Back in April 1960 George Eastham was keen to be released from his contract with Newcastle United Football Club. His employers were less keen on the idea, so Eastham took matters into his own hands, left football, and began working for a friend. A director at Newcastle declared that he would see Eastham shovel coal before he would see him play for someone else.

Several months later he wrote to the league outlining his position and looking for permission to transfer. The league decided it was a matter between club and player. Cut to picture of Pilate washing his hands.

The Professional Footballers' Association issued a writ on Eastham's behalf the following October charging that Newcastle were acting in unlawful restraint of trade. Newcastle did nothing but in early November accepted a bid from Arsenal for the players services.

Eastham's career resumed but he was persuaded by the PFA to continue with his groundbreaking case which was finally heard in June 1963. The following month Justice Wilberfroce decided that the retain and transfer system as operated by league clubs was an unjustifiable restraint of trade. Together with the abolition of the maximum wage a couple of years earlier, the path had been paved that would free footballers from a grim sort of slavery.

Last week Jean Marc Bosman, whose own case decades later would further liberate footballers, commented that never in his vision had he entertained a case like Nicolas Anelka's whereby a well-paid player with a successful club would deliberately try to engineer a lucrative transfer to another club merely out of caprice. Soccer is in a little bit of trouble. When one looks around the English Premiership to absorb and wonder at the sort of wages being paid to players like Duncan Ferguson there can be no doubt that Roy Keane, for instance, is entirely justified in his pursuit of a vastly improved income. He has been pivotal to Manchester United and can illustrate his contribution quite easily by pointing to United's empty trophy cupboard at the end of the season he missed with a knee ligament injury and the bulging cabinet which now sits in the boardroom.

If United accede to Keane, however, a silly agreement entered into by United chairman Martin Edwards means that several of those younger players brought up at the club who have opted to stay for the long-term can march in and demand (and expect to receive) precisely the same wage. And when that happens agents for Jaap Stam and Dwight Yorke and others won't be far behind. This procedure will ripple across other clubs until somebody pays even sillier money to another footballer and the process starts again.

And so it goes. Wealthy clubs are looking presently at squad sizes and wage bills (Chelsea just touching one million a week) which ensure that lesser clubs can no longer compete. Demonstrably the money has wrung the romance out of the game.

The FA Cup has become the property of big clubs who can win the thing by sticking out a team full of nominally fringe players when the going gets tough and the schedule gets heavy.

The fabled "Double", the achievement of which was a landmark of excellence, is won routinely now while the lucrative nature of participation firstly in the Premiership and ultimately in Champions League has hardened the tiered system in soccer.

When the yellow cards and disciplinary points add up to a suspension at Manchester United the side isn't significantly weakened. The bigger clubs don't know injury crises in the way that the smaller ones do. For the good of football the case has to be made for a salary structure and an income distribution system which levels the playing field. In raising the issue it is important to point out that a league-imposed salary cap would not return players to the feudal system which existed pre-1961, but would return some collective bargaining power to the PFA. The simplest model to follow would be that which applies in most American professional sports whereby teams have a minimum entry level wage and a maximum pool which may be shared out by the senior players in an organisation. The system ensures that mobility of players ceases to be a function of the highest bid or the most outrageous wage packet, it keeps players at the bottom of the sporting hierarchy paid on a ratio consistent with those who have achieved superstar status, and, most importantly, it ensures some sort of competitive balance prevails in the leagues.

In turn, TV revenue and league merchandising revenue is shared out fairly. There are imperfections of course. Minor league players are treated as callously as players who don't make it in English soccer, but at least players as a bloc have a collective bargaining power which is now the function of agents in England today.

The equitable redistribution of income in English soccer ceased to exist just as the money became sufficient to save the game. Now the Premiership's top five or six clubs export wage inflation to all the clubs below them.

The difference ultimately is that one wouldn't feel comfortable taking a bet that any range of teams would not win the World Series in baseball or the Superbowl in gridiron in the next five to 10 years. That competitive balance it there for well-managed clubs to avail of.

You could feel certain, though, that perhaps two-thirds of the teams in the Premiership won't be winning the competition in that timescale. In other words they exist as fodder to fill out the competition and they struggle as the elite grow away from them. Anne Bourke of UCD's Dept of Business Administration presented a fascinating paper to the Conference on the Corporate Governance of Professional Football in London last spring. She proposed a model drawn from the ownership structure of English clubs based on the evolution of Irish PLC co-operatives and citing successful experiments in same at Northampton FC and Bournemouth FC.

She quoted an American economist writing 40 years ago, but succinctly framing the economics of sport's business.

"Two teams opposed to each other in play are like two firms producing a single product. The product is the game weighted by the revenues derived from its play . . . In one sense the teams compete, in another they combine in a single firm in which the success of each branch requires that it be not `too much' more efficient than the other. If it is, output falls."

The bad, short-sighted management of English soccer has created the Anelka Frankensteins and while radical but common sense ideas like Anne Bourke's seem a long way from implementation at the top, the game is failing us all.