For Jack Taylor, the referee for the 1974 World Cup final, handling players was much like handling the clientele at the Wolverhampton butcher shop he worked at throughout his career.

"I think my experience behind the counter at the butcher's shop helped because it made me fairly good at chatting people up," he wrote in his 1976 autobiography, Jack Taylor: World Soccer Referee.

Champagne, bags of bank notes and Adidas balls: these were amongst the gifts Macedonian Blagoje Vidinić received during his African odyssey in the early 1970s.

This was a man who presided over the joint-worst World Cup performance of all time, but also a man who as a goalkeeper had once rivaled Lev Yashin in many eyes, who had played in Los Angeles, San Diego, St Louis in a pioneering era of American soccer; a man who as coach took two African countries to unprecedented heights and managed to change the course of world sporting history, by tipping off Horst Dassler just in time for the Adidas head to back the right man in the 1974 FIFA presidential election.