The Making of the Political Economy of Post-War English Professional Football
English professional football had long functioned as a closed political economy, but changing circumstance after the Second World War resulted in its partial opening up.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
I wrote last week about the political and moral economies of post-war British culture, and on the way it operated in the context ‘of increased economic interventionism, improved living standards and higher expectations, and an antagonistic relationship with the Soviet bloc’:
In this piece, I want to focus in a little more on how the political economy of one particular industry operated in that context: English professional association football. I say English rather than British as the institutional infrastructure of the sport has long operated independently there from in other parts of the United Kingdom, though they cannot be separated out entirely. Moreover, in order to explain how that infrastructure operated in post-war conditions, it is necessary to firstly sketch out how it evolved in the first place.
Establishing the institutional infrastructure of English football
British association football has long been organised on a four-nations basis, with the Football Association (FA) founded in England in 1863, followed by the Scottish Football Association, Football Association of Wales, and Irish Football Association in 1873, 1876, and 1880 respectively. All four of the Union’s associations established the International Football Association Board to determine the laws of the game in 1886.
By the 1870s, the FA had established itself as hegemonic in England, including organising the FA Cup. Thereafter, however, its authority was increasingly challenged by professional teams from the Midlands and North, whose working-class base was far removed from the elite backgrounds of the FA’s founders and administrators. The FA were nonetheless unwilling to countenance a split and when 12 of those professional sides formed the Football League (FL) in 1888, they did so under the FA’s continuing remit.1 Tony Collins has identified the late Victorian association football club as representing a more formalised type of firm than earlier commercial sporting endeavours; yet, as Tony Arnold has highlighted, such formalisation also worked as a bulwark against commercialisation, with football clubs functioning as utility rather than profit maximisers, operating within cartelistic conditions.2
The FL hesitantly expanded into a national league by the end of the First World War, adding new divisions and integrating teams from rival leagues, and extending its coverage southward and into Wales. Clubs who finished bottom of the league had to apply for re-election, while those wishing to take their place had to seek election from other league members. During periods of consolidation, the FL faced accusations from the sporting press of operating a closed shop.3 The FA, meanwhile, used its authority to ensure the continued supremacy of its own narrow interpretation of what football should be – for example, refusing to sanction indoor exhibition matches at the Olympia in the mid-1900s, or in 1923 banning FA-affiliated clubs and grounds from hosting women’s football matches.4
As Arnold has also argued, clubs’ league performance closely correlated with their spending power and catchment area population.5 The FL strove to offset this tendency and preserve the league’s competitiveness, by preventing smaller clubs losing players to larger ones. It imposed a retain-and-transfer system from 1893–94, whereby footballers could not play for other league clubs unless the club they were registered with agreed to transfer their registration (which clubs subsequently began charging fees for).
It then in 1901 introduced a maximum wage. Such conditions might have amounted to a restriction of trade, but the question of their legality remained scarcely tested, with the Association of Football Players’ and Trainers’ Union (AFPTU), formed in 1907, beset by apathetic membership and poor leadership.6 Only a minority of players received the maximum wage anyway, while the highest earners could earn more through benefits for length of service, endorsements (though receipt of royalties for usage of their image was erratic), England appearances, and quite likely under-the-table payments.7
The internationalisation of the game
The FA arranged the first international match against Scotland in 1871, found the fixture rather lucrative, and subsequently arranged internationals against Wales and Ireland, eventually developing into the seasonal Home Championship from 1883. The associations also made increasing contact with the nascent administration of football on the continent and, though sceptical, joined the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), established in 1904 to oversee the game at international level, with FIFA also gaining representation on IFAB in 1914.
England subsequently played its first matches against overseas opposition in Austria-Hungary in 1908 and 1909. The four UK FAs (following the English lead) temporarily left FIFA in 1920 over readmission of teams from the former Central Powers, and then more enduringly in 1928, ostensibly over broken time payments, but more likely with a view to maintaining their autonomy from FIFA; close relations and ongoing international fixtures with European sides continued, and the four FAs continued to sit with FIFA on IFAB, but none of the home nations participated in the World Cup, first held in 1930.8
British and European club sides also played increasingly frequently in routinised and regional cup competitions during the 1930s.9 Professional football had hitherto been of scant peacetime interest to the British state, save for its value to the Exchequer (including through the entertainments tax). However, Foreign Office attention was piqued by increased contact between British football teams and overseas counterparts against a background of worsening international tensions. Its approach to sports diplomacy was hesitant, defensive, precedent-focused, and clandestine, but by the late 1930s it was coordinating more closely with football’s authorities to ensure British prestige was not harmed by poor player conduct or performances.10
English football after the Second World War
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the FA suspended all organised competition under its aegis, and set up a War Council featuring armed forces’ representation. It continued to work closely with government bodies and the services, who agreed to let leading players with coaching experience join their physical training corps. In this context, services football established itself as the most elite version of the game being played in Britain, with the country’s best players retained to play for representative service and national sides. These matches raised significant funds for war charities, while overseas fixtures were a valuable diplomatic and morale-boosting tool, with service teams sent over to play in France at the start of war, and then across Europe towards its end.
Domestic club football, meanwhile, resumed on a regional basis, aided by heavy use of guest players, until the 1946–47 season. The introduction of peacetime national service ensured armed forces football continued to have access to young elite players. Though amateur ideals continued to pervade its administration, professional norms also became more accepted, with high levels of performance pursued through banding together star players with access to the country’s best facilities.11
Economic conditions for professional football shifted markedly after the war. Football League crowds peaked at 41.2 million in 1948–49, but thereafter fell by eight million by 1956–57, and then by a further four million by 1960–61, with lower league clubs especially badly hit, partly owing to the increasingly broad and home-focused range of leisure pursuits people could spend time and money on.12
Clubs could, however, tap into new revenue streams. League members voted immediately after the war to rebuff an initial revenue-sharing approach from the Pools Promoters Association, claiming it would compromise the competition by giving gambling interests a hand in its organisation. Yet attitudes ameliorated and in 1958, under recently enacted copyright law, the FL successfully sued Littlewood, the largest of the pools companies, to ensure its members received a share of their takings thereon.13
The FL was also extremely wary of television’s potential impact on club attendances, but in the early 1960s accepted the BBC’s bid to screen its match highlights, while rejecting a potentially lucrative bid from the less experienced ATV.14 Until the 1980s, the FL ensured these revenues were relatively equally shared among its members, while clubs in lower divisions raised admission prices to better monetise their shrunken crowds.15
The players’ response
The AFPTU also took important organisational steps, including establishing a Joint Standing Committee with the FA and FL in 1949, and joining the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1955. Moreover, resentment was building among leading players over the ceiling on their earning power, stoked by a narrowing wage gap with ordinary workers, and their perception leading clubs were wealthy due to high attendances, abolition of Entertainments Tax, and introduction of pools money. Under the media-savvy leadership of Jimmy Hill of Fulham, the union, now renamed the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), threatened strike action if the maximum wage was not abolished and, with the support of the TUC and MPs on both sides of the House of Commons, achieved this end in 1961.16
The retain-and-transfer system remained intact until the case of George Eastham, who had sought a transfer from Newcastle United in 1960 and was forced to work outside the game until 1962, when Newcastle relented and sold him to Arsenal. Eastham nonetheless sued Newcastle with PFA backing. The judge presiding ruled retain-and-transfer was a restraint of trade, although an adjusted, less draconian version of the system survived thereafter.17
These changes reflected and reinforced generational differences between players who plied their trade before, during, and immediately after the war, and those coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Hunter Davies’s study of Tottenham in 1971–72 is illustrative. The clubs’ players did not conform to former players and now manager Bill Nicholson’s and assistant Bill Baily’s ideals of masculinity. Though from working-class backgrounds, they enjoyed high wages and middle-class lifestyles, albeit while remaining generally socially removed from that context. They were politically Conservative leaning, but generally apathetic, domesticated but believers in separate gender roles, split between seeing the game as a job, a career, and a form of entertainment, and in some cases had outside financial interests, encouraged by hangers-on sternly disapproved of by the club’s board.18
Reintegrating into the world game
British football also eventually became more integrated with the game at continental and global levels. Dynamo Moscow had arrived for a short tour in November 1945. Their trip generated significant excitement, as they drew 3-3 with Chelsea, beat Cardiff City 10-1, and then a guest-laden Arsenal side 4-3, before finally drawing 2-2 with Glasgow Rangers. Yet while Dynamo’s scintillating play caused much excitement, disputes increasingly marred the tour.19
The Foreign Office subsequently discouraged (with FA backing) the prospect of any British club side undertaking a reciprocal tour of the Soviet Union in 1946, and then persuaded the FA to reject an invitation for England to play Czechoslovakia in 1948.20 By contrast with the British approach to sporting administration, the communist model was state-controlled, with clubs representing organs of government; football, and encounters with Western sides, were valued for diplomatic purposes and – as the British Foreign Office warned – propaganda for the communist system of government.21
In the interim, the UK FAs re-joined FIFA in 1946 and committed to playing in the World Cup from 1950 onwards, providing their dominant position on IFAB remained intact. This rendered resumed contact with Eastern Bloc sides extremely likely: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania also took part in the World Cup from 1954, as did East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union from 1958. In any case, a post-Stalin thaw in East-West relations enabled England and Scotland to play friendlies against Hungary, then widely regarded as the best side in the world. Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 and then 7-1 in Budapest in 1954, as well as winning 4-2 away to Scotland that same year.22 At club level, friendly fixtures against European opposition became valuable money-spinners.
In response to one such fixture, Wolverhampton Wanderers’ dramatic 3-2 victory over Hungarian side Honvéd in 1954, French football magazine L’Equipe began campaigning for the establishment of a formalised, seasonal European club competition. With footballing bodies unconvinced, L’Equipe applied directly to the clubs, who set up a body to administer the competition; this prompted the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA – established as regional branch of FIFA to run the new European Nations Cup) to step in and take over. While English champions Chelsea were compelled to withdraw by a hostile FL, English clubs would become regular participants in the European Cup and subsequently the Cup Winners’ Cup (also organised by UEFA) and Fairs Cup.23
This internationalisation of the English game also had implications for its practitioners’ employment prospects. There had been a significant outflow of coaches to Europe in search of work prior to the war, and now the FA took more active steps to place British coaches with overseas clubs, and to audit numbers working overseas.24 Leading British footballers like John Charles, Jimmy Greaves, and Denis Law also made lucrative moves to Italian clubs during the 1950s and early 1960s, albeit with mixed fortunes on the pitch.25
Effects on the game itself
Changing contexts transformed how English football was played. The war and involvement in the armed services offered English coaching a shot in the arm: Walter Winterbottom, for example, became de facto coach of the England national team in 1946, after working in the RAF’s PT corps.26 British coaches who spent time abroad, meanwhile, participated in a pancontinental cross-fertilisation of ideas. Jimmy Hogan coached extensively across Europe, including in Hungary, from 1910 until the mid-1930s, after which he returned to work in England.
Arthur Rowe, who also briefly coached in Hungary before the war, won the league with Tottenham in 1950–51. Rowe’s Tottenham played with a fluidity then rare in English football, still dominated by a positionally static 3-2-5, or WM, formation. Its shortcomings were illuminated during the Dynamo tour, and then horrendously exposed against Hungary’s more flexible 4-2-4 system in the mid-1950s.
The latter matches prompted extensive discussion in the sporting press about whether to mirror the Hungarian football’s more centralised organisation off the pitch, and whether to return on it to the 2-3-5 formation and much shorter passing game that had dominated in the 1920s. Direct copying of Hungarian methods by English club and national sides were ultimately rare. Yet routinised encounters with overseas opposition highlighted how far British national and club teams had fallen behind, and helped encourage tactical innovation and override suspicion towards hands-on, professionalised coaching.27
England’s continued failure in World Cup competitions prompted the FA to accept new manager Alf Ramsey’s demand that it hand him sole responsibility for choosing his side, rather than continue to use a selection committee, enabling him to pick players to fit a system. Ramsey subsequently applied a 4-2-4, then 4-3-3, and finally 4-4-2 formation, and his approach was rewarded when England won the 1966 World Cup.28
Final reflections
English football functioned as a rather closed political economy, operating on the margin between private sector and civil society, from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Players, coaches, clubs, and administrators held a plurality of views as to who and what the game was for, and how to distribute the revenues it generated. Nonetheless, clubs invested their political capital in the FA and FL, who thus determined access to that political economy and the rules governing it. They ensured the relative autonomy of that political economy by imposing restrictions on investment into and the movement of human capital; limitations on economic capital flows into and out of the industry; and relatively equal distribution of those inflows. By contrast, its integration into the nascent European and international political economy of the game was far more tenuous and ad hoc.
Nonetheless, the mid-twentieth century was marked by multiple instances of new connections with actors operating outside this political economy: the armed forces, Whitehall, the betting industry, the television industry, the TUC, Parliament, the courts, FIFA, UEFA, and overseas football associations and clubs. Sometimes temporary, sometimes enduring, such connections dismantled and destabilised prior aspects of English football’s political economy – with short and longer-term ramifications for the balance of power and resources within it – and reduced its autonomy from wider conditions.
English football thus became more commercialised and more unequal, not least in the financial position of its leading players, although many aspects of the existing institutional infrastructure partly constrained that inegalitarianism until the 1980s and 1990s. The way it was played would also change, as routinised competition with sides from outside Britain set benchmarks and highlighted shortcomings, although again strong elements of distinction – not least in its labour market – from the global game persisted until the turn of the millennium.
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A. J. Tony Arnold, ‘Harnessing the Forces of Commercialism: The Financial Development of the Football Association, 1863–1975’, Sport in Society, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2004), pp. 232–248.
Tony Collins, Sport in a Capitalist Society: A Short History (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 51–52; Anthony John Arnold, ‘Football at the ‘End of the Line’: Economic Decline, Cross-Subsidies and Football League Membership in the NW Steel District of England’, Sport in History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2016), pp. 47–72 (48–49).
See Matthew Taylor, ‘Building a National League: The Football League and the North of England, 1888–1939’, The International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2005), pp. 11–27; Matthew Taylor and John Coyle, ‘The Election of Clubs to the Football League 1888–1939’, Sports Historian, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1999), pp. 1–24.
See Benjamin Litherland, ‘Sporting Entertainments, Discarded Possibilities and the Case of Football as a Variety Sport, 1905–1906’, Sport in History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2015), pp. 391–418; Jean Williams, A Game for Rough Girls? A History of Women’s Football in Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), Ch. 1.
Arnold, ‘Football at the ‘End of the Line’’, p. 52.
See David McArdle, From Boot Money to Bosman: Football, Society and the Law (London and Sydney: Cavendish Publishing, 2000).
Matthew Taylor, ‘Beyond the Maximum Wage: The Earnings of Football Professionals in England, 1900–39’, Soccer and Society, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2001), pp. 101–118.
See Peter J. Beck, ‘Going to War, Peaceful Co‐Existence or Virtual Membership? British Football and FIFA, 1928–46’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000), pp. 113-134.
See Michaël Delépine, ‘The Racing Club vs. Arsenal Matches, 1930–1962: A Franco-British Ritual, European Games or Football Lessons?’, Sport in History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015), pp. 604-617; Paul Dietschy, ‘Did a ‘Europe of Football’ Exist in the 1930s?’, Sport in History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015), pp. 515–530.
For the development of British sporting diplomacy prior to the Second World War, see Peter J. Beck, Scoring for Britain: International Football and International Politics, 1900–1939 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999).
For professional football’s wartime experience, and relationship with the Army during and after the Second World War, see Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi, Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chs. 6 and 7; John Ross Schleppi, ‘A History of Professional Association Football in England during the Second World War’ (PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1972).
See Matthew Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British Football (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2008), Ch. 4.
For an overview of the history of football betting, see Mike Huggins, ‘Football and Gambling’, in John Hughson, Kevin Moore, Ramón Spaaij, and Joseph Maguire (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Football Studies (Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), pp. 63–73.
For the developing relationship between football and television in this period, see Richard Haynes, ‘A Pageant of Sound and Vision: Football’s Relationship with Television, 1936–60’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998), pp. 211–226.
Arnold, ‘Football at the ‘End of the Line’’, pp. 49–53.
See Matthew Taylor, ‘Trade Unionism in British Sport, 1920–1964’, Labor History, Vol. 55, No. 5 (2014), pp. 622–637.
McArdle, From Boot Money to Bosman, pp. 24–27
Hunter Davies, The Glory Game, 5th edn. (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001).
For in-depth accounts of the tour and its coverage, see David Downing, Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 1999); Ronald Kowalski and Dilwyn Porter, ‘Political Football: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1997), pp. 110–121.
Peter J. Beck, ‘Britain and the Cold War’s ‘Cultural Olympics’: Responding to the Political Drive of Soviet Sport, 1945–1958’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2005), pp. 169–185 (p. 173).
For Eastern Bloc states’ approach to sports organisation, see:
Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Andrew Handler, From Goals to Guns: The Golden Age of Soccer in Hungary, 1950–1956 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1994).
Victor Peppard and James Riordan, Playing Politics: Soviet Sports Diplomacy to 1992 (London: JAI Press, 1993).
James Riordan, Sports, Politics and Communism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
For analysis of the diplomatic background and cultural impact of the Hungary games, see:
Peter J. Beck, ‘Losing Prestige on and off the Field: England versus Hungary, 1953–54’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 10–26.
Jeffrey Hill, ‘Narratives of the Nation: The Newspaper Press and England v Hungary, 1953’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 47–60.
Ronald Kowalski and Dilwyn Porter, ‘England’s World Turned Upside Down? Magical Magyars and British Football’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 27–46.
For the origins and establishment of the European Cup, see Philippe Vonnard, ‘A Competition that Shook European Football: The Origins of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, 1954–1955’, Sport in History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2014), pp. 595–619.
For the migration of British coaches to Europe, see Matthew Taylor, ‘Football's Engineers? British Football Coaches, Migration and Intercultural Transfer, c.1910–c.1950s’, Sport in History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2010), pp. 138–163.
Taylor, The Association Game, p. 230.
Schleppi, ‘A History of Professional Association Football in England during the Second World War’, pp. 303–305.
Steven Wagg, The Football World: A Contemporary Social History (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 44–48, 81–82
Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics (London: Orion Books, 2008), pp. 142–152. For a fuller account of Ramsey’s playing and coaching career, see Dave Bowler, “Winning Isn't Everything…”: A Biography of Alf Ramsey (London: Gollancz, 1998).