Since the early 1960s there has been a series of major institutional reforms to the organisation of the players' labour market in English football, starting with the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961, and culminating in the 1995 European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling in the Jean-Marc Bosman case (see chapter 2). Some of the broader consequences of these changes are obvious and widely recognised. Spiralling wages, especially for superstar players, are a consequence of the progressive shift towards freedom-of-contract that has been underway throughout this period. Although naturally the chronology and detail of institutional reform varies between countries, the same long-term trend has been evident worldwide. The trend towards the globalisalisation of the players' labour market has accelerated significantly in recent years, especially among the major professional football playing nations located in the EU, as a consequence of the Bosman ruling.

This chapter begins in section 4.1 by presenting a descriptive profile of certain key personal and career characteristics of professional football players in the English league. The analysis focuses on those players who turned out most regularly, week-in-week-out, for league matches played in each of two seasons located 20 years apart: 1979 and 1999. Tabulations of the data are used to draw comparisons between the composition of the two samples. Among the players' characteristics investigated are age, place of birth and various aspects of each individual's career playing record.