Professional football has long been an industry, and the players’ right to strike is no different from every workman. If footballers feel their reasonable demands about conditions have not been met by the latest offers from the Football League Management Committee, then strike action will be justified. For too long players’ conditions have had a feudal flavour; the retain and transfer system, for example, should have been scrapped years ago. Yet the League insists on maintaining this. Neither is the League prepared to concede the player’s unfettered right to negotiate his own contract on the best terms he can obtain. Instead, the carrot of a possible maximum of £30 a week – as against the present maximum of £20 – is dangled before the players. The League is in effect trying to stave off a strike without impairing the present structure of football administration. And it is precisely the League system which needs drastic revision. If this week the players vote to strike, they will set the pattern for a more rational approach to football administration in which they, as well as the game, will be the ultimate beneficiaries.
Key quote
“This makes four important papers to go in two months - entirely without precedent in the history of British newspapers”.
HJ Bradley, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, on the closure of the Sunday Graphic.
Talking point
Mr Gaitskell has been told by Coventry Borough Labour Party that they do not want him to visit the city. He had included Coventry in a three-day tour of the West Midlands but last night a local Labour Party spokesman said: “We have informed the party’s West Midland federation that we don’t want Gaitskell to visit us. Everywhere he goes there is always trouble and it is doing the party more harm than good.” Front page news story
