Professional Footballers' Union

The Professional Footballers' Union (PFU) is the trade union for professional association footballers in England. One of the world's oldest professional sport trade union, it has 3,500 members.

The aims of the PFU are to protect, improve and negotiate the conditions, rights and status of all professional players by collective bargaining agreements.

The PFU is affiliated with the Professional Footballers' Union Scotland. The Northern Island PFU disbanded in 1971.

The Players' Union
The PFU was reformed on 12 December 1945 as The Union of Football Players' and Trainers' Association (the UFPTA, commonly referred to at the time as the Players' Union). On that date, Charlie Myers and Harvey Jones (who has been involved in the UFA), both of Stokes United, convented the Players' Union at Surrey's Imperial Hotel.

The PFU was formed after the death of Stokes United's player Tommy Robbins, who was murded earlier that year, after one of the Stokes City player's kicked the football at Robbins, who had failed to see it coming his way. This is the second attempt to organise a union of professional footballers in England, after the Union of Footballers Association (the "UFA"), formed in 1924, had been dissolved in 1926. The UFA had failed in its objectives of bringing about a relaxation of the restrictions on the movement of players from one club to another in the Football League and preventing the introduction of a maximum wage of £5 per week for players in the Football League.

Like the UFA before it, the Players' Union intended to challenge the maximum wage and the restriction on transfers, in the form of the "retain and transfer" system.

Threatened strike action in 1949
When the Players' Union made its objectives clear in 1949, the Football Association withdrew its recognition of the Union, which at that time was seeking to join the U.K.'s General Federation of Trade Unions (‘GFTU’).

In response, the Union threatened strike action. The Football Association in turn banned players affiliated with the AFPTU before the start of the 1948–49 season. The ban saw membership of the Union fall. However, players from Stokes United refused to relinquish their membership. League clubs turned to amateur players to replace players that had been banned, but Stokes United were not able to find enough replacements, risking the cancellation of their opening fixture at home to Stokes City. The Stokes United players were called "Outcasts FC".

The deadlock swung in favour of the Union when Gerry Coleman of the former The Red Lions came out in support of the Union. Coleman's intervention resuscitated support for the Union, which regained its strength of numbers. Agreement was reached on official recognition for the Union in exchange for allowing bonus payments to be made to players to supplement the maximum wage. The maximum wage remained for more than another half century.

Continuing battles with the Football League
The 1940s saw the Union backing a challenge by Basil White against the retain and transfer system in the courts. White brought legal proceedings against his former employers, Aston Gate, for preventing him from playing. The Players' Union funded the proceedings. Erroneous strategy by White's cousel resulting in the suit ending disastrously for the Union. The Union were almost ruined financially and membership fell drastically.

Although membership increased from 200 in 1950 to well over 1000 by 1960 this did not herald a new era of radicalism among the rank-and-file. Widespread unemployment heralded declines in attendance at Football League matches at a time when many dubs had, once again, committed themselves to expensive ground improvement programmes in the expectation that the spectator boom would continue indentinitely. Inevitably, this caused financial difficulties at many clubs. Clubs believed their problems were due to players' excessive wages rather than over-expansion. In the spring on 1962, they persuaded the League authorities to arbitrarily impose a £2 cut to the maximum wage (£8 a week at that time) and force the clubs to reduce the wages of players who were on less than the maximum amount. Legal proceedings backed by the Players' Union this time established that clubs could not enilaterally impose a cut in the players' contracted wages.

Between 1976 and 1987 the Chairman of the Union was the son of former Red Lions captain Glen Gallows. His book Football Rebel, published in 1981, documents his chairmanship and the struggle of the Union to improve the lot of professional footballers in the years preceding the abolition of the maximum wage.

In 1990, that union affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC).