The man who made almost every professional footballer, and their agents, much richer never set out to change the game for ever. Jean-Marc Bosman did not want to be a rebel. He had no intention of suing his club RFC Liège, the Belgian football association and ultimately UEFA all the way to the European Court of Justice.
Nor did Bosman want to "give football something wonderful", as he puts it today. Above all, he never wanted to pay the highest price himself. "I had a chaotic life," is how he describes what was in truth a complete collapse: alcohol, debt, depression, a lawsuit over domestic violence and chronic financial hardship. Bosman revolutionised football, but football no longer wanted him. "It is sad, but from the very beginning they wanted to erase me. I was ignored. But I understood that you pay a price when you attack an existing power apparatus," he says today.
At the time, Bosman wanted justice, but for himself. He simply wanted to keep playing and, after his contract with Belgian top-flight club RFC Liège expired in the summer of 1990, move to French second-tier side USL Dunkerque.
He was 25 then, an averagely gifted attacking midfielder who had come through at Standard Liège and made his professional debut there. In the previous two years, though, he had managed only 25 matches in Division 1 for local rivals RFC. Bosman was glad his contract was ending because the last few months had been difficult. He had argued with the coach and the management. The club did offer him a new deal, but only at around 850 euros a month, a quarter of his original salary. This was 1990, but 850 euros for a top-flight footballer in western Europe? Even then, that was ridiculous. A factory worker in Belgium earned around 1,000 euros at the time. Dunkerque's offer arrived at exactly the right moment: second division, yes, but in France, a bigger football country than Belgium. He would also be able to play in a city right on the border with home. It was a solid offer for a player like Bosman.
His club at the time demanded a gigantic transfer fee for Jean-Marc Bosman
There was just one problem: RFC Liège did not want to let Bosman go for nothing and demanded a transfer fee of between 600,000 and 800,000 euros for their No 10. This was for a player whose contract had expired and who had just been offered a new deal on the Belgian minimum wage.
Dunkerque would not, or could not, pay that much, so Liège blocked the transfer. Bosman became a rebel. He gave up his professional status, had himself reclassified as an amateur and was able to leave Liège. First, to keep fit, he joined a French fifth-tier club. A year later he moved to a top-flight club on La Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. Above all, though, Bosman sued his former club and the Belgian football association for damages.
On the pitch, Bosman's moves barely mattered. He was unhappy on La Reunion and when he returned to Belgium in 1992 no club wanted to sign him. He applied for unemployment benefit and was rejected. At times during those years, the former professional lived in the garage of his parents' house.
Getty ImagesThe Bosman ruling divides football into a before and an after
In court, things went better. As early as 1990, courts in Belgium ruled that his move to Dunkerque should not have cost a transfer fee. The club and the football association ignored those rulings. In UEFA's view, ordinary courts had no jurisdiction over football. Only football should be allowed to decide football, the association insisted. But football had not reckoned with the EU: the Belgian judiciary and Bosman appealed to the European Court of Justice. They wanted a landmark ruling under which professional footballers, too, would benefit from the free choice of workplace that applies in the EU.
Clubs and associations fumed and warned of football's collapse. "The European Union is trying to destroy club football," thundered then UEFA president Lennart Johansson, while the future FIFA boss Sepp Blatter, then still FIFA general secretary, tried to cast himself as the saviour of the disenfranchised: "Should we allow the rich to get richer and say nothing about it?"
None of it made any difference. In December 1995 came the ruling that split football into a before and an after.
- Before the Bosman ruling, players were not employees, they were like serfs and practically belonged to their clubs. Players could change clubs only if their current club allowed it, even if their contract had already expired. After the Bosman ruling, players could do what they wanted once their contracts had ended. The players had the clubs in their hands: clubs had to try to extend contracts as early as possible, but that came at a cost. Players' wages exploded overnight.
- Previously, transfer fees were also due when contracts had expired. Afterwards, out-of-contract professionals were free transfers and often demanded a signing fee from their new clubs.
- Previously, clubs could more or less decide arbitrarily how expensive a player should be and how much money he should earn. Afterwards, players became above all one thing: ever more expensive.
- Before the Bosman ruling, professionals played for the minimum wage. After the ruling, even averagely gifted professionals in the top leagues became millionaire earners.
- Previously, only a limited number of foreign players were allowed to play for a club, at the start of the 1990s three in most European leagues. Afterwards, that was history at least for professionals from the EU and later UEFA as a whole. On 26 December 1999, FC Chelsea fielded, in the Premier League, for the first time ever a team in a top league made up entirely of foreign professionals.
Jean-Marc Bosman could at times "not even afford an ice cream"
Chelsea's coach at the time was the Italian Gianluca Vialli, who the previous year had led Chelsea as player-manager to triumph in the Cup Winners' Cup. Vialli, incidentally, had been the most expensive player before Bosman: in 1992 Juventus paid Sampdoria Genoa a transfer fee of 17 million euros for the young striker. One and a half years after the Bosman ruling, Inter Milan paid 26.5 million euros to FC Barcelona for Ronaldo. Twenty years later, the 222 million euros PSG paid Barcelona for Neymar smashed through every limit.
The Bosman ruling made huge numbers of professionals much richer and shifted the balance of power in football towards the players. At the same time, and on that point Blatter was in fact right, it cemented the dominance of the top five leagues: whereas these accounted for just under 80 per cent of the players who finished in the Ballon d'Or top ten in the first half of the 1990s before the ruling, after Bosman 98 per cent of Ballon d'Or protagonists played in England, Spain, Italy, Germany or France.
Bosman got none of that. "Everyone benefits from me. From my fight. Only me, I get nothing from it," says Bosman. In 1996 he still made seven appearances for then Belgian second-tier side RSC Visé. In 1999, nine years after the start of his legal case and four years after the Bosman ruling, he received 780,000 euros in compensation for the premature end of his career. The money soon disappeared, and at times he could "not even afford an ice cream". Some Belgian professionals such as Frank Verlaat and Marc Wilmots, whom he had made rich thanks to his legal case, donated a little to help Bosman make ends meet. Today he receives a monthly payment from the players' union Fifpro. At least they have not forgotten him. "Everyone knows the Bosman rule, but nobody knows the man behind it," says Bosman, "I am a man without a face."
Would the rebel against his will sue again today? "I gave the world of football something wonderful, but never received any recognition. That above all hurt me," says Bosman, "so no, I would not do it again. I have had to give a lot for it."