There have been several men knighted for their services to football. The bloke on the training pitch at Tottenham may join them before long, apparently. Though perhaps for services to the male grooming industry. Yet if anyone should be honoured for services to fellow footballers, it has to be Jimmy Hill.
Fifty years ago last week, he won his greatest victory, when, as campaigning chairman of the PFA, the maximum wage of £20 a week was abolished. Football was cheap back in 1961. I would regularly play in front of 65,000 crowds at Stamford Bridge, who each paid two shillings and sixpence (12 and a half pence) for the privilege of seeing plenty of goals and some of the most hilarious defending in the western world. Twenty quid a week was just above the national average wage, which stood at about £16, but it only applied to first-team players. If you got injured, you could be down to little more than half of that figure and would be genuinely struggling to pay your mortgage.
While a top-flight striker and an England Under-23 international, I was still weeding the terraces at Wimbledon’s Plough Lane ground to make ends meet during the summer months. Two Chelsea team-mates, Peter Sillett and Dave Cliss, set up a window-cleaning business, buying themselves a van before they got round to realising that they shared one another’s fear of heights. Something had to give – but it needed the immense courage of Jimmy Hill and PFA secretary Cliff Lloyd to make it happen.
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When the maximum wage was finally declared illegal, players were about to go on strike. With the entire football programme about to be wiped out, a series of exhibition matches had been arranged on the Saturday afternoon for places like Hackney Marshes, at greyhound stadiums and other venues not affiliated to the FA. It would have been some spectacle and it’s a bit of a shame that the maximum wage was abolished just before we took our action. It was an extraordinary time to live through. I was convinced that the PFA would be proved right and always attended the southern branch meetings at the Great Eastern Hotel near Liverpool Street station.
The most famous story came from a northern PFA meeting, when one player spoke up against a strike by insisting that his father worked long hours down a coal mine and earned less than a footballer. To which Tommy Banks of Bolton stood up and said: “If tha father wants to mark brother Matthews on Saturday for 20 quid a week, he’s welcome to it” – we were all ‘brothers’ and ‘comrades’ at that point, even Sir Stanley.
While support for a players’ strike was supposedly unanimous, there was actually a remarkable lack of courage among many of my fellow pros, especially in the south. Many were frightened about their financial futures, short-term and long-term. Half a century on, in an era of immense player power, this is difficult to imagine. But clubs were bullies. After the maximum wage was abolished – a decision which would come into effect in the summer of 1961, just as I was leaving Stamford Bridge for AC Milan – I was fined my final week’s Chelsea pay for refusing to go on a post-season tour of Israel. The club even had me banned from playing for England against Mexico at Wembley.
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It was another couple of years before George Eastham won freedom of contract for players, so footballers continued to be bound by rules which would never have been allowed in any other industry. Fulham chairman and music-hall star Tommy Trinder made himself few friends among fellow club owners when he claimed he wanted to pay his captain Johnny Haynes £100 a week. I used to play tennis with Tommy and was well aware that Mr Trinder was somewhat backwards in coming forwards when it came to buying a round. Having made the £100-a-week comment to raise a laugh, Tommy had to stick by it.
When I returned from Milan at the end of the year, I was actually offered £120 a week to go back to Chelsea and £60 a week to join Tottenham, the league and Cup double winners. Chelsea’s previous treatment of me had been so poor that I had little hesitation in choosing Spurs.
It was not until the Premier League and the Sky TV money in the 1990s that footballers’ wages lost all semblance of reality. Although I’ve never felt jealous of modern players, I do find it laughable to hear average footballers earning silly money. You can only hope that those who rake in £40,000 a week for sitting on the bench, will be raising a glass to 82-year-old Jimmy Hill this week.