This book emerges out of a traumatic personal experience some two and a half decades ago when I was called before the selectors and informed that I would no longer be considered for the university rugby team, which, of course, played the union version of the game. What was my heinous crime? I had not questioned the parentage of the referee, nor had I committed gross indecency in the depth of the scrum. All I had done was play a few games of rugby league, but this was enough to have me deemed a professional and hence ineligible to participate in union matches. To me this seemed harsh justice as I was never good enough to get paid, officially or otherwise: all that I ever found in my boots were sweaty socks. What, I wondered, was so special about professional sportsmen that simply to play alongside them, even second-rate ones, was sufficient to contaminate my amateurism? My interest in the professional was further roused a few years later when I realised that the enigmatic, spectacled batsman who ran me out in a school cricket match was making a living doing the same thing attest level!

The actual stimulus to write this book arose more recently, after I had emigrated to Australia, where I became more aware of some of the special features of a career in modern professional sport. First, there are the restrictions placed by political and sports authorities on the mobility and earning capacity of professional sportsmen.