Why Gordon Taylor and his £2m PFA salary need to go

If you are paid two million quid a year you’d better be pretty good at your job. And for the most part, Gordon Taylor has been.

He has developed a reputation as a tough negotiator as chief executive at the PFA and in his 37 years at the helm, he has instigated some important changes.

Like establishing pathways for retired players to get education or experience in the real world.

Or making sure that players’ pastoral care is as good as the physical nurturing they get as professional sportspeople.

The fact that Clarke Carlisle, the former Queens Park Rangers defender and PFA chairman, is even here to say that Taylor’s time at the top has run its course is testament to the PFA’s work.

Carlisle said this week that “Gordon has been nothing but supportive of me when many other people left me on my own” when he was seeking help in addressing his addiction and mental health issues.

Quite frankly he and other players would be dead if it wasn’t for the PFA.

Time to go

But Carlisle is right: it is time for Taylor to go.

For all the laudable efforts the PFA has made in helping players – such as establishing a link with Salford University back in 1991, or getting work for ex-pros in matchday press boxes up and down the country, or increasing diversity throughout the game – there are enormous gaps in its achievements.

The increasing cases of dementia in former players for one. The PFA’s near silence on this matter has been deafening.

Dawn Astle, daughter of Jeff, believes Taylor has been resistant to evidence that her father’s 2002 death was linked to heading the ball.

She said: “The PFA needs reform and it needs to have people in charge who really care about the most important issues facing players – and dementia is one of those.

Reprehensible

And the dragging of the PFA’s heels over the sexual abuse scandal which has rocked the game this decade is similarly reprehensible.

Taylor said in his open letter to members on Wednesday that he wants a “full and open review” into the PFA’s structure.

He added: “It is important that we are transparent, committed to constantly improving and restless in our mission to support you.”

It is vital that the review is indeed transparent – as difficult as it may be to imagine, given that the review will be first read by the chief executive who happens to be at the centre of what is being investigated.

If the PFA is modernised, so it can cater for the modern player – many of whom are so unimaginably rich and well catered for and may not even know what Taylor does – then this exercise will have been a success.

Transparency

Speaking of transparency, the money that Taylor earns, making him the highest paid union leader in the world, has been the catalyst for this current scrutiny on the organisation, as much as the power struggle between him and the chairman Ben Purkiss.

It is an obscene amount of cash – but perhaps one that is unsurprising given the seven or eight-figure sums that are bandied about on a regular basis in football.

And if you are earning that sort of wedge, you’d better prove that you are actually worth it. This is Taylor’s challenge.

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