On 15 December 1995, judges at the European court of justice (CJEU) took two minutes to bring an end to a legal process that had lasted five years. The Bosman rule, as it was known, was to stand, the judges said. European football clubs were no longer allowed to demand transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired, with governing bodies stopped from capping the number of Europeans in any team. The man whose dogged legal pursuit had brought about these changes, Jean‑Marc Bosman, emerged from a crowd of cameras and well‑wishers to give his verdict. “I have got to the top of the mountain and I am now very tired,” he said.
For Bosman himself, it was downhill from there. “In the past I got a lot of promises but never received anything,” he told the Observer in 2015, claiming he “earned nothing” from the changes that ensued. He went bankrupt, was treated for alcoholism and was found guilty of assault against his then partner in 2013, resulting in a community service order that included mowing the grass of his local football pitch. There can be no argument, however, that the ruling that took his name was historic and, 30 years on, it has helped bring about a revolution in the sport from which the man himself was ultimately shunned.
“It’s good to remember just how restrictive and feudal the older order was,” says David Goldblatt, a leading football historian. “It seems incredible to look back 30 years and see that footballers who were out of contract just couldn’t go and do what they wanted. That the clubs had hold of licences that they could just retain over somebody, to control what they can do with their own labour. It seems like something out of the 14th century.
“Bosman absolutely transformed the economics of football. It changes the football labour market, the relationship between clubs and players, and second-hand players in the wider culture. Fans too. And it definitely contributes to creating a concentration of talent and money, and greater inequality as a result.
“For those who are playing in the leading professional divisions of the world, why else has there been the kind of wage inflation that there has? Yes, money has been streaming into the industry, but the capacity for players and their agents to commandeer 70 to 80% of the turnover of professional football, it’s pretty incredible. Even bankers aren’t taking that much.”
For those players who are away from the top of the pile, the situation has not changed in the same way, and one of the legacies of Bosman has been a continuing contest over players’ terms and conditions. After the 1995 ruling, Fifa, Uefa and the European Commission worked to devise a system known as the regulations on the status and transfer of players (RSTP) that came into effect in 2001. In 2015, those rules were tested in a case brought by Lokomotiv Moscow against Lassana Diarra over compensation allegedly owed by their former player after the termination of his contract by the club.
Diarra was found by a Fifa dispute and resolution chamber, whose panel included two player union representatives, to be culpable and told to pay Lokomotiv €10.5m (£9.2m), a sum for which any club that might employ him in the future would also be liable. Diarra contested this verdict and, another nine years later, there was a new CJEU ruling, one that found Diarra’s right to freedom of movement had been infringed by some aspects of Fifa’s transfer rules. The governing body immediately introduced temporary changes, opened a consultation process on reform and found itself on the end of a legal class action.
“The impact of Bosman went far beyond what probably anyone initially expected,” says Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association. “There were unintended consequences, and it took a lot of time for football to accept the changes, absorb the impact and adjust to the way it worked. Lessons have to be learned from that. We’ve got court rulings now, most notably in the Lassana Diarra case, that could very easily have a similar or bigger impact than Bosman. Football authorities need to work together, and work with players, to shape changes rather than just burying their heads in the sand and then scrambling to pick up the pieces afterwards.”
Molango’s call for collaboration is, somewhat surprisingly, repeated by Dolf Segaar, a Dutch lawyer leading the class action against Fifa under the banner “Justice for Players”. The suit is seeking damages from Fifa and five national associations for an alleged loss of earnings for up to 100,000 players due to the previous transfer rules. But a second demand is that the court obliges Fifa to go beyond consultation and negotiate new transfer rules alongside players and clubs.
“Even as a lawyer who earns my living from these proceedings I agree that legal action is not good for the sport,” Segaar says. “Football is a family and if you have all those court cases, it’s not good for the relationships. If you can be around the table and negotiate on solutions, it will be much better. We are open for negotiation with Fifa.”
Segaar recalls the initial effect of the Bosman ruling, saying it gave the impression to many within the game that “the transfer system was now open and you can negotiate as a player and you can leave as a player whenever you want. And that has not been the case.” In his view, Bosman caused a shift towards the players that the RSTP rebalanced, due in part to legitimate concerns over maintaining the stability of contracts and the transfer market itself (the concept of the transfer market was actually supported by the CJEU’S 1995 ruling).
The consequences of the Bosman rule have rippled longer than James Milner has been a professional player, and they have further to go yet. For Segaar, one possible destination is a move away from the individualism of the past 30 years. “I believe that players and clubs should negotiate at the start of any employment agreement the mechanism if you want to terminate your contract,” he says. “So the idea could be to have a collective bargaining agreement on a European level with the players’ unions and the clubs’ associations in which you provide for these rules. It will be accepted by the European court and it would be clear to anyone what exactly the transfer fee should be if you leave.”
Were such an outcome to be achieved, that pre-Bosman world would look even more remote.
