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BREAKING NEWS : Championship to resume 20th June


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27 minutes ago, ka58 said:


you might as well cancel football for the next 2 years then.

Whilst there is still over 100 people dying daily in the UK sporting events of any kind should not be taking place until this pandemic is under control.

It will resume but only down to greed and that's very sad.

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5 hours ago, sherlyegg said:

Schools opening tomorrow in many areas....not Sheffield though.

Director of public health for Sheffield says it's not safe yet and will review in a few weeks.

 

Wonder if he has final say on football ...(in Sheffield)

 

Many areas are waiting, Many parents and teachers ( Supported by their Union)  will be non-compliant. I just wish the same old crowd would stay clear of Cleethorpes. Me, I start week 13 commited to staying home. 

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5 hours ago, ka58 said:


it’s not a ridiculous risk to get a group of people who aren’t ill or infectious to have a game of football.

 

ill keep an eye out on result but not overly excited.


8 different Championship clubs have players/staff that have tested positive. 

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I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate here so don’t start going ballistic at me. My question is when do we start elite sports again and how do we do it? I personally think that any time and any method has risk unless the virus is totally eradicated (which isn’t going to happen for a few years or may not happen at all). If we are on our way back to normal life we need to start doing things that we were doing prior to lockdown. 

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8 hours ago, TheLastSleepingGiant said:

The fact it even mentions “in line with our broadcast partners” tells you everything behind the motives for this decision.

 

Football without fans isn’t football

Football is just like any other business, they, just like other businesses want to start operating again.

 

Can't understand the outrage TBO.

 

Of course it's going to be poo without fans but if it's deemed safe to start working again, then I don't blame them one bit.

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I’ll also play devils advocate 

 

There were approx 17 positive tests from approx 1047 tests

 

That’s 98.4% negative results
 

As long as testing continues and it’s just those who are tested as negative playing then I don’t see an issue starting

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It will be interesting to see how much each club it affected by not having their fans behind them.

It might adversely affect our away performances...It might help with our home performances as away fans like to come to Hillsborough and make lots of noise whilst we can be a bit flakey.

I should imagine that Leeds will be adversely affected both Home and away ha ha 

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When football first became a thing it was groups of people having fun in a park, kicking a ball around and having a great time with their friends.

Then those people got together and decided to create a football team and then football leagues to enjoy playing their sport against each other all over the country as the sport became more and more popular.


People would turn up to watch and the fun got more competitive


Then things like player wages and transfer fees eventually came in and grew


But there was a wage cap until Jimmy Hill (the old chinny TV pundit) came along. 

 

In 1957, he became chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) and campaigned to have the Football League's £20 maximum wage scrapped, which he achieved in January 1961, when Fulham teammate Johnny Haynes became the first £100-a-week player.

From that moment on wages increased 

 

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Without the players, there’s no game. That, in blunt terms, was the rationale behind the formation of the Professional Footballers’ Association, which began as the Players’ Union and had even deeper roots in the Association Footballers’ Union, formed in 1898 after The Football League’s first decade.

The bottom line of this maxim is that professional footballers can, if they are so minded, withdraw their labour. And in the early years of The Football League there were occasions when, in any other “industry”, the workers would surely have downed tools.

In 1902 the Manchester City and Wales player, Di Jones, cut his knee on a shard of broken glass during a pre-season match. The wound became infected and he died. City refused to accept liability because it was a friendly. Jones, they maintained, was “not working". There was no insurance cover in place, so his wife and children received nothing.

The original players’ union had all but folded, but Jones’ team-mate Billy Meredith, the fabled Welsh winger, said the memory drove him to set up the Players’ Union in 1907.

In modern times, players have effectively threatened to strike by stating, in some cases, that they would walk off the pitch in solidarity with a colleague being racially abused by opponents or spectators.

 

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The spectre of industrial action is not, however, new to football. In 1961, under the leadership of Fulham player and future TV personality Jimmy Hill, the PFA called out its members. The aim was to force The Football League and the clubs to abolish the maximum wage – a salary cap in today’s parlance - which meant players could be paid no more than £20 a week during the season. In the summer they received £17.

The decision to strike was the culmination of a campaign that had been going on almost since The League kicked off 125 years ago. When Liverpool first won the championship, in 1900/01, the average wage of their players was £7 a week. The following season The Football League introduced a maximum weekly wage of £4.

In 1920 it stood at £9, but four years later it was down to £8. Fast forward to 1953, the year of “the Matthews final”, and the upper limit was still only £15, reduced to £13 over the summer.

Before the Second World War a footballer’s pay was above that of the average worker. By 1960, despite the advent of television and European competition, the gap had closed.

 

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Stanley Matthews, who spanned both eras, was unsympathetic towards the union’s position as the dispute flared again. Yet in '61, at a new-year rally of 190 players in Manchester it became clear Blackpool’s Wizard of Dribble had changed his mind. “I’ve done well out of the game, but could I ignore the injustice to my colleagues?” he recalled. “Loyalty to the players won. My hand went up."

To the consternation of the Pools companies, the strike was scheduled for Saturday 21st January. There were signs that the clubs’ resolve was weakening, with a handful of wealthy clubs alert to the advantage they might gain from being able to attract their rivals' stars.

Even Bob Lord, the outspoken Burnley chairman, suddenly conceded there should be no wage-ceiling. In contrast, his counterpart at nearby Blackburn Rovers, Jim Wilkinson, argued that even a £30 maximum must be opposed as “it would be suicide for many clubs.”

The chairman of the Trades Union Congress, Ted Hill, appealed to the public to boycott matches that went ahead. He also warned darkly that the labour movement would “remember the blacklegs when they finish in football and want to come back into industry.”

Then, with 72 hours to go before the master winger became a striker and picket lines were manned at grounds around England, the League management committee persuaded the clubs to agree to abolish the maximum wage.

The PFA, emboldened by the news, opted not to call off the strike.  There had been no mention by the League of the union’s other historic bugbear, the retain-and-transfer system, which, as the redoubtable League secretary Alan Hardaker put it candidly, “enabled a club to retain a player against his will at the end of his contract and, not only that, to pay him less money while doing so.”

Hill and two union officials were summoned to the Ministry of Labour to negotiate with Hardaker, League president and Barnsley chairman Joe Richards and Chelsea chairman Joe Mears. The PFA again prevailed. The strike was off.  

 

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At that time, George Eastham, the silky schemer who would be part of Alf Ramsey’s England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966, was challenging the archaic retain-and-transfer system through the legal system.

Eastham wanted to leave Newcastle United, who refused to let him go. Even after the contractual issue had been resolved, the PFA bullishly urged him to continue the case, which he did even after Newcastle sold him to Arsenal. The case spluttered on until 1963 when the High Court ruled in his favour, saying the League regulations and FA rules amounted to restraint of trade.

The highly emotive word “slavery” had come to be bandied about when players described their conditions.  This was perhaps an injudicious choice: the lot of a Fourth Division footballer, let alone Matthews, Billy Wright or Bobby Charlton, was hardly comparable with the cruelty, brutality and loss of basic liberties and human dignity to which, say, African slaves were once subjected.

It was, nevertheless, a term which, for the players and their union, served its purpose in publicising their fight for a higher minimum wage and the end of the maximum wage.  Hill’s predecessor as PFA leader, ex-Portsmouth forward Jimmy Guthrie, who relied less on PR and more on old-fashioned militancy, thrust it into the heart of the debate over pay.

When he was in his pomp at Pompey, before the War, the maximum wage was £8 during the season, £6 in the summer. Injury or demotion to the reserves meant £2 a week less. 

Guthrie bemoaned The Football League’s “Victorian business ethic” and targeted the clubs. The Scot was no stranger to such tactics; when he captained Portsmouth in a wartime Wembley final his team were still unchanged in the dressing-room as kick-off loomed. He had told the directors they would not play unless the players were paid wages docked at the start of the War.  

 “Just eight minutes before kick-off,” said Guthrie, “our masters rather ungracefully surrendered.”

He became the first full-time PFA chairman. In 1955, addressing the TUC Congress in Blackpool, he propelled the twin issues of wages and contracts on to the front pages of the press.

“I stand before you as the representative of the last bonded men in Britain,” he told delegates. “The conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.”

 

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Meanwhile the introduction of floodlights, while thrilling for the public, was in Guthrie’s opinion adding to the players’ workload. He viewed it as evening work, or overtime. With that in mind he made a well-publicised trip to Molineux to meet Billy Wright and other Wolves stars. After a dressing-room ballot, a game against Athletic Bilbao had to be cancelled.

Even so, the concept of “player power” was still years away. Coincidentally, Hill’s Fulham colleague Johnny Haynes was the most high-profile beneficiary of the lifting of the maximum wage, becoming the Football League’s first £100-a-week man in 1961.

Today the balance of power has shifted towards the players. Pay levels within the higher reaches of the English game mean that certain individuals earn more in a week than Matthews and his generation made in a lifetime.

The Bosman ruling of 1995, which gave the footballers freedom to move without a transfer fee when their contracts were up, further strengthened their position.

However, as the League celebrates its 125th birthday, the old, mutually antagonistic roles adopted by itself and the PFA have been largely consigned to history. In 1979 a new collective bargaining agreement was signed and this was followed in 1985 by a private contributory pension scheme for full-time players. Just a year later The Football League and PFA combined again to launch ‘Football in the Community’ to help deepen the relationship between clubs and people living in their local area.

And in 2004 the two bodies collaborated, once again, to create ‘League Football Education’ which delivers educational programmes to apprentice footballers on the books of League clubs.

 

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At the Football League Awards ceremony in 2010, Gordon Taylor, the union’s chief executive who today serves on the Board of The Football League Trust, received an award for his “outstanding contribution to League football”, which would have been unthinkable in Guthrie's time. Twelve months earlier, in the surest sign of old antipathies being laid to rest, the same award had gone to the late Jimmy Hill.



NOW?

 

It's just a financial free for all, with eye watering wages (at all levels, even in development teams), ridiculous ticket pricing, corruption all over the game, and the ordinary working man who had started the sport in the first place having been shoved out of the whole thing by corporate and individual greed.

Even worse, we have some fans advocating this saying you can't get promoted without high ticket pricing (even though other clubs seem to be managing it fine), but even worse mocking those who can't come, saying 'tough luck mate' and similar platitudes. We see it regularly whenever ticket pricing is mentioned, basically showing humans at their absolute worst.

Let's hope that when football does come back, that it comes back renewed, reviewed, and with more reasonable expectations from everyone within the sport

 


Owlstalk Shop

 

 

 

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10 hours ago, Mus said:

What about players contracts? Lots end on 30th June!

I assume that extensions will be offered. Be interesting to see if any players refuse extensions and are therefore unable to play.

Could some get a better deal this way?

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The season is due to be concluded (assuming no further disruptions) by the end of July including play offs.

 

It will be interesting to see how this pans out with our EFL hearing which I understand is also in July. If the issue remains unresolved past the season end there will be some real fun and games-certainly more entertaining than our on field performances this season.

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Just now, Magic Rat said:

The season is due to be concluded (assuming no further disruptions) by the end of July including play offs.

 

It will be interesting to see how this pans out with our EFL hearing which I understand is also in July. If the issue remains unresolved past the season end there will be some real fun and games-certainly more entertaining than our on field performances this season.

 


yeah can see it being VERY messy regardless of the outcome of the meeting

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Owlstalk Shop

 

 

 

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