When footballers were skint the Irish dispensation provided players with a rare opportunity to secure a windfall.
In the 1960s Terry Neill was a teenager living in Northern Ireland and playing football for Bangor when to his amazement he saw a headline in the newspaper Ireland’s Saturday Night that would change his life. It read: TERRY NEILL FOR ARSENAL.
It was totally unexpected and his reaction, once the initial shock wore off, was whether moving to England was what he wanted, even if it was to join such a great club. ‘I was very happy with the way things were,’ he says. ‘I had a wonderful family life, great friends, a lovely place to grow up, serving an apprenticeship.’ But he was persuaded it was an opportunity that would be foolish to miss.
And so began the process of making the move over the Irish Sea, which at that time, when the English game was still very insular, had benefits all of their own for players from across Ireland.
It was a rare instance in the days when footballers were skint that they could pick up a sizeable perk.
These were the days before agents. The signing-on fee for players launching their careers in the English Football League or switching clubs was so minimal and tightly controlled there were not even slim pickings for acquisitive go-betweens. Except, that is, when it came to the movement of players from Ireland – south and north – to English clubs, a trade that operated outside these controls, a kind of Irish dispensation.
In Neill’s case, Bangor knew precisely what to do to exact maximum compensation. They upgraded Neill from amateur to professional, which meant they could now negotiate a transfer fee with Arsenal. Two and a half thousand pounds was a record for Bangor at the time.
And how much of this was passed on to the player usually depended on canny parents making sure their boy did not miss out, either. In Neill’s case his cut was about 800 quid, an amount, he says, that Bangor did not need much persuading to hand over. ‘They knew that if they didn’t I only had to hold on for another three or four months and then I wouldn’t re-sign for them as an amateur and just go to the Arsenal for nothing.
‘Call it a bung if you like, or a private deal, but I suppose it’s far enough removed now for the taxman not to be coming after me.’
Neill was following in the footsteps of countless other Irishmen, among them Peter McParland.
McParland’s passion for football was a conflicted one. As a pupil at the Christian Brothers St Joseph’s school in Newry, County Down, which is in Northern Ireland close to the border with the Republic, McParland played Gaelic football, which remains a potent symbol of Irish identity.
The school would not countenance any association with what it called soccer. And this was why McParland, who was captain of the school’s Gaelic football team, found himself barred on one occasion from the Ulster schools final. ‘You were playing soccer yesterday,’ a Christian Brother told him, ‘so you’re not playing in the Gaelic final on Saturday.’
McParland liked the Gaelic form of football – ‘It’s a catch-and-kick game, which I enjoyed,’ he says. ‘It’s rough and tumble’ – but he preferred soccer. This was the game he played with his mates as soon as he left the school premises. When a summer league started these friends formed a team called Shamrock United.
It was playing for Shamrock that McParland, aged 16, was spotted and in 1950 joined Dundalk, who competed in the League of Ireland in the Republic. He soon established himself as a goal-scorer.
In 1952, a trip with his summer league side to Birmingham included a visit to Villa Park. The highlight for McParland was a summons to play in a practice match with Villa’s first-team players. These players then advised George Martin, Villa’s manager, to ‘sign the wee number ten who gave us so much trouble’.
McParland’s transfer to Villa had marked similarities with Neill’s move a few years later. As with Neill, McParland’s amateur status was rescinded immediately before the signing so that money could change hands. ‘At two minutes to three I signed professional for Dundalk and at two minutes past three I signed for the Villa,’ McParland says.
Protracted negotiations over the transfer fee involved the owner of Dundalk and the chairman of Aston Villa, Noel Mansell, with McParland’s father also having a say. ‘I know that Dundalk were looking for £5,000 for me,’ McParland says. ‘In the end it was agreed that the fee would be £3,800 and I would get £1,400 out of it.
‘It was normal thing then with fellas who were transferred from Ireland to England to get a cut.’
According to McParland, his father ‘then got a bit greedy’. After settling things with Dundalk, he went to George Martin and said: ‘Now, what’s the signing-on fee?’ And Martin said: ‘There’s nothing other than the ten-pound signing-on fee when you sign for Villa.’
‘So that was me signed for life – for a tenner,’ McParland says. ‘As things stood, Villa could decide what to do with me from then on.’
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson/@hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.