IF any of today's multimillionaire stars are reading, making up that shortfall would be a fitting use of a day's pay. Quite a few will have earned it by the end of morning training.
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| Carlos Tevez |
Forcing the clubs to abolish the £20-a-week maximum wage and to start loosening the contractual shackles which meant that clubs could hold the registration even of players out of contract had been a long and sometimes acrimonious fight, but "Hill's Hour of Triumph" was the headline in the Daily Mirror on January 19, 1961.
And while this may have been a fight that was harder to lose given that legal and moral force was so clearly on the side of the players against pig-headed, feudal chairmen, no one on either side of the battlelines disputes that Hill, as chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association, excelled.
He was sufficiently irritating to his adversaries that when Alan Hardaker, secretary of the Football League, caught a shark off the Cornish coast during the long-running dispute, he urged his partner to bludgeon it. "Hit it again," he said. "It looks like Jimmy Hill."
Very grudgingly, Hardaker would admit that Hill - "a great talker, a practised charmer and a man who did a lot for himself in the course of doing so much for the players" - handled the campaign superbly.
Showing the flair for media that would subsequently earn him a long career as a presenter and pundit, Hill quickly grasped the significance of public relations. In 1958 he had advocated the change of name from Players' Union to Professional Footballers' Association (PFA). "Professional people with professional status," he would say.
While the clubs blustered, Hill gathered favoured reporters at the now defunct Red Lion in Fleet Street for briefings after he had finished training at Fulham. "Until the last 18 months we'd had no success in either increasing the maximum wage dramatically or eliminating it, but the pot was beginning to bubble," Hill would later say. "And it only bubbled through the press and radio and television."
He succeeded in winning over The Times, which came out in favour of the players earning more and enjoying freedom to move clubs in a leader article: "In popular estimation footballers of that class resemble, according to their celebrity, the stars or extras of Hollywood; in contract of service they resemble the apprentices of some ancient guild."
Not even the threat to strike, which would deprive the working man of his Saturday entertainment, alienated the fans, giving Hill and Cliff Lloyd, the PFA secretary, huge clout in their negotiations.
A series of well-attended players' meetings held up and down the country brought momentum to the campaign and only a handful of players voted against the strike.
For one union meeting, the Liverpool directors paid for a bus to take the players on the strict instruction that they did not vote to strike, an order ignored by men such as Roger Hunt as soon as they saw the depth of feeling.
There was the famous exchange at one PFA gathering when a player from Bury voiced concern that to go on strike might look greedy given his father earned less than £20 a week for toiling at the coalface.
Tommy Banks, the Bolton Wanderers and England defender, brought the house down by standing up and pointing to Stanley Matthews. "I've greatest respect for yer Dad and his job," Banks said. "I've been down the pit meself. But ask your Dad if he fancies marking brother Matthews on Saturday."
Still the clubs had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept the inevitable, but then they had got away with tiny increases in the salary for decades. As the 1960s dawned, though, the top players were being offered huge amounts to move to Italy.
In 1961 Jimmy Greaves was weighing up a move to AC Milan, where he would receive a signing-on fee of £1000 - a year's salary in England. "Money was the only motive," he said. "We were losing our top players abroad," Hill would say. "Each time one of those transfers happened, there was a feeling of 'Why can they earn that in Italy and not here?' It was something the public could understand."
The clubs originally tried to suggest an increase to £30 a week maximum for two years. Even after they publicly accepted defeat, they met secretly at the Cafe Royal to try to agree a cap of £50 among themselves. But Tommy Trinder, the Fulham chairman, had already talked publicly about paying Haynes £100 a week and he kept his word, though it would take far longer for less celebrated players to cash in.
Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the PFA, estimates that it took another decade before he was earning £70 a week at Birmingham City. "Twenty pounds a week was more than my Dad was earning as a motor fitter so, even after the maximum wage was abolished in 1961, it wasn't as if we had expectations of getting rich quick," Taylor said. "For many players it was a slow process."
These days there are complaints that too much power has shifted towards the players, with their vast earnings, but no one forces Manchester City to offer Tevez £12 million ($19.25m) a year. "It has become an emotive issue," Taylor said, "but if people go out to enjoy a good film, they don't go home worrying about what is being paid to BradPitt."
For those concerned about wage inflation in football, Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, yesterday described UEGA's looming Financial Fair Play rules as "a soft salary cap". "No one in football is proud of the kind of wage inflation we've experienced," Scudamore said.
As far as Hill was concerned, it was a battle for basic legal rights that had to be won, whatever the longer-term ramifications for the game's finances.
Asked if he had regrets, Hill said: "No, not in the slightest. It was an injustice; there was no reason for there to be a maximum wage for football players." Now 82, Hill is not in great health. Plans for the statue in Coventry continue, with the PFA donating £12,000 towards the appeal.
The expectation is that it will be erected in 2012 and measure seven feet (213cm). And, no, that's not just his famous chin.
Source -http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
