Billy Meredith is remembered as one of the formative figures of the early British game, and as the player at the centre of the first great scandal in Manchester City’s history. He captained City and scored the only goal in the 1904 FA Cup final, the club’s first major title. Within two years he had been banned for a season, 17 City players had been barred from turning out for the club again and two of its directors had been banned for life.
The trouble began on the final day of the 1905 season, when City stood on the verge of winning the title and instead lost to Aston Villa in a match that involved punches and literal mud-slinging. More seriously, Meredith was heard offering a £10 bribe to the Villa captain, Alec Leake, to throw the game. The report came from a spectator whose identity has never been established, and how serious the episode truly was has never been settled. Meredith was suspended for a season, and the consequences ran for decades.
It was the investigation that followed which did the lasting damage. When Meredith was seen still hanging around City despite his ban, the FA launched a fresh inquiry into the club’s finances. It found that City’s gate money was being funnelled into the private accounts of club directors and used to give off-the-books payments to players. Meredith was on £6 a week at a time when the maximum wage was £4, and he was far from the only player receiving a little extra on the side.
The sanctions were heavy, and they bit. City were hardly the only club making similar illicit payments, yet the punishment sent them slipping down the table; they were relegated three years later and did not win the title again until 1937. The episode has since been read as proof that strong penalties work, and as an early example of one of football’s immutable laws of gravity: the faster a club rises, the shakier its foundations may be, and the more likely it is to plummet back to earth. Meredith, City’s star forward, left for Manchester United after the 1906 scandal.
Meredith’s own story turned into a redemption arc. Some felt he had been unfairly targeted for trying to set up a players’ union and campaigning for the abolition of the maximum wage, and he could certainly play. No less a judge than David Lacey, the Guardian’s long-serving football correspondent, ranked him with Stanley Matthews in the history of the British game. When Manchester United supporters voted Eric Cantona their greatest ever player in 2001, Lacey suggested that a couple of decades earlier they would have gone for George Best, and before that for Meredith himself.
He is in United’s hall of fame and was a key part of the team that won the club its first league title in 1908. He turned out for City from 1894 to 1905 and again from 1921 to 1924. Intriguingly, those switches across Manchester do not appear to have attracted much condemnation. When Meredith played in the Manchester derby of 1910, the Guardian’s man on the ground was left unimpressed by the lack of fire and venom. “Both sides tried hard, no doubt; there was no shirking to speak of,” he wrote. “But the game differed in no way that one could see from a hundred other games in which local rivalry has had no place whatsoever. The teams might have represented Penzance and Berwick-on-Tweed respectively for all the evidence the play gave to the contrary.” United won 2-1.
The same correspondent went on to question whether the players of the day cared enough about the shirt on their backs. “Is it reasonable to expect local or even club fervour in professional football as it exists today?” he wrote. “Can local patriotism thrive under a red jersey this year, a blue one the next, and perhaps a white one after that? It does not seem likely.”
Meredith kept playing until he was 49, helped, as the Guardian noted in his obituary, by being a details man whose “mind persistently dwelt on the problems of the game”. He finally called it a day four months before his 50th birthday, when he took over a pub. Known affectionately as “old skin”, he played with a toothpick in his mouth to help him concentrate. Retirement was not quiet: during the Manchester blitz a bomb exploded at the back of the pub and a shower of Welsh international caps scattered across the local neighbourhood. It took some time to collect them all, given he won 51 caps for his country.
He was candid, too, about how City’s success had been built. Asked about the secret of it, he openly admitted the club “put aside the rule that no player should receive more than £4 a week”. He also said: “Clubs are not punished for breaking the law – they are punished for being found out.” Written in the wake of Manchester City’s latest case, the argument is that the line applies as much to 2026 as it did more than a century ago.