The footballing flair of George Eastham, who has died aged 88, thrilled crowds at Newcastle United, Arsenal and Stoke City in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and earned him a winners’ medal with the 1966 England World Cup squad. But his rebellious streak also secured him an honourable place on the list of players who fought against – and eventually helped to end – the restrictive practices of the footballing establishment.
Having joined Newcastle as an attacking midfielder in 1956, Eastham had asked for a transfer at the end of the 1959-60 season, and Newcastle had refused. The iniquitous retain and transfer system still existed then, binding a player to a club as long as they wished to keep him. But Eastham had financial backing in the shape of a Yorkshire businessman called Ernie Clay, later to become a controversial chairman of Fulham.
Thanks to Clay he was able to mount a long legal challenge to Newcastle’s decision, and in 1964 the high court finally delivered a judgment that struck at the very foundations of the Football League’s hegemony, decreeing that the League’s transfer regulations were an “unreasonable restraint of trade” and therefore not binding.
There was still a long way and many years to go before footballers won true freedom of contract following the Bosman ruling in the European court of justice in 1996, but the judgment that followed Eastham’s stand, like the abolition of the maximum wage in 1960, was a substantial step along the way.
Eastham had refused to play for Newcastle once the dispute erupted, and spent a period on strike until the club, mindful that one of its prime assets was rapidly diminishing in value, decided to sell him to Arsenal anyway.
He went for £47,500 in October 1960, long before the court ruling. Although Eastham had fallen out with Newcastle, he had put in four good seasons at the club, especially the last of them in 1959-60, when he played all 42 First Division games and scored 18 goals. He went on to be an outstanding player at Arsenal from 1960 to 1966, using the ball with flair and precision, adept in close control and possessed of excellent balance.
By 1963 Alf Ramsey had given him his England debut at Wembley in a 1-1 draw against Brazil, and he featured in Ramsey’s highly successful first foreign tour, helping England to beat Czechoslovakia 4-2 in Bratislava and East Germany in Leipzig. He then became a regular member of the England attack at inside-left, with Bobby Charlton usually his outside-left.
However, although Eastham figured in the European tour that preceded the 1966 World Cup, Ramsey had by then decided to make Charlton his deep-lying centre forward, and as a result the way was barred to the Arsenal player. Eastham was picked for the 22-man World Cup squad, but, like six other squad members, he did not play a single minute throughout the tournament.
At the time, football’s world governing body, Fifa, gave medals only to the 11 players on the pitch at the end of the final, so he walked away from Wembley empty-handed. But in 2009, after a successful campaign to retrospectively alter that custom, Eastham, along with other England squad members, was presented with his medal at 10 Downing Street. He did not play again for England after the World Cup, and finished with 19 caps, having scored two goals.
Eastham’s father – also George, an accomplished inside-right for Bolton and Brentford before the second world war – had played for England too, on one occasion, against the Netherlands in the 1934-35 season. He also played for Blackpool FC, where young George was born, and went to Arnold grammar school. In 1953, his father moved the family to Northern Ireland to become player-manager of Ards. Father and son played alongside each other for the team in the Northern Ireland league into the mid-50s.
After leaving Newcastle, Eastham gave Arsenal distinguished service for six seasons, playing in 207 league games and scoring 41 goals. But for all his creative influence, they were largely barren years for the Gunners, in which no major titles were won and nothing of any consequence was achieved in Europe.
He left for Stoke City after the World Cup, to figure prominently in a team shrewdly put together by a manager, Tony Waddington, who had a penchant for veterans.
Eastham, who was only 30, subsequently tended to make a joke of his passing years, notably after he had played a salient part in winning his club’s only major honour, when Stoke defeated the favourites, Chelsea, 2-1 at Wembley in the 1972 League Cup final. Paired at inside-forward with another gifted performer, Peter Dobing, Eastham played a crucial part in the first Stoke goal and eventually scored the winner.
Eastham left Stoke in 1973, having played in 194 league games for the club, and flew to South Africa to become player-manager of Hellenic FC in Cape Town, winning the cup and league double there. Waddington then brought him back to Stoke as assistant manager, and by 1977 Eastham, now made OBE (1973), took up the managerial reins. He could not prevent a weak Stoke side from being relegated from the First Division in 1976–77 and was sacked midway through the following term in the Second Division.
He then moved out of professional football entirely, and in 1978 emigrated to Johannesburg, where he ran his own sportswear company and, as an opponent of apartheid, held coaching courses for local black children.
He was married to Wendy and had three children, Suzanne, George and Christine.
• George Eastham, footballer, born 23 September 1936; died 20 December 2024
