldn’t receive his unpaid bonus, the Judge – a Mr Justice Wilberforce,
who had a history of finding in favour of workers’ rights – declined to award him
damages. But he did agree that the transfer system was unfit for purpose. Wilberforce
reasoned that any rules preventing players from joining a new club after the expiration
of a contract were, in effect, a restraint of trade.
As a result, the Football League was forced into a heavy dilution of Retain & Transfer.
Tribunals were introduced to arbitrate end-of-contract situations, transfer listed players would
still be paid while they searched for new clubs and, most importantly, they would be
allowed to leave for free at the end of a contract if a new one wasn’t offered at
equal or superior terms.
Eastham enjoyed an exceptional career, he was actually a member of the England squad
that won the World Cup in 1966, but this is his real legacy. He was the inadvertent author
of the biggest change English football would experience until the Bosman ruling of December
1995.