Football “remains one of the last bastions of social mobility, creating working-class millionaires by the bucketload,” Guardian columnist Marina Hyde heralded a couple of months ago.

The idea of “working-class-boy-done-good” runs through a lot of British footballing popular culture and folklore, from the Roy of the Rovers comic strip to the 1996 film When Saturday Comes and modern day heroes like David Beckham and Wayne Rooney.

Globally, footballing greats Pele and Diego Maradona are well-known to have grown up in poverty, with the former supposedly playing with either a sock stuffed with newspaper or a grapefruit as his family couldn’t afford a ball.