Now another Welshman, Gareth Bale, holds the world transfer record with his move from Spurs to Real Madrid for a staggering £85 million . My, how transfer fees have grown. The reported $10 million that Valencia paid for Australian Mat Ryan is 70 times what Juve paid to sign John Charles.
Charles, not dissimilar in build to Bale, was known in Britain as The Gentle Giant. In Italy they called him Il Gigante Buono and King John. He was an instant success at Juve where he spent five years, being top scorer in his first season and scoring 93 goals in 155 Serie A matches for The Old Lady. The Juve front trio of Omar Sivori, Giampiero Boniperti and Charles was the deadliest on the Continent.
Football’s financial landscape since that era has changed so much that a move such as that by John Charles is unlikely to happen today, at least to Juventus. The English top tier is now the best paying league in the world and British players have little reason to move to the Continent unless they go to a mega-rich club like Real Madrid or Barcelona.
Record transfer fees have come a long way since Willie Groves moved from West Brom to Aston Villa for £100 in 1893 and they are more than ever, in my view, an obscenity on the face of the world game.
The transfer system, whereby contracted players can be bought or sold like pieces of meat, above all ensures that only the richest clubs get the best players and remain rich.
I know that to a lot us fans the sight of £85 million - that's $185.3 million - being paid for a player makes exciting reading but, frankly, it should be done away with. Which is exactly .
The football transfer market is valued at $5.7 billion annually and is growing rapidly. It grew by over $4 billion between 1994 and 2011.
Among FIFPRO’s concerns is the capacity of clubs who fail to pay a player’s wages to keep that player and charge a fat transfer fee for him if he wants a move. FIFPRO makes the argument that this does not and cannot happen in any other area of work.
Much of the opposition to FIFPRO’s call understandably comes from the poorer, selling clubs, especially from outside Europe, whose entire business model is founded on making profits from transfer fees. But this helps roll a never ending cycle. Clubs in, say, South America keep producing players they sell to European clubs and replace them with young players whom they later also sell.
The net effect of this is that clubs in South America can virtually never keep quality players, all of whom go to Europe, many of them to lower-tier leagues whose quality is no better than the one they left. They don’t necessarily become better players, only richer ones.
I for one would not shed a tear if this wildebeest-style migration came to an end.
The John Charles story of course is a different one. He went to a better league and a better club with better players. Probably the same applies to the transfers of Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale.
And that goes for the Australians who have recently moved to decent European leagues like those in Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The demise of the transfer system would in the least slow the trend of talented Australian players going to richer, but hardly better quality, leagues like China's Super League or those in the Middle East.
And I would not shed a tear over that either.