The extraordinary journey of English football’s Spanish pioneer
De Coubertin Books, £14.99
Reviewed by William Abbs
From WSC 361, March 2017
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Stories
With another transfer window almost done we look back to November 2000, when Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor argued it was time for a new system
The story of
Billy Meredith
by John Harding
Empire Publications, £16.95
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 332 October 2014
If you had to choose one player to encapsulate the Edwardian football world, you would be hard pressed to do better than Billy Meredith. In an extraordinary career, which ended in 1924 FA Cup semi-final defeat at the age of 49, the celebrated Welsh winger was central to many of the era’s key moments.
He scored the winner for Manchester City in the 1904 FA Cup final, then won the League with Manchester United in 1908 and 1911, and claimed another Cup winner’s medal in 1909. He was with United when Old Trafford opened in 1910, and back with City when they moved to Maine Road in 1923.
But Meredith’s greater significance lies in his turbulent relationship with clubs and the football authorities, and his key role in setting up the Players’ Union, the forerunner of the PFA. In 1905 he was suspended for a year after the FA found him guilty (in a closed inquiry) of trying to bribe an Aston Villa player to lose the final game of the season. Incensed by City’s perceived failure to support him, Meredith spilled the beans on bonuses the club had been paying in breach of the recently introduced maximum wage. The case devastated City, sparking the departure of Meredith and several others to United, and cemented Meredith’s hostility to the hypocrisy of the system, as well as personal bitterness over money that would last until he died, a poor man, in 1958.
The suspension helped drive Meredith to re-establish the union, which collided head-on with the FA in 1909, when the whole United team was suspended for refusing to sign contracts that effectively meant disowning the union. Its fledgling power was broken, but its structure survived to give birth to the PFA, which finally defeated the maximum wage and the iniquitous retain-and-transfer system in the early 1960s. As the postscript to John Harding’s book notes, it was not until the Bosman ruling that Meredith’s full vision of contract freedom was realised.
As if all that were not enough, Meredith was also involved, though not implicated, in the 1915 fixed match between Liverpool and Manchester United, for which eight players received life bans – the final scandalous blast of United’s years as a “rebel” club of stubbornly confrontational players.
Harding’s groundbreaking biography was first published in 1985, and has worn well with little amendment. Without over-elaborating, he sketches a rounded portrait of Meredith’s complex personality, rooted in his Methodist upbringing in the mining village of Chirk. Meredith’s rigorous attitudes to fitness, work, industrial solidarity, Welsh nationalism and alcohol (he was a teetotaller, despite running pubs in retirement) are neatly teased out in that context.
But there is still room for a fascinating broader picture of Manchester football in a tempestuous phase of its development, and thoughts on how Meredith’s playing style meshed with the tactics of the day – in curmudgeonly old age he scorned the new-fangled ways of whippersnappers such as Stanley Matthews.
Meredith complained that the Edwardian FA treated the professional footballer as “a mere boy, or a sensible machine or a trained animal”. Harding’s work is far from a dry polemic or hagiography, but a timely reminder of how the players’ struggle to overcome that contemptuous attitude began.
The rise of fan ownership in English football
by Jim Keoghan
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Tom Davies
From WSC 332 October 2014
It is surprising that the rising supporter activism of the past three decades – from the inky anger of 1980s fanzines to the thoughtful campaigning on governance and club ownership of the supporters’ trust movement – has not been more widely chronicled. Jim Keoghan has made one of the few readable stabs at drawing all these stories together in Punk Football, which traces how fan protest has shaped the game in recent times, including where it has failed and the formidable forces it is up against.
With a useful introductory section looking at the history of how English football and its clubs came to be organised as they are, with the transition from members’ clubs to private companies that accompanied the rise of professionalism and mass spectatorship at the back end of the 19th century, Keoghan rightly places the structure of clubs at the centre of the story. So developments such as the abolition of the maximum wage, the formation of the Premier League and Bosman are given full acknowledgement.
Many of the stories here will be familiar enough – the anti-bond scheme protests at West Ham United in 1991-92, the fight to stop Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Manchester United, the formations of FC United and AFC Wimbledon, meltdowns and fights back at Brighton, York, Portsmouth and elsewhere – but Keoghan has done an impressively exhaustive research job in talking to key protagonists about how the idea of supporter control, at club level if not, alas, at national administrative level, has taken root.
He’s not blind to where things have gone wrong – a chapter is given over to failures of varying degrees at places such as York, Notts County and Stockport, though it is debatable whether we need the one on where directors have done right by their clubs. Many of Keoghan’s interviewees also concede the underlying tension between those fans who care only about results and those prepared to be more political about it.
He looks abroad too, at the strengths and occasional weaknesses of fan ownership in Spain, Germany and Sweden, acknowledging the underlying economic and political explanations for these developments, such as the much later arrival of professionalism in Germany. That many fans in Sweden have rallied to the defence of their own model despite a lack of big club success in Europe that might have prompted a frantic dash to turbo-charged commercialism is also noteworthy.
At times it’s unclear whether Keoghan, an Everton fan, is writing for an uninitiated or deeply committed audience – do we really need the Bill Shankly “life or death” quote, the introductory blurb about the nature of fan loyalty or the apparent astonishment that a League Two game is as passionate and committed as a top Premier League encounter? In light of this, editing errors that have Rochdale and Exeter at points given the suffix “United” to their club names jar. The absence of any significant discussion of Hillsborough – the single most momentous event around which the late 1980s/early 1990s fanzine and activism boom took place – also seems curious.
The phrase “Punk Football” itself, too, woven liberally through the text, also feels a little forced. If we’re going to run with music analogies, supporter activism is now deep into its post-punk phase, the initial outpouring of unfocused anger and energy having made way for something much more creative and influential. But these quibbles do not detract from the fact that this is an important book, well balanced and accessibly written, and a very handy primer for those looking for an easy account of how organised fandom has evolved, and what they themselves can contribute. To run with the punk metaphor and paraphrase the famous 1977 fanzine rallying call, this is one football club’s story, this is another, this is a third – now run your own one.
Celtic’s progression into the Europa League group stages came through the back door, but Swiss rule breakers Sion are not backing down. Andy Brassell reports
If received wisdom initially decreed that Celtic should be embarrassed at the means of their progression to the group stages of the Europa League, then the fuss caused ever since by Sion, the Swiss team that originally qualified through the play-off at the Glasgow club’s expense, has completely overshadowed it.