BIG PRICES FOR FOOTBALLERS

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27824, 24 November 1955, Page 6

BIG PRICES FOR FOOTBALLERS

English Soccer Finances (From the London Correspondent of “The Press”) LONDON, November 9. Arsenal, one of the great club sides of English Soccer over the years, has been having a few lean seasons of late. Leyton Orient, a third division side, has been in financial difficulties. But the Orient team had a first class player called Vic Groves for whom Wolverhampton Wanderers were willing to pay £23,000. Arsenal, with large financial reserves from its “good” years, offered £30,000 if another player, Stan Charlton, was thrown in ? ‘to make the weight.” After a week of haggling over the price. Leyton Orient decided to sell to the highest bidder and Groves and Charlton will next Saturday join the “Gunners” at Arsenal’s famous Highbury ground. Orient’s financial worries have disappeared and a new grandstand will soon appear at its ground. Both players are former amateur internationals and their cost to Orient was only the initial signing-on fee of £lO. It would seem that there are considerable financial rewards for the lucky ones in the football market. Groves, who is 22, will join Arsenal as a centre forward. He recently played for the England B team against Jugoslavia as a right wing. Charlton aged 25, is a full back. The young centre-forward has been a popular player for Orient, and when it was mooted two months ago that he might have to be sold to augment finances, club supporters, many of them factory girls, collected £2OOO in small amounts in an effort to keep him. This sum was well below the figure required so Groves had to go back into the market. With a £20,000 price tag attached to him, Groves became a marked man. According to Leyton Orient manager, Mr A. Stock, the club had to consider the danger of Groves becoming “seriously crocked.” It was better for Arsenal to get him, he said, “before Groves was brutally kicked out of Soccer. The transfer gives him the chance of playing without fear of being crippled—and the money gives us a chance to revolutionise football in Leyton.”