The Socialist Vision for Sports, Part One: Early Labor Struggles

My writing background is in soccer. I started out blogging as a teenager, and managed to make it my job for a few years. Growing up, my mother would half-joke that our family’s religion was “fundamentalist athlete,” since we played for so many teams and watched so many games.

At times, it can be hard to reconcile my love of sports with my socialist beliefs; high-level sports leagues are monopolist capitalist enterprises, built on labor exploitation, extortion of local communities, and player transfer rules that can border on human trafficking.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sports are best when played socially, watched socially, and experienced as part of a wider social context. It only makes sense that they would be best owned socially.

It hasn’t always been this way, either. The forerunners of modern sports teams were not commercial enterprises, but simply societies of men (and at this point, they were all men) who wanted to play recreational games. They were often students, workers, or groups of immigrants.

Modern baseball can trace its roots to Alexander Joy Cartwright, a bank clerk and volunteer firefighter of the Knickerbocker Engine Company №12 who played stickball in a vacant lot with his fellow firefighters. When the vacant lot became unavailable, he formed an association to collect the funds for a $75 yearly rent on a field in Hoboken, New Jersey. Cartwright’s team, the Knickerbocker Club, laid down 20 rules and played the first games of organized baseball in 1845.

Three years after Cartwright’s Knickerbockers took to Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, students at England’s Cambridge University drafted the Cambridge Rules, a seminal code of “football” that formalized a version of the traditional ball games which had been played in Britain for centuries. The Cambridge Rules formed the basis for the development of rugby, American (NFL-style) football, Gaelic football, Australian rules football, and most popularly, “Association” football, the version of football played by the rules of the Football Association. It is from the shortening of this name to “assoc.” that we get the term “soccer.”

The earliest top-level soccer teams were founded and represented by the sons of the British aristocracy, who, living in their elite southern England boarding schools, had the free time and resources to form such clubs. This is reflected in their early dominance of England’s FA Cup: the finals of the earliest competitions are dominated by names like Old Etonians (graduates of Eton College), Oxford University, Wanderers (graduates of Harrow and the Forest School) and the Royal Engineers (comprised of British Army officers).

This aristocratic dominance fell away as the labor movement advanced and working-class men had free time to enjoy themselves. Darwen F.C. flouted rules to employ a pair of Scotsmen in 1879 — the sport’s first professionals. A year after Old Etonians lost the 1881 final to the similarly-respectable Old Carthusians (former pupils of the Charterhouse School), it beat Blackburn Rovers, the first northern side to make the final and one which carried a stink of mercenary professionalism with its working-class players. The next year, Old Etonians lost to another provincial Lancashire team, Blackburn Olympic. It is here that I pause to quote David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round to demonstrate the societal rift between the two sides:

Blackburn Olympic: you couldn’t ask for a better cross-section of the provincial industrial workforce. A certain S. Yeats Esq., owner of an iron foundry, provided the capital. Mr W. Braham Esq. was employed as a full-time trainer. In his team three weavers, a spinner, a cotton machine operative and an iron worker were his working-class spine; a plumber and a picture framer his skilled tradesmen; a clerk and a dental assistant from the lowest rungs of the white-collar middle class and up front, oiling the wheels, a publican…

The Old Etonians are another matter. They just roll up at the last moment. They’ve been here before. Ten of the eleven have Cup Final experience and hard training is ‘bad form’. Who needs training when you have the future Lord High Commissioner for the Church of Scotland, a dilettante gentleman farmer, a Professor of Latin, the leading commercial lawyer in British India and a baronet by the name of Percy de Paravicini?

No team of aristocratic amateurs has won the FA Cup since. With the decline of feudal aristocracy comes the dominance of market capitalism. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was discovered that people wanted to watch these sporting events, and would willingly pay so for the pleasure. Three thousand people watched Wanderers defeat Oxford University in the 1877 Cup final. In 1892, just 15 years later and in the same venue, nearly 33,000 showed up to see West Bromwich Albion lift the trophy with a 3–0 win over Aston Villa. In 1891, more than 1.3 million people attended games of Baseball’s National League.

Players were now paid, but they were signed by their teams to restrictive contracts and treated as assets to be exploited for the best return on investment. In that same year that West Brom lifted the Cup, it sold Scotsman Willie Groves to Villa in the first transfer worth £100 (about $7,500 in today’s money). The first thousand-pound fee came in 1905, and the £10,000 threshold was broken when Arsenal bought David Jack from Bolton Wanderers in 1928.

Although the British are the ones who have kept the transfer fee system (Manchester United spent $112 million on French midfielder Paul Pogba last year), it was the Americans who were the big spenders in the 19th century. The Boston Beaneaters spent $10,000 on Chicago’s Mike “King” Kelly in 1886— nearly a quarter million dollars today.

Such massive sums did not escape the notice of the players, who attempted to secure for themselves some of the money exchanged for their services. Kelly asked for percentage of his record sale, but was denied. Another eventual Hall of Fame member, James “Deacon” White, refused a sale from his Detroit team to Pittsburgh, saying, “No man can sell my carcass unless I get half.” The Detroit owner, Frederick K. Stearns replied, “He’ll play in Pittsburgh or he’ll get off the earth!” White sat out half of the 1889 season in protest but eventually joined Pittsburgh.

It was in this context that John Montgomery Ward emerged and became the greatest labor advocate in the history of professional sports. Ward was a great pitcher — he had a career 2.10 ERA, won 47 games as a 19-year-old, and threw a perfect game at the age of 20 — but he was also a lawyer, educated at Penn State and Columbia; he founded first labor union in sports, the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players; and he organized the Players’ National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, mercifully shortened to the Players’ League, a co-cooperatively run organization that attempted to destroy the monopolistic power of the dominant National League.

In Ward’s day, players in both England’s Football League and the United States’ National League were restricted by reserve clauses, which tied a player to his team even after his contract expired. This gave clubs immense power over players, in terms of both controlling their movements and suppressing their wages. Indeed, the Football League, representing the interest of the clubs and seeing Victorian amateurism as the ideal compared to the mercenary nature of working-class professionalism, introduced a maximum wage of £4 per week ($285 in modern terms) in 1901.

Ward objected not to the reserve clause in itself, which he saw as benefiting the growth of the league, but to what he believed was its misuse. In 1889, dozens of members of Ward’s Brotherhood refused to sign their contracts for the 1890 season, and soon after, Ward published a “Manifesto” that set out the players’ grievances and intention to form their own league. Ward Wrote:

There was a time when the League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport; to-day its eyes are upon the turnstile. Men have come into the business for no other motive than to exploit it for every dollar in sight. Measures originally intended for the good of the game have been perverted into instruments for wrong. The reserve rule and the provisions of the National Agreement gave the managers unlimited power, and they have not hesitated to use this in the most arbitrary and mercenary way.

Players have been bought and sold as though they were sheep instead of American citizens. “Reservation” for them became for them another name for property right in the player. By a combination among themselves, stronger than the strongest trust, they were able to enforce the most arbitrary measures, and the player had either to submit or get out of the profession in which he had spent years in attaining a proficiency… We believe it is possible to conduct our national game upon lines which will not infringe upon individual and natural rights. We ask to be judged solely by our business conducted more intelligently under a plan which excludes everything arbitrary and un-American, we look forward with confidence to the support of the public and the future of the national game.

With this declaration, Ward and the Players’ League suffered attacks from the baseball establishment that would be grimly familiar to any student of socialist or labor history: the players were revolutionaries, radicals, conspirators, secessionists, terrorists and worst of all, guilty of ingratitude to their employers.

The 1890 season was a disaster for both the National League and the Players’ League. Unlike the NL’s other competition, the second-rate American Association, which charged half the price of the NL, played on Sundays and served alcohol, the PL players saw themselves as middle-class conservatives and sought to directly challenge the NL. The competition and its incessant coverage cannibalized sales and alienated fans. Both leagues lost money, although the NL lost far more and saw teams go out of business, an indignity not shared by the PL.

The Players’ League came out of the 1890 season in far better shape than its rival, but the newer league’s backers were skittish and panicked after their promised profits failed to appear. The National League’s owners hid their financial disasters much better, and led by Albert Spalding, strong-armed Ward and the other player representatives out of negotiations. Financial backers of the Players’ League franchises in New York and Chicago joined with Spalding and the NL, making the PL an untenable proposition without operations in the country’s two largest cities; Baseball’s worker cooperative had been sold out by capitalists.

English Soccer wasn’t without its own devastating labor setbacks. In 1901, the Football League decreed the £4 maximum wage and banned the payment of bonuses. The first players’ labor group, the Association Footballers’ Union, had been organized in 1898 to fight such proposals, and having failed failed, was dissolved the same year. It wasn’t until 1907, with the founding of the Association of Football Players’ and Trainers’ Union (the forerunner of today’s Professional Footballers’ Association) by England international Charlie Roberts and Wales captain Billy Meredith, that the players finally had representation willing to fight on their behalf. The Players’ Union threatened to strike in order to fight the maximum wage; the Football Association threatened to ban every member of the AFPTU who didn’t give up his membership.

Many resigned, but others, including the entire Manchester United team, led by Roberts and Meredith, resisted. “Outcasts FC” trained on their own after the club suspended them. The AFPTU and the FA eventually reached a compromise, restoring the option of paying bonuses, and no players had their registrations revoked. But the maximum wage stayed. Meredith lamented the reluctance of his fellow players:

The unfortunate thing is that so many players refuse to take things seriously but are content to live a kind of schoolboy life and to do just what they are told… instead of thinking and acting for himself and his class.

The Players’ Union found its moment in the case of Herbert Kingaby, an outside right who in 1906 had been sold by Clapton Orient of the secondary Southern League to Aston Villa, a Football League founding member.

Villa had paid £300 for Kingaby (a fee undisclosed to the player), but decided after a few months that he wasn’t up to the task and, failing to find a new club to buy him, stopped paying his wages. At the same time, Villa was unwilling to write off an asset for which it had paid a substantial sum, and kept him “retained.” Kingaby rejoined the Southern League, but upon an agreement between the two leagues to mutually recognize the other’s retain-and-transfer system, Villa demanded an exorbitant £350.

Blocked by a club unwilling to pay him or sell him at a fair price to a team at the level which his talent warranted, Kingaby took Aston Villa to court in 1912. He was backed financially by the Players’ Union, which hoped to have the maximum wage and the retain-and-transfer system abolished. In court, Kingaby’s barrister made a critical mistake: instead of arguing that the entire system was unfairly restrictive, he argued that Villa’s application of the rule was motivated by revenge for leaving to join the Southern League. Since a malicious motive cannot render a lawful act unlawful, the case fell apart. The AFPTU was nearly ruined, and membership plummeted.

For the next half-century, English footballers made little more than the average factory worker for a difficult and physically demanding career that was usually over by a player’s mid thirties. Some players turned to sponsorship as a way to bolster their wages. Others traded on the memories of their past glories. Nine of the twelve medals given to England’s 1966 World Cup winners have been sold by players or their families. During this time, the tradition of the testimonial developed: as a popular player neared retirement, his club would hold an exhibition in his honor, letting him keep the ticket revenue as a retirement package.

It wasn’t until former Fulham player Jimmy Hill became secretary of the AFPTU in 1956 that the vision of Meredith and Roberts came to fruition. Hill was an innovative figure — as manager of Coventry City, he introduced the first match programs; as a broadcaster, Hill suggested the first pundit panel during coverage of the 1970 World Cup. Hill changed the organization’s name to the Professional Footballers’ Association, and upon becoming PFA chairman in 1957, campaigned to end the maximum wage. Sixty years after its introduction, it had risen from £4 to just £20 — worth around $26,000 per year in today’s money. For comparison, Mickey Mantle signed a contract for $75,000 that year — More than $600,000 in modern terms. The Football League offered to gradually increase the maximum wage to £30. Hill’s PFA voted 712–18 in favor of a strike, and then rejected another proposal from the Football League. Three days before the strike was to begin, the Football League agreed to immediate and total abolition of the maximum wage.

English soccer’s version of the reserve clause, the “retain-and-transfer” system, lasted until 1963, when the PFA paid £15,000 in legal fees to support the case of midfielder George Eastham in his case against his employer, Newcastle United. The PFA finally won the victory it had sought back in 1912, with a High Court judge ruling that the retain-and-transfer system was an unfair restraint of trade.

Even then, labor’s soccer struggle wasn’t over. It wasn’t until 1995 that the landmark Bosman ruling gave European players true, no-fee free agency at the end of a contract. There was also the issue of the third-party ownership system. Under this system, investors could buy the “economic rights” of a player either from his club or by convincing young players — often impoverished youngsters from South America or Africa— to sign a contract. The investors could then engineer moves in contradiction of his wishes, often in quick succession to take advantage of signing bonuses or to clubs on the far side of the world. At lower levels, it could be almost indistinguishable from human trafficking. FIFA — the governing body of world soccer — only banned the practice in 2015.

The fall of the Players’ League was a triumph for capitalist control of sports. Baseball’s reserve clause stayed in place until 1975, and various controls on player movement and compensation remain in place in the United States: maximum contracts, restricted free agency, salary caps, the National Football League’s “franchise tag,” and just about everything done by Major League Soccer or the NCAA.

In the next installment of The Socialist Vision for Sports, we will examine how sporting capitalists leverage their positions to extort local and state governments.

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