“When will this folly on the part of football clubs come to an end?” raged the writer as yet another transfer record was set.
This, though, was a column in The Football Post nearly 100 years ago, in February 1922, after Falkirk — yes, Falkirk — paid West Ham United a world-record £5,000 fee (which equates to £300,000 today) for their England international “Super” Sydney Puddefoot.
The incredulity at the inflation in football transfer fees in 1922 was understandable — people still remembered the first £100 transfer fee in 1893, Willie Groves moving from West Bromwich Albion to Aston Villa, followed by Alf Common’s move from Sunderland to Middlesbrough 12 years later, which commanded ten times that sum and caused consternation among the game’s authorities.
For a country reeling from the First World War, the idea that football clubs could splash out thousands of pounds on a player seemed madness, but there was no stopping the runaway express of football transfers — and one that has ploughed on upwards
ever since.
In 1928 Arsenal broke the £10,000 barrier to sign David Jack from Bolton Wanderers, but it would be more than 30 years, after a period of postwar austerity in the Forties and Fifties, before the next landmark, when Manchester United signed Denis Law from Torino for £115,000 in 1962.
Advertisement
That was a year after the maximum wage in English football was scrapped, the Sixties were swinging and economic growth was surging. In 1970 the £200,000 mark was broken when Martin Peters joined Tottenham Hotspur from West Ham, but the first signs of huge inflation came in 1979.
In January of that year Ron Atkinson broke the £500,000 mark to bring David Mills to West Brom, only for that to be eclipsed a month later, when Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest made Trevor Francis the first £1 million man.
During the 1980s English football found itself unable to compete with clubs in Italy and Spain, and it took the arrival of the Premier League in the early 1990s for the surge in transfer fees that has grown exponentially since then.
TV money was the key: the first £304 million deal agreed in 1992 more than doubled to £670 million in 1997 and broke the £1 billion mark at the turn of the millennium.
Transfer fees mirrored that growth: Manchester United smashed the record to sign Andy Cole for £7 million in 1995, then Newcastle United smashed it again with £15 million for Alan Shearer a year later. Sir Alex Ferguson paid almost double that, £29.1 million, to bring Rio Ferdinand to Old Trafford in 2002.
Advertisement
A decade later, with the world emerging from the global economic crisis, the £50 million mark was broken when Chelsea signed Fernando Torres from Liverpool in 2011.
In 2016 Manchester United set another record, paying £93 million for Paul Pogba, and over the next five years the top clubs regularly splashed out eye-watering sums between £60 million and £80 million to land their targets.
Before Grealish’s signing Manchester City had not set a transfer record since the 2008 purchase of the Brazil ace Robinho for £32.5 million. To have broken the £100 million boundary will ensure, however, that this one will go down in the history books.
As for Puddefoot, inset, he had three seasons in Scotland earning the maximum wage of £9 a week, but was sold to Blackburn Rovers after he failed to make the expected impact and win a single trophy.
Grealish will be hoping that his story has a happier ending.
