Ex-footballers: from rags to riches
From selling medals to podcast empires WARNING: FOOTBALL-RELATED CONTENT
Match of the Day. Gary Lineker and the BBC have finally called it one after his 26 years on the show. The final straw was Lineker sharing an Instagram post, "Zionism explained in two minutes", which featured a rat emoticon. Lineker was already on a yellow card after frequently airing political views other than those of Nigel Farage, which earned him the hatred of the right-wing tabloids (third behind Two Tier Keir and Harry&Meghan) and ergo the TV media too.
You get the sense Gary had had enough. He’s been an increasingly grumpy grandfatherly figure in the BBC studio, forever chuntering in a “the game’s gone” kind of way about VAR and the new handball rule, tired of Rooney mumbling fitfully beside him and pining for his mates Alan, banished to the gantry to co-commentate, and Wrighty, who has left him for a new bromance with Keane and Neville.
Not so long ago Lineker seemed unstoppable. When the BBC suspended him in 2023 for saying government language on asylum policy language was "not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”, his fellow commentators and pundits boycotted Match of the Day out of solidarity, and the BBC was forced to air a strange, silent 20 minute programme that somehow reminded me of those unsettling Eastern European animations that used to pop up in children’s TV programming in the 1970s. The BBC had to climb down in humiliation. Now that pesky rat emoticon has probably cost Lineker his shot at being the UK’s first president when scandal finally brings down the curtain on the royal family. It looks like a battle between Johnson, Blair, Clarkson, Winkelman, Tennant and Martin Lewis, with Prince Harry as a cheeky outside bet.
Lineker has had to stop playing golf due to arthritis, he’s single after two divorces and you can often see him trudging around Barnes, eyes fixed on the ground avoiding all eye contact. But let’s not feel too sorry for him. He is worth £30m1 and he does not need his £1.35 million BBC salary2. He’s now going to focus on his hugely successful “podcast empire”, Goalhanger productions, named ironically after Lineker’s net-adjacent MO in his card-free footballing career.
Lineker caught the tail end of the explosion in footballer’s pay. This chart shows how football salaries took off in the Premier League era starting in the early 90s.Now the average annual premier league salary is £3 million, almost 100 times the average wage. Erling Haaland earns £25 million a year - if only Man City were more generous they might have persuaded him to take a penalty in the FA Cup Final.
But even retired footballers from the Premier League era have managed to fall on hard times. Research conducted in 2013 by the organisation XPro suggested that as many as 60% of former players, who earned huge salaries in their Premier League days, were declaring bankruptcy within five years of retiring. See this dream team of bankrupt footballers. Many footballers made disastrous investment decisions, often lured into aggressive tax-avoidance schemes. Ex-footballers suffer unusually high levels of addiction and mental health issues.
Still not feeling any sympathy? Let’s go further back, right back to 1894, six years after the English professional league started. Footballers were starting to earn quite a nice living. Alarmed, Football League President J. J. Bentley advocated for a wage cap, observing that “over 70 per cent of the gross receipts actually go to the players for wages, outfit and travelling expenses.” That’s still around the same now. J.J. Bentley concluded that legislation would “prevent a rich club swallowing up all the talent, and so reducing the competition to a mere farce, for it is obviously to the advantage of the League as a whole that the clubs should be as nearly equal as possible in strength”. Sound familiar?
A maximum wage cap was introduced in 1901 (£4 a week) and it had only risen to £20 a week by 1961, about 1.5 times average salary at the time. Jimmy Hill, one of Lineker’s four MOTD presenter predecessors (and the only one to be a professional footballer like Lineker), led a plan to strike on 21 January 1961 in protest.
But 72 hours before the planned strike a delegation led by Hill met with club chairmen and they agreed to abolish the wage cap. Fulham promptly raised Johnny Haynes’ salary to £100 a week.
In those days, even the top footballers lived in normal houses like you and me. A man I met told me that he grew up on a Leeds council estate where Jack Charlton, then in his pomp at Leeds and playing for England, lived in one of the bigger council houses. He once saw Jack waiting for the bus, cigarette in hand. “Hi Mr Charlton, sir, do you think I could have your autograph?” he asked, nervously. “Fuck off!” he replied. Friendlier times.
Football salaries slowly crept up, but look at this chart again. In 1984, aged 24, Lineker was only on £400 a week for Leicester. The average basic first division wage at the time was £24,000 per annum (estimated at £36,000 including bonuses), around 2.5 times the average wage at the time.
Football is a short career, with limited post-career options. Not everyone can be a telegenic broadcasting superstar like Rooney and Ferdinand. Many footballers retired to run pubs and bars, usually with limited success. They were not rich men. In the old days long-serving players nearing retirement used to have testimonials where the proceeds of the match went to the player. A good testimonial could be the difference between relative security and penury. Many footballers did not have pensions.
Footballers often suffer from health complications after they retire. Medical care used to be rudimentary, consisting principally of the magic sponge, a cold, wet sponge applied to the injured area.3 Players got cortisone injections so they could get back on the pitch quickly after injury. But they cause osteo-arthritis and a research project assessing 300 footballers at the end of the last century found that:
“half of them were found to be suffering from osteoarthritis, a rate five times higher than their non-playing peers of the same age. Almost a quarter of retired footballers showed symptoms of depression and 15% were registered disabled, with many having to give up work because of their condition.”
Since that study, many footballers have developed dementia in later life, likely because of heading heavy, rain-soaked leather footballs so often. A study found that ex-footballers are over three times more likely to be diagnosed. Five members of England’s World Cup winners of 1966 got dementia (the Charlton brothers, Stiles, Peters and Wilson, and only one of the starting eleven is alive now (Hurst).
Of those heroic World Cup winners, Stiles, Banks, Hurst, Cohen and Ball all had to sell their World Cup medals to raise money. And to think they each must have frittered away that £1,000 bonus for winning the trophy. No favours were granted to members of the winning team, no ambassadorial roles were handed out. Only Jack Charlton had an outstanding managerial career, with Alan Ball and Nobby Stiles making a living at it and Hurst, Peters and Bobby Charlton all failing. Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt worked on the pools panel; Ray Wilson became an undertaker; George Cohen, struggling with cancer, didn't watch a football match for years.
The saddest story is that of Bobby Moore, England’s handsome, graceful and gentlemanly captain. Moore wanted a move to Spurs in 1966 but West Ham refused to sell him. In those days a club could hold onto a player’s registration indefinitely and prevent him playing elsewhere. Further transfer requests were refused and eight long years later, when Moore’s career was nearly over, West Ham said he could leave on a free transfer (meaning that he would get paid a decent lump sum). But West Ham reneged on the deal and sold him to Fulham for £25,000. Moore never went back to West Ham except in his latter days as a commentator. Moore was lured by East End faces to invest in dodgy Essex bars and clubs which either burned down or failed spectacularly. He was shunned by the football world and died of cancer aged 51. Read this story and see the moving documentary about him if you have not had the chance.
And these were England’s heroes, the most illustrious ex-footballers of all - ill, impoverished and ignored. Imagine what happened to the less successful ones.
So though the pendulum may have swung too far in top footballers’ favour, with Ronaldo for example supplementing his tax free $200m salary with $3m per Instagram post, remember that there were times when the clubs had it all their way and footballers were as downtrodden as everyone else, and retired at 35 with their bodies and brains irreparably damaged.
I am glad that it’s all changed and that footballers can now enjoy a decent retirement without having to sell their medals. After all, how would ex-Spurs4 Arsenal players survive?
See this article in the Daily Express enjoying Lineker’s severance payment-free exit from the BBC, most notable for coining a new use of the term “plummeting” to mean “staying exactly the same”
If you are or know someone who moans about the money wasted on Lineker’s salary, it actually amounts to 5.6 pence per licence fee-payer per year.
I was sometimes a recipient of the magic sponge (no euphemism intended) as a schoolboy and young adult when playing football and can attest to its surprising efficacy.
Amended after Spurs unexpectedly won a trophy last night in a match notable for having the worst ever salary:skill co-efficient in the history of football. Those Spurs’ winners medals will be especially valuable for their unique rarity. Even Son and Romero didn’t get one.