By Tony Attwood
- Arsenal: celebrations, clubs with the most yellow cards, low scoring games and what’s to come
- For once it is not Arsenal and us fans who are to blame, but we probably will be
If you have been reading Untold across the years, you may have noticed that we have, from time to time, taken the view that football as a working environment, and football clubs and international bodies are employers are no different from any other sort of working environment and employer.
And leading on from this comes the view that in terms of being employees, professional footballers have equal rights in law with all other employees. True, their salaries are often of a magnitude that most of us can only dream of, but that does not put their employers beyond the basic requirements of the law.
In other words, the basic rules that affect workers across Europe also affect footballers. They may be paid astronomical amounts of money at the top of their profession, but nonetheless, they are still entitled to the same basic rights as everyone else in a job.
It’s not a particularly exciting topic, I know, not one that we come back to very often, but it is there: footballers have the same basic rights in terms of employment as the rest of us who work in Europe have.
But a few football clubs, and even a few football associations, haven’t accepted this, arguing (as people often do over basic human rights) that somehow this trade of footballing is some sort of “special case”. But now Fifpro, the football players’ union, has managed to get a key legal judgement which says what we knew all the time. Footballers are employees who are paid wages, and as such, they are covered by the same rights and the same protections as everyone else who works in Europe.
As so often happens in matters like these, it was one country that took up the issue – in this case, France – and the result will automatically apply throughout the rest of the EU and from there will trickle down into other countries in Europe.
This case relates to the basic working rights of professional footballers and the victory dismisses the bizarre view that for reasons that could never be explained fully, professional players don’t have the same rights as everyone else.
The ruling has only recently been made public, but it dates back to mid-March and came from the European Committee of Social Rights that footballers have the right to proper and decent working conditions. What’s more this applies to members of junior teams as much as to full-time professionals.
This specifically means that each country in the EU (and because of the way football is organised, that will mean each country in Europe) has an absolute duty to protect professional players from unnecessary health and safety risks. Such risks can arise as much from playing on unsafe pitches, to playing in arenas where attacks from supporters are possible, and on to playing so often that the danger level from injuries from over-playing arises.
Until now Uefa, Fifa and other organisations have laid down the law on where and when games must be played, without any reference to the safety or well-being of players. That is now recognised as an offence. Fifa had argued that it was up to the individual countries to have suitable protective laws, but the court rejected that objection, ascerting what we already knew: state authorities are responsible for seeing that workers’ rights are upheld.
In the legal proceedings, it was stated that it is up to each state to keep football authorities under review to ensure that they do not allow “systemic failures” in the way any sport is organised to result in injuries
In particular, the final statement notes that many states allow footballers to have contracts which include only the most minimum of standards for rest periods, and thus occupational health and collective bargaining are structurally undermined by decisions taken at a worldwide level.”
In short, it suggests that sometimes events such as friendly international tournaments have been organised in such a way that some players are unable to have suitable rest periods, while others are unable to consult their representatives about the workload they are being put under.
In short, the FA, Uefa, and Fifa cannot and must not go ahead and fix up internationals just to suit themselves. They have an absolute duty to take player well-being into account.
