December 2 – Power to the People!

WE’RE going all Arthur Scargill on you today at OTFD as we look at the birth of the Professional Footballers’ Association that was created today in 1907 to improve the conditions, rights and status of professional footballers and proved to be the driving force behind much of the development of the game over it’s 101 year history.

Back in the relative Wild West conditions of turn-of-the-century football, there was little to stop the Football League from enforcing whatever they wanted among it’s players.

When the league decided to slap a maximum wage of £4 on its’ players after the dissolution of the PFA’s forerunner, the Association Footballers’ Union, Charlie Roberts and Billy Meredith decided that this just wasn’t cricket and set up their new gang in Manchester’s Imperial Hotel, originally calling it the Football Players’ and Trainers’ Union.

For the next 50 years the Union would battle gamely against not only the maximum wage, but also the retain and transfer system, a way of making sure that clubs held all the aces when it came to player power and is excellently documented in Gary Imlach’s superb book My Father and Other Working Class Heroes.

Good work from Portsmouth captain and former chairman Jimmy Guthrie in his 11-year tenure that ended in 1957 paved the way for Jimmy Hill to stick his chin in and finally make the league agree to abolish the maximum wage in 1961. If you want someone to blame for Darren Bent picking up over £100,000 a week, look no further (although we can see you sneaking out Mr Comolli).

Two years later the retain and transfer system was also axed in what remained the biggest ever shake-up of the transfer system until Jean Marc Bosman’s exploits in Luxembourg in 1995.

These days, with power resting well and truly with the player at the top clubs in the country, the PFA has shifted it’s aims to broader, more inclusive targets, such as anti-racism and community football, as well as looking after ex-pros that either missed out on the crazy wages that the Sky Sports era has ushered in, or were simply not good enough to get a share of Murdoch’s cash cow. Oh, and it also give Gary Neville a reason to feel important, as he currently combines his time on the Old Trafford sideline with being on the PFA management committee with the likes of Marcus Hahnemann, Darren Moore and Clarke Carlisle.

See footage of Neville Neville’s working class hero of a son keeping it real below and have a gander at what else was going on today here.