For sixty years, an English footballer could not earn more than a skilled factory worker, could not leave his club when his contract expired, and had no say in where he was sold. Today a single Premier League season is worth more in broadcast rights than the entire English game earned in its first century. Almost none of that happened by design.
This is the second chapter in The Making of Modern Football. Chapter one covered the laws. This one follows the money, and the story is not really about greed. It is about three moments when footballers stopped being property, and one moment when television decided the game was worth more than anyone had imagined.
The strange part is where it ends. The domestic television boom that built the modern Premier League has quietly stopped growing, and this season the sport's financial rulebook was torn up and rewritten.
- 1901The maximum wage is introduced Four pounds a week, whoever you are. Combined with the retain-and-transfer system, it leaves players unable to negotiate pay or leave when their contract ends.
- 1905The first £1,000 footballer Alf Common moves from Sunderland to Middlesbrough. The fee triggers an FA enquiry and questions in the House of Commons.
- 1961The maximum wage falls Jimmy Hill and the PFA threaten a strike. The £20 cap goes on 18 January, and Fulham make Johnny Haynes the first £100-a-week footballer.
- 1963Eastham beats the retain system George Eastham takes Newcastle to the High Court and wins. Retain-and-transfer is ruled an unreasonable restraint of trade.
- 1979Britain's first £1m player Brian Clough signs Trevor Francis for Nottingham Forest and tries to price him at £999,999. Add-ons push it over anyway.
- 1983Tottenham float on the stock exchange The first English club to list publicly. Football clubs start being run as businesses answerable to shareholders.
- 1988The £44m television deal ITV pays a then astonishing sum after the biggest clubs threaten to break away. The threat works, and everyone notices.
- 1992The Premier League breakaway The First Division clubs resign from the Football League and sell their own rights. Sky pays £304m over five years, roughly seven times the previous deal.
- 1995The Bosman ruling The European Court of Justice ends transfer fees for out-of-contract players and scraps EU nationality quotas. Power moves decisively to the player.
- 2003Roman Abramovich buys Chelsea The first time an owner's private wealth, rather than a club's revenue, sets the ceiling on what it can spend.
- 2008Abu Dhabi buys Manchester City State-linked ownership arrives in English football. UEFA responds with Financial Fair Play three years later.
- 2013The first £1bn-a-year cycle Domestic rights pass £1bn per season for the first time, then peak at roughly £1.72bn a season in the 2016 to 2019 cycle.
- 2017Neymar breaks the world record Paris Saint-Germain trigger a €222m release clause at Barcelona, more than doubling the previous record. It still stands today.
- 2021The Super League collapses Twelve clubs announce a closed European competition. Supporter revolt kills it within about forty-eight hours, and the political mood shifts towards regulation.
- 2026Squad Cost Ratio replaces PSR From this season, Premier League clubs may spend a maximum of 85 per cent of football revenue on their squad, assessed in-season rather than across three years.
Compiled by My Football Facts. Broadcast values are total contract values for the stated cycle.
The Sixty Years When Footballers Were Property
The maximum wage arrived in 1901 and capped a professional footballer's pay at £4 a week. It was not the real problem. The real problem was the retain-and-transfer system that sat alongside it.
Under retain-and-transfer, a club could keep a player's registration after his contract expired. If he refused the terms offered, he could not sign for anyone else. He simply stopped being paid and stopped playing. Clubs owned careers, not just contracts.
By the 1950s the consequences were visible. England's best players were leaving for Italy, where the money was real. Jimmy Greaves saw his £20 a week become the equivalent of roughly £130 during a short spell at AC Milan. John Charles, Denis Law, Joe Baker and Gerry Hitchens all went. The Football League was exporting its own stars because it had made it illegal to pay them properly.
1961: The Strike That Never Happened
Jimmy Hill was still a Fulham player when he became chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association in 1957. In late 1960 a poor pay offer finally moved a famously docile membership, and the PFA set a strike date.
Three days before it was due to begin, officials met club chairmen at the Ministry of Labour in London. On 18 January 1961 the maximum wage was abolished. Fulham chairman Tommy Trinder promptly made Johnny Haynes the first £100-a-week footballer in Britain, a fivefold rise for one player in a single stroke.
What the players did not win was retain-and-transfer. The League refused to ratify that part of the agreement in April 1961, a reversal Hill called the Great Betrayal. It took a courtroom to finish the job: in 1963 George Eastham took Newcastle United to the High Court, which found the retain system to be an unreasonable restraint of trade.
1992: Television Changes Everything
The 1980s taught English clubs a lesson they never forgot. In 1988, when the biggest sides threatened to break away, the response was a television contract worth £44m. Threatening to leave paid better than staying.
Four years later they left properly. The First Division clubs resigned from the Football League, formed the Premier League and sold their broadcast rights independently. Sky's £304m over five years was roughly seven times the value of the deal it replaced, and it arrived in the same summer as the back-pass rule, which is the sort of coincidence that makes a decade look designed.
The money did not stop. Domestic rights passed £1bn a season in the 2013 cycle. Look at the all-time Premier League table and you are looking at the league table of that money: the clubs at the top are, with one or two exceptions, the clubs that were already big when the television deals arrived.
1995: Bosman, and the End of the Old Contract
Jean-Marc Bosman was a Belgian midfielder at RFC Liege whose contract expired in 1990. He wanted to join Dunkerque. His club demanded a fee anyway, and when Dunkerque would not pay it, Bosman was left suspended, unpaid and effectively unemployable.
He sued. On 15 December 1995 the European Court of Justice ruled that professional footballers are workers under European law, that charging a fee for an out-of-contract player obstructed free movement, and that quotas limiting how many EU nationals a club could field were equally unlawful.
Two things followed. Squads at elite clubs became international almost overnight, because the old three-foreigners rule was gone. And because clubs now risked losing players for nothing, they started offering longer contracts and much higher wages to keep them. Bosman himself received compensation of around €300,000 after five years of litigation, which remains one of football's better arguments about who captures the value of change.
The Twist: The Domestic Boom Is Over
Here is the part that rarely makes headlines. The Premier League's domestic television income has stopped growing.
The growth has simply moved abroad. In the 2022 to 2025 cycle, international rights outsold domestic rights for the first time in Premier League history. The gap has since widened considerably.
Something similar has happened to transfer fees at the very top. Neymar's €222m move to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017 has now stood as the world record for nine years, the longest unbroken spell in decades. Spending has exploded at every level below it, though: Premier League clubs spent more than £3bn in the summer of 2025 alone, comfortably a record. The market has got much deeper without getting much taller.
2026: A New Rulebook
Financial Fair Play arrived in 2011, and English football's own version, the Profitability and Sustainability Rules, capped losses at £105m across a rolling three-year period. It produced points deductions for Everton and Nottingham Forest, endless argument about accounting treatments, and a widespread suspicion that it entrenched the clubs that were already rich.
It is now gone. Premier League clubs voted in November 2025, by the narrowest possible margin of fourteen votes to six, to replace PSR from the 2026-27 season with two new frameworks:
- Squad Cost Ratio. A club may spend a maximum of 85 per cent of football-related revenue and net player trading profit on squad costs, meaning wages, amortised transfer fees, head coach pay and agents' fees. Clubs in UEFA competition are held to a stricter 70 per cent.
- Sustainability and Systemic Resilience. Three separate tests of working capital, liquidity and equity, applied through the season rather than after it.
The crucial change is timing. PSR looked backwards at three years of losses. SCR is assessed in-season, with a first checkpoint each March after the January window closes. A club above the 85 per cent threshold but below an upper limit faces a financial penalty rather than a points deduction. Clubs also voted down a separate proposal for a hard spending cap.
Whether it works is a question for the next few seasons. What it confirms is that football's financial history is still being written, and that the arguments of 1901 have not really changed: who gets to decide what a club may spend, and who captures the value when the answer changes.
The Pattern Behind the Money
Read the timeline back and every leap forward came from outside football's own governing bodies. A players' union threatened a strike. A player went to the High Court. Another went to the European Court of Justice. A broadcaster bet on a product nobody else valued properly. Supporters killed a competition in two days.
Football's authorities have rarely led these changes. They have almost always been reacting to somebody who refused to accept the existing arrangement, which is worth remembering whenever the game insists that the current settlement is the natural order of things.
For more on the clubs this money built, see the Premier League winners by year, the all-time top flight table stretching back to 1888-89, and the complete record of Champions League and European Cup finals.
The Making of Modern Football
- 1. The Rule Changes That Rewrote Football
- 2. Follow the Money: How Football Got Rich You are here
- 3. The Disasters That Forced Football to Change Coming soon
- 4. Ninety Minutes That Changed Everything Coming soon
Football and Money FAQs
Here are the answers to the most common questions about how football's finances developed, from the maximum wage to the new Squad Cost Ratio rules.
When was the maximum wage abolished in football?
On 18 January 1961, after the Professional Footballers' Association under Jimmy Hill threatened a strike. The cap had stood at £20 a week. Fulham immediately made Johnny Haynes the first British footballer to earn £100 a week. The related retain-and-transfer system survived until George Eastham won his High Court case against Newcastle United in 1963.
What was the Bosman ruling and what did it change?
The Bosman ruling was a European Court of Justice judgment delivered on 15 December 1995. It held that clubs could not demand a transfer fee for a player whose contract had expired, and that leagues could not cap the number of EU nationals a club fields. It created free agency in European football and led directly to longer contracts and much higher wages, because clubs now risked losing players for nothing.
How much are Premier League TV rights worth?
The domestic deal with Sky Sports and TNT Sports covering 2025 to 2029 is worth £6.7bn, around £1.68bn per season. International rights are now worth more, at roughly £2.17bn per season. Overseas rights overtook domestic rights for the first time during the 2022 to 2025 cycle.
Who was the first £1m footballer in Britain?
Trevor Francis, who joined Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City in February 1979. Brian Clough attempted to set the fee at £999,999 to reduce the pressure on the player, but add-ons took it past £1m. Francis scored the winning goal in that season's European Cup final against Malmo.
What is the world record transfer fee?
Neymar's move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain in August 2017, when PSG triggered a release clause of €222m, reported at between £198m and £200m depending on the exchange rate used. It more than doubled the previous record and has now stood for nine years.
What is Squad Cost Ratio and why has it replaced PSR?
Squad Cost Ratio limits a Premier League club's spending on wages, amortised transfer fees, head coach pay and agents' fees to 85 per cent of its football-related revenue and net player trading profit. It replaced the Profitability and Sustainability Rules from the 2026-27 season after a vote in November 2025. The key difference is that SCR measures spending against revenue and is assessed during the season, whereas PSR measured accumulated losses over a rolling three-year period.
How much was the first Premier League TV deal worth?
Sky paid £304m over five years for the rights from 1992-93, roughly seven times the value of the previous ITV contract, which was worth £44m when it was agreed in 1988. Domestic rights are now worth more per season than that entire first Premier League contract was worth in total.