The retain and transfer system was simply ownership

For seventy years an English footballer could be refused a move and refused a wage by the same club at the same time.

Here is how it worked, and the plainness of it is the shocking part. A club offered a player a contract for one season. At the end of that season the club could place him on a retained list, which meant no other club could sign him. It could also decline to offer him new terms. Retained and unpaid at once. He was not free to leave and not entitled to be employed.

On top of that sat a maximum wage, a nationally agreed ceiling that applied whether you were the best player in the country or the eleventh choice at a mid-table club. In the late 1950s that ceiling was around twenty pounds a week, which was a decent industrial wage and nothing like the value being generated by a man filling a stadium every fortnight.

The defence was competitive balance, and it was not entirely cynical. Without a ceiling, the argument ran, three rich clubs would buy every good player and the league would become a procession. Look at football now and you can say the argument was proved right. I would still say the system was indefensible, because the mechanism it chose to protect balance was to remove one class of participant's rights entirely while removing nothing from anyone else. Directors were not capped. Gate receipts were not capped. Only wages.

The maximum wage fell in 1961 after the players' union threatened to strike, and the retain and transfer system was broken in court soon afterwards, when a judge found it to be an unreasonable restraint of trade. Both of those took organised collective pressure, not enlightenment from within the game.

What followed is the part administrators forget. The predicted collapse did not arrive for thirty years, and when the gap between rich and poor clubs did open up, the cause was not player freedom. It was television money distributed unequally.

Every generation of owners produces a version of the same claim: that restricting what players can do is the only way to keep the competition fair. The retain and transfer years are the cleanest test case we have, and the answer was that the restriction protected the clubs, not the contest.