A Short History of Wages in English Football

October 26, 2024 0 By Paul W

Payment of wages in English football was the issue which defined professionalism from 1885 and led directly to the creation of the Football League three years later. The first regulations soon followed with the introduction of a maximum wage, which was to remain in place for the decades up to 1961. 

Jimmy Hill & George Eastham with Cliff Lloyd

Jimmy Hill & George Eastham with Cliff Lloyd

In 1893 the maximum wage payable to any player was restricted by the League to £140 per year, with ‘optional’ payments during the close season not to exceed £1 per week. An 1894 Athletic News Football Annual editorial titled “Football Finance” saw ‘The Free Critic’ complain of the damage done by “exorbitant wages”, stating that “Competition has undoubtedly raised the salaries of professional football players to a degree which was never anticipated”. A further objection was “the drain on the club’s resources” caused by paying players over the summer months.

J. J. Bentley, who succeeded founder William McGregor as Football League President in 1894, wrote in the same year that “a glance at the balance sheets of the various clubs will prove that over 70 per cent of the gross receipts actually go to the players for wages, outfit and travelling expenses.” He concluded that legislation would “prevent a rich club swallowing up all the talent, and so reducing the competition to a mere farce, for it is obviously to the advantage of the League as a whole that the clubs should be as nearly equal as possible in strength.” 

Pay - Remuneration (Football Wages)

Formal regulation of professional footballers’ income followed with the introduction of the maximum wage in 1901, capped at £4 a week (in season). It rose to £5 in 1910 and by 1920 up to £9, only to be reduced back to £8 (£6 in the summer months) two years later. It took until 1947 for the players to secure another increase, to £12 (for players with five years unbroken service), and that remained in place for a decade. At the Football League’s AGM of June 1957, the maximum wage was fixed at £20 a week during the season (equivalent to approximately £407 in 2024), which reduced to £17 over the summer. The campaign to abolish the wage restriction was spearheaded by Fulham’s Jimmy Hill, leader of the players’ union, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), assisted by secretary Cliff Lloyd. On behalf of the players, Hill demanded “the freedom to earn as much as they can negotiate with their employers. There should be no artificial ceiling.” 

It was not the first time that the players’ union had challenged the restriction on their earnings. The union had been formed in 1907 by two of the greats of the day, Billy Meredith and Charlie Roberts of Manchester United. Promptly banned by the League, the union was unable to overturn the maximum wage despite the threat of industrial action but did gain a concession when bonuses were allowed. By 1960, Hill’s threat to strike was given weight by the support of star players including Stanley Matthews, English football’s biggest name, which forced the clubs’ hand. The League agreed to meet the bulk of the PFA’s demands at their June 1961 AGM, including the abolition of the maximum wage. 

'Stan Mortensen applauds the New Deal' 1
'Stan Mortensen applauds the New Deal' 2

The restriction on wages led directly in the post-Second World War years to the loss of many of the Football League’s star players to Italy, where they could earn substantially higher salaries: Joe Baker, John Charles, Jimmy Greaves, Gerry Hitchens, Denis Law. England striker Greaves had his £20-a-week wage increased to the equivalent of £130-a-week during his short stay in Milan. In contrast, the average Football League player under the maximum wage had to replace their income from football with another job in retirement – a situation documented by the interviews with former professionals in Jon Henderson’s fascinating book When Footballers Were Skint.

After Hill’s successful campaign to abolish the maximum wage in 1961, the conditions which created the modern game began to take shape. An elite group of clubs emerged, able to pay the increased salaries and transfer fees which top players now commanded. The first notable beneficiary was Fulham’s England star Johnny Haynes when his wage was upped to a milestone £100 a week – as promised by his chairman Tommy Trinder. Haynes followed in the footsteps of Stanley Matthews and top players of an earlier era in also pursuing commercial endorsements to supplement his income, employing an agent to do so. 

Billy Meredith - Johnny Haynes

Clubs had previously held the balance of power via the ‘retain and transfer’ system, which bound players to their employer so that even at the end of their contract, they could only leave with the club’s consent. The ruling was implemented in 1893 during the formative years of the professional game, but persisted until 1963. Outmoded as the system was, it still served as a check on players’ wages. ‘Retain and transfer’ was finally contested and freedom of contract established in a legal case fought in 1963 by another England international, George Eastham. The system was described by the High Court Judge as “an unjustifiable restraint of trade”.  

While the Eastham verdict left players better able to negotiate new deals when their contracts expired, it took until 1979 for full freedom of contract to be introduced. In the same year Trevor Francis became the Football League’s first million-pound player and Nottingham Forest team-mate Peter Shilton Britain’s best-paid player on the league’s first £1,000-a-week contract. After that, there was no doubt that players held the upper hand when it came to bargaining. 

George Best - Kevin Keegan & Stanley Matthews

Above: George Best; Below: Kevin Keegan & Stanley Matthews

As agents were more widely employed by the best players during the 1960s to negotiate contracts and maximise wages, commercial activities significantly boosted their income. George Best was able to set a trend by earning more off the pitch than on it, followed by Kevin Keegan and others whose sponsorship deals were more lucrative than their basic club salary. For the rest, First Division footballers were earning on average £15- to £17,000 a year by the mid-1970s. With rising wage bills and falling attendances, many league clubs were in a precarious financial position, summarised in 1975 by The Sportsman’s World of Soccer: “the fact remains that wages are far too high to be compatible with revenue in a great many cases”.  

Still footballers were better-paid abroad than in the Football League. Several England internationals were tempted to move to European clubs towards the end of the decade, with higher salaries a major factor. Kevin Keegan led the way, moving to German champions Hamburg where he earned £100,000 a year. Tony Woodcock followed Keegan to the Bundesliga with Cologne, and Laurie Cunningham moved to Real Madrid – stating that he and Woodcock had discussed how domestic players “are being exploited” and “poorly paid in comparison with other countries.”  

Kevin Keegan - Laurie Cunningham

With English football in the grip of recession by the early 1980s, financial crisis was never far away – the most spectacular example being the Ashton Gate Eight. With Bristol City on the brink of liquidation, eight senior players ripped up their long-term contracts to ensure the survival of the club. Chelsea and Wolves offered further examples of a vicious cycle of clubs living beyond their means, unable to meet their expenses (in these instances, expensive new stands) and having to sell their highest wage earners – with relegation following. Ipswich and Nottingham Forest, who only years earlier were competing at the top level in Europe, found themselves feeling the pinch as smaller clubs and having to cut costs by off-loading their biggest earners – Shilton included. Elsewhere in the First Division, Northern Ireland international Ian Stewart of QPR actually turned down a pay rise.  

By 1984/85, the average annual salary of a top-tier Football League player was reckoned to be in the region of £25,000. During the following season, the Rothmans Football Yearbook reported that 40 players were earning in excess of £50,000 – there were only eight in 1980/81. In the same publication, it was noted that England captain Bryan Robson’s new boot contract “boosts his annual income to around £350,000”. By 1990, Liverpool were offering a record deal – of £8,000 a week – to John Barnes, reportedly the best-paid player in England as the Premier League began. Blackburn’s record £5m signing in July 1994, Chris Sutton was on £10,000-a-week, and only a year later Arsenal signed Dennis Bergkamp – paying him ‘staggering’ wages of £25,000-a-week.  

Peter Shilton - Bryan Robson - John Barnes

Manager’s salaries were traditionally shrouded in secrecy, with only the biggest names having even a recorded estimate. During the First World War, Herbert Chapman had been implicated in a scandal of illegal payments at Leeds City, which eventually saw the club expelled from the League. Having overturned a lifetime ban, he set Huddersfield on the way to three successive titles before being tempted to Arsenal on £2,000 a year – and starting them on another treble of First Division championships before his untimely death in 1934. Post-War, Matt Busby was appointed Manchester United manager on an annual salary of £675 in 1946. By the end of his tenure in 1969, club accounts showed a combined total of £204,028 on ‘wages and bonus’ for a squad including Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. His Liverpool counterpart Bill Shankly was reported to be earning £2,500 a year on taking the Anfield job in 1959, while the club’s weekly wage bill for players and coaching staff a year later came to a total of £517, 12 Shillings and 2 pence.

A third great manager of the era, Leeds’ Don Revie later had his reputation tarnished when leaving the England job in 1977 for a lucrative £340,000 four-year contract in the UAE. Revie’s successor at Leeds, Brian Clough had been paid £5,000 a year at Derby, believed to have been tripled during his ill-fated spell in charge at Elland Road. By August 1982, Clough was estimated as English football’s highest-paid manager on £60,000 at Nottingham Forest, ahead of Liverpool’s Bob Paisley, Southampton’s Lawrie McMenemy, John Bond and Ron Atkinson at the Manchester clubs. When McMenemy left for a disastrous stay at Sunderland in the summer of 1985, he became the best-paid boss in the country. A year later, David Pleat was reckoned to be on an annual salary of £90,000 at Spurs. 

Liverpool wage bill 1960 - Man Utd accounts 1969

Above: L) Liverpool wage bill 1960 – R) Manchester United accounts 1969; Below: Sunderland under Lawrie McMenemy

Sunderland under Lawrie McMenemy

David Goldblatt’s book The Game of Our Lives (2014) documents the growth of wage differentials between the divisions in the Premier League era:  

“In 1992 the average wage of players in the Premiership was £75,000 a year; by 2010-11 it was £1.4 million a year, which is around £26,000 a week. In the Championship the average player’s wage in the early 1990s was £50,000 a year, two-thirds of the wages in the division above. By 2011 they were earning less than a seventh of players in the Premiership, at just over £200,000 a year. In League Two, the old Division Four, players were earning an average of £15,000 a year in 1992. Now they are bringing in £40,000 a year. The ratio of wages in the bottom division to Premiership wages has shifted from 1 to 5, to 1 to 35.” 

The years since have only seen increasing wage inflation, a greater gap between the divisions and the emergence of an elite within the Premier League itself as ‘the rich get richer’. Clubs often put themselves in an unsustainable financial position trying to reach the top tier, primarily through their wage bill outweighing their income. The boom in wages in the 21st Century is further illustrated by Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland topping a September 2024 list of 20 Premier League players earning £200,000-a-week and above. English football today echoes the fears expressed in the 1890s of the effect of “exorbitant wages” leading to “a rich club [or clubs] swallowing up all the talent, and so reducing the competition to a mere farce”. 

Wolves (Andy Gray) - Ian Wallace

The history of wages in the Football League and the effects of the abolition of the maximum wage are among the topics discussed in my book Before the Premier League: A History of the Football League’s Last Decades