PFA Has Chance to Reinvent Itself After Gordon Taylor's Grandstanding Era

Gordon Taylor is to leave his role as the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive. Photograph: Andy Hampson/PA Images
Gordon Taylor is to leave his role as the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive. Photograph: Andy Hampson/PA Images
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PFA Has Chance to Reinvent Itself After Gordon Taylor's Grandstanding Era

Gordon Taylor is to leave his role as the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive. Photograph: Andy Hampson/PA Images
Gordon Taylor is to leave his role as the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive. Photograph: Andy Hampson/PA Images

Farewell, then, Gordon Taylor. Who knows, maybe this time it really will be adieu. The news that Taylor will be leaving his post imminently, a mere 39 years into his elevation to the role of Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, will be met with caution by long-term Taylor watchers.

Like a zombified hand, thrust back up through the cemetery soil, Taylor’s most remarkable quality in recent years has been his astonishing indestructibility. This is a union boss capable of surviving not just successive rounds of bad publicity, gaffes, and campaigning opposition, but his own previous departure notice in 2018.

That Taylor should end up leaving on his own terms is tribute to his tenacity, his unquenchable will-to-power, and to his success in certain areas, most notably matters relating to the union’s income. Not to mention increasingly, his shamelessness.

This is not in itself a bad thing. Union bosses are not supposed to be shrinking violets and are often at their best as grandstanding can-do merchants. But it is a quality that has, in Taylor’s case, outlived and ultimately consumed his usefulness in his role.

It is the institution itself that demands our attention now. The most obvious side-effect of retaining a 75-year-old (seriously, football?) in a key leadership role across four decades of visceral change is the accompanying cultural stasis, the lack of new brooms and spring cleans.

Perhaps the most startling quality of Taylor’s union in the past couple of years is how utterly it has been left behind by the modern world. In that time it is Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford who have become the most influential campaigning figures for the welfare and status of elite players.

Imagine, if you can, a players’ union with the presence and the sensitivities to hitch itself properly to the campaign Sterling has waged against racism using just his own wits and a social media account. Or a union that could channel Rashford’s devastatingly clear-sighted messaging on social issues that speak to so many people.

Imagination is required, because it seems to exist in a different world to this cutting edge – to the extent the idea of Taylor and Rashford sharing a platform seems mildly absurd. The feeling of entropy in what should be a position of real influence is tangible. A few years back Joey Barton described Taylor as a “fat, festering old king” – inaccurately as it happens. Taylor is not particularly fat.

Two obvious questions present themselves. What to make of Taylor’s own multi-era-spanning tenure? And, more pressing, what next for the union?

For various reasons, not least his own remarkable anti-charisma, there will be some celebration at Taylor’s departure. There will be an urge to point only to the obvious failings, plus – it is one of the great obsessions of English football – his salary.

The positives first. Taylor leaves the PFA with booming finances and a platform to do a great deal more. It was Taylor’s strike threat in 1992 that hitched the PFA to the Premier League’s new income streams. A similarly muscular approach drew an improved deal from Richard Scudamore, not a man instinctively given to offering improved deals.

Taylor was mild rather than silent on campaigning issues. He helped establish Kick It Out, a good idea underfunded and understaffed. But two issues will define how he is remembered in the short term. Most recently, evidence of dementia in former footballers has been a source of anger over a perceived lack of support. Clubs and governing bodies have the ultimate duty of care. But a functioning union could and should have done more for its members’ welfare.

Then we have the gaffes and the blunders: the comparison of Ched Evans’s return to the struggle of the Hillsborough families; the lack of discretion over abuse survivors and players’ mental health issues.

Finally, there is that salary, about £2m, far more than any other trade union leader. This has been a constant point of comparison with the sums spent supporting members and good causes. In his defense Taylor may indicate the madness of football’s finances generally – Scudamore, for example, was paid a £5m golden goodbye. Mesut Özil is on £18m a year. Nothing makes sense here, nothing is proportionate.

The PFA is a body that has always had finances at its heart. It was founded in 1907 as a means of extending and then abolishing the maximum wage, which it finally succeeded in doing under (the unpaid) Jimmy Hill.

It is from here the current oddity springs. Such has been the contortion in football’s finances over the past 30 years that the union now finds itself acting for both multimillionaires and lower-league players on regular salaries, all of whom pay the same £100 dues.

Little wonder a figure such as Taylor should have risen with it over those years and that this organization should have started to look so strange, so unbalanced, so torn at by competing needs. In this sense it does at least reflect accurately the industry it serves.

The PFA does have a chance to reconfigure itself. What is certain is that Taylor has wildly overstayed his natural time slot, even if in the process his own sharp elbows have helped rake in huge amounts of cash. A thorough review of finances is promised. In the meantime it is worth considering what a leader of genuine vision and zeal could do with the campaigning power Taylor seemed only to occupy but not to exercise.

(The Guardian)



Arensman Wins Tour de France 19th Stage as Pogacar Retains Yellow Jersey

INEOS Grenadiers team's Dutch rider Thymen Arensman celebrates on the podium after winning the 19th stage of the 112th edition of the Tour de France cycling race, 93.1 km between Albertville and La Plagne, in the French Alps, on July 25, 2025. (AFP)
INEOS Grenadiers team's Dutch rider Thymen Arensman celebrates on the podium after winning the 19th stage of the 112th edition of the Tour de France cycling race, 93.1 km between Albertville and La Plagne, in the French Alps, on July 25, 2025. (AFP)
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Arensman Wins Tour de France 19th Stage as Pogacar Retains Yellow Jersey

INEOS Grenadiers team's Dutch rider Thymen Arensman celebrates on the podium after winning the 19th stage of the 112th edition of the Tour de France cycling race, 93.1 km between Albertville and La Plagne, in the French Alps, on July 25, 2025. (AFP)
INEOS Grenadiers team's Dutch rider Thymen Arensman celebrates on the podium after winning the 19th stage of the 112th edition of the Tour de France cycling race, 93.1 km between Albertville and La Plagne, in the French Alps, on July 25, 2025. (AFP)

Thymen Arensman claimed his second victory in this year's Tour de France when he benefited from the top guns' waiting game to prevail in the 19th stage, the last mountain trek of the race on Friday.

The Ineos Grenadiers rider, whose team have been facing doping questions related to their glorious days as Team Sky, went solo in the final climb to La Plagne before crossing the line two seconds ahead of Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar, who were second and third respectively.

Slovenian Pogacar retained the overall leader's yellow jersey and leads Vingegaard by 4:24 going into the final two stages and is widely expected to win a fourth title if he avoids a major incident.

German Florian Lipowitz took fourth place on the shortened stage to cement his third place overall, stretching his advantage over fourth-placed Oscar Onley of Britain by 41 seconds to 1:03.

It would have taken a colossal coup from Vingegaard to topple Pogacar on the final mountain test in the Alps, but the Visma-Lease a Bike rider only tried within the last 100 meters to take two seconds off of the Slovenian's lead, with Pogacar emerging as the puppet master of the peloton.

A leading trio featuring France's Lenny Martinez and Valentin Paret Peintre as well as former Tour runner-up Primoz Roglic, reached the Col du Pre with a small gap of a chasing group after a brutal 12.2-km ascent at 7.7%.

The peloton, controlled by Pogacar's UAE Emirates-XRG, trailed by less than a minute.

With two kilometers left in the climb up to the Cormet de Roselend (5.9km at 6.9%), Paret Peintre and Roglic shook off Martinez, but only briefly as the Bahrain-Victorious rider clawed his way back.

Roglic went solo in the descent into Bourg Saint Maurice, dropping Martinez and Paret Peintre, who were quickly caught by the bunch.

Roglic was then swallowed two kilometers before the final climb and spat out immediately.

Austrian Felix Gall, gunning for a top five finish in Paris, accelerated 14.5km from the finish with Arensman, Pogacar and Vingegaard reacting.

Pogacar made his own move 14km from the top with Vingegaard and Arensman the only riders able to get into his slipstream.

Pogacar eventually let Arensman go and seemed content with setting a decent tempo to keep the Dutchman within reach, but the Slovenian eventually did not make the effort to go for a fifth stage win this year.