What If... Bosman Hadn't Won?

Hold onto your hats for a thrilling article about the finer points of EU employment legislation! Relax. Not really. But we do want to talk abut Jean-Marc Bosman, who won his famous legal victory 13 years ago this week.

Saluted from the Porsche dealerships of Alderley Edge to the estate agents of Kensington and Chelsea, Jean-Marc Bosman changed the life of the professional footballer. His football story - or at least the interesting bit, because the rest of his career was deeply average - begins at RFC Liege in 1990. Jean-Marc's contract ran out and he had a chance to move to glamorous Dunkerque, but the fee they were offering was not acceptable to...we were going to say "to his employers", but they weren't really, were they? The fee wasn't acceptable to Liege, so they told Jean-Marc he couldn't go, in fact he could stay and rot in the reserves, and as he wasn't a first-teamer any more, he'd be doing all this on a pay-cut.

Nice way to run a railroad. But although Jean-Marc might not have been a great player, he certainly didn't lack for determination, or bloody-mindedness. He embarked on a five-year legal battle that effectively cost him his career (he was 26 in 1990) and eventually culminated in the famous European Court Of Justice ruling of 15 December 1995 that, as any fule kno, means that out of contract players can leave their club without a transfer fee.

After the decision, footballers from Aberdeen to Zaragoza realised that the actions of this one brother player had been huge benefit to each and every one of them, so they all dug deep and had a massive whip-round. No, of course they didn't.

Basically unemployable, Jean-Marc had a low-key testimonial in Lille that was snubbed by a variety of retribution-fearing big names. The Dutch national squad bunged him 60,000 Euros, which was welcome, but all in all, there was no Spartacus moment for Jean-Marc. He reckoned, including his testimonial, a few bob from the union and a court settlement, he got £720,000. Not a great deal, seeing as he gave up the best years of his career to see the likes of Sol Campbell get fat and happy.

In fact, Jean-Marc's been reduced to selling t-shirts on the internet, which - as anyone will tell you - is worse than prostitution and far less lucrative. His signature design bears the frankly baffling slogan: "Go the player circulate for your way." This may mean that secretly JMB is a Zen poet, prone to expressing his wisdom in circular riddles. Or more likely, he used Google's translation tools, which have caused more than one person to email strangers asking them if their panties are as big as an orange.

But what if things had go circulate another way for the player, as Jean-Marc would no doubt put it? What if he had lost what we definitely would not know as the Bosman ruling? For a start, "doing a Bosman" wouldn't have passed into the lexicon. Incidentally, it's fortunate for all broadcasters that Jean-Marc didn't have a comedy surname such Quim, Arshavin or Janker. "He's off on a Quim," would have provided us all with endless hilarity. All of us with purile and easily amused minds, that is.

Footballers obviously would still be extremely well paid. If a few million people in the country do something, the best couple of thousand at it are going to be very well remunerated. But their negotiating power would be reduced. There is no way that Campbell would have had earning parity with Thierry Henry at Arsenal for instance, and Lucas Neil, who is apparently asking for another pay rise this week seemingly blind to the fact that West Ham busted flat in Baton Rouge, would never have got near being offered 70k for his muscular services.

For everyone bar the super-rich clubs, the Bosman ruling has been a huge hindrance. A middle-ranking team that takes the time and foresight to invest heavily in youth development nonetheless sees its assets leave for a fraction of their market value once they are fully fledged first teamers.

The tribunal system for players under 24 offsets this to some extent, but it makes building a team of young local players who have come through together - which is surely what any true fan really wants to see at their club - extremely difficult. The ruling has meant that the biggest teams in a league can follow the Old Firm route of simply watching their smaller rivals develop the players and then harvesting them once they are all but fully rounded. This is one of the factors that has made the leagues in most top European countries so uncompetitive.

Another annoying result of the ruling has been what you might call the Mark Viduka Model, whereby a footballer does absolutely bugger all apart from get very fat, limp around and occasionally go loopy and run off until his contract is about to run out, when he suddenly starts playing like a latter-day Maradona for just long enough to snag another juicy deal from a new club who, for some mystifying reason haven't spotted him performing this brazen routine in the past at every single bloody team he has ever played for and think his pledges of undying love and allegiance are genuine and not entirely motivated by raking in large piles of unearned cash for lying on a treatment table getting massages from a man called Sid.

Clubs are put in the unfortunate position of either having to offer players much longer deals than is financially prudent or sign them on short contracts which can see the player leave for nothing. The fact that players can start sitting in the football brothel window with their legs apart with six months left to run on a deal only adds to this uncertainty.

People will say that it is only fair that footballers have the same right to move between jobs as other people but this argument is bogus, and not in a 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' way. The contract system means that players get paid even if they are injured and unable to work, and even if they perform way below an acceptable level; try pulling that one on your boss this week, unless you work for Royal Mail obviously. Imagine if we wrote this piece in the Mark Viduka Model style. It would largely be blank, perhaps just a few letters here and there and one really good sentence at the end. Money now please.

All the risk is currently borne by the clubs and the Bosman ruling has meant that players have even more power to go with their total lack of responsibility. Call us old fashioned, but that's not fair is it?

Alan Tyers and John Nicholson