They should get 100%...

…the Western Sydney Wanderers, that is. The players have been embroiled in a pay dispute with the club, which has offered them only ten percent of the revenues from participation in FIFA’s pointless annual parade of continental champions’ league winners, the Club World Cup. The players have been asking for fifty percent – the same ratio that Adelaide United got when they partook of the same event in 2008.

There are a few examples of professional sporting teams being run along the lines of workers’ co-operatives. In 1890, baseball players disenchanted by team owners’ use of the reserve clause to hold down their earnings formed the Players’ League, once of three major leagues in operation that season, with franchises in Boston, New York, (the then-still independent city of) Brooklyn, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Players took the profits for themselves, and clubs didn’t collude to reduce players’ bargaining power.

Prior to 1905, Australian cricket tours to Britain were run by the players themselves for their own financial benefit, with the Melbourne Cricket Club getting a slice of the profits in exchange for lending its support and branding (pre-Federation Australian tourists wore the blue, red, and white of the club rather than the green and gold introduced by the Board of Control). The formation of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket (now Cricket Australia) ensured that the profits from outbound Ashes tours would be siphoned away from the players and towards the administrators. The final blow to player sovereignty was inflicted in 1912, when six of the country’s top cricketers were left out of a touring squad bound for Britain when they demanded the right to choose their own manager for the tour.

1890 and 1905 were victories for capitalist owners and administrators over the players – the sporting equivalents of the Freikorps’ shooting of Rosa Luxemburg and Franco’s coup against the Spanish Second Republic. They helped to ensure that professional sportspeople would spend the rest of the century battling the reserve clause, the maximum wage, and other restraints on their bargaining power.

What is needed is for professional leagues to be run on the lines of the Players’ League, with players owning and managing their own franchises, and controlling one hundred percent of the profits generated by their labours.

Alternatively, players’ bargaining power can be increased by upping the number of owner-controlled franchises bidding for their services. American baseball players benefited from the existence of ‘third’ major leagues in the 1910s (the Federal League) and the 1940s (the Mexican League), in both cases either jumping ship to the new league or using its existence to get a better deal from the established leagues. A rebel league is a difficult proposition in soccer, with FIFA’s totalising control over the sport, but the original North American Soccer League showed that it can be done.

The players, not only of the Wanderers but of all the other professional sports franchises across the nation, would do well to study the examples of the Players’ League and the pre-1905 Ashes tours. They shouldn’t settle for ten percent, or even fifty percent.