One of the leading goalscorers in UFWC history, he scored 20 goals in 17 title matches.

Having retired from playing, in an unfortunate case of bad timing, Bloomer took up a coaching position in Berlin just three weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. He was subsequently interned for three and a half years at Ruhleben, where he led his barrack to the camp football championship at the sprightly age of 43.

‘Though his activities are now confined to the narrow limits of Ruhleben,’ reported the Ruhleben camp magazine, ‘Mr Bloomer’s skill on the field of play has been a source of inspiration for our younger players and of genuine pleasure to the onlookers.’

Bloomer returned to his hometown of Derby after the war, and died in 1938.

‘Batigol’ was born in 1969 as the son of a slaughterhouse worker. A promising basketball player, Batistuta turned his talents to football after being inspired by the 1978 Argentinean World Cup-winning team.

He scored 10 goals at three World Cup tournaments, but won only the 1993 Copa America with his country. At club level he scored 168 goals for Serie A side Fiorentina, and the city of Florence erected a bronze statue in his honour. He later won Serie A with Roma.

Batigol retired from football in 2005 aged 36. Something of a sex symbol, and once described by The Observer as a ‘straightforward lust-monkey’, Batistuta won female hearts as an apparent footballing rarity – a family man dutifully faithful to his wife Irena.

Born in 1955, Platini scored a remarkable 41 goals in 72 games from midfield for France, including 15 goals in just 18 UFWC games.

After skippering his country to European Championships and UFWC glory in 1984 he was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour. He was voted European Footballer of the Year three times in a row in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and World Player of the Year in 1984 and 1985. He later managed France, but failed to match his successes as a player.

Like many of football’s greatest players, Platini never won the World Cup but he can at least add the UFWC title to his impressive list of honours.

Archie played alongside his brother John at Derby, although the siblings played for different countries. Archie was born in Ireland, John was born in England, and both were raised in Scotland. (John starred for England in the UFWC in the 1890s, and scored 10 UFWC goals.)

Tough and controversial, it was said that opponents were ‘attracted as if by a magnet to the business end of Archie’s shoulder’. Goodall almost missed the kick-off of the 1898 FA Cup Final for Derby because he was outside the ground touting his complimentary tickets.

After retiring from the game, Goodall toured Europe and the Americas with a bizarre vaude-ville act billed in the programme thus: ‘Archie Goodall (former greatest football player of the past decade) in his thriller: walking the hoop. Here is an indescribable sensation that has startled two continents. He will defy the laws of nature and walk the interior of a hoop 50 feet in circumference, five inches wide, three inches thick and weighs 200 pounds.’ Roll up, roll up.

When Nazi Germany took control of Austria in 1938, Sindelar refused to play for the newly-formed combined Austria/Germany side. A year later he was found dead in mysterious circumstances, officially from carbon monoxide poisoning. Despite the pressures of war, 20,000 people turned out for his funeral. Sindelar is still regarded as Austria’s greatest ever footballer.

Gaejtens was 26 years old when he hit ‘the shot heard around the world’. Born in Haiti in 1924, he moved to the US to study at New York’s Columbia University, and worked as a restaurant dishwasher to pay his way.

Renowned for his speed and style on the football pitch, he cut a distinctive figure with his socks around his ankles. Gaetjens never played for the US after 1950, but turned out for Haiti in a World Cup qualifier in 1953. He had a brief spell at Troyes in France, then returned to Haiti to open a dry cleaning business.

In 1964 the apolitical Gaetjens was arrested by the Tonton Macoutes, the Haitian secret police, and was never seen again.

15 years later, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a report that concluded: ‘The fact that Mr Gaetjens, a football player of international standing, has not been seen since his detention in 1964 leads to the conclusion that he is dead.’ Witnesses later claimed that, within days of his arrest, Gaetjens was lined up against a wall and shot.

Although he was born in England, in 1847, his only international appearance was for Scotland in the 1873 UFWC match against England.

He played in nine FA Cup finals, won five, and scored in three. He celebrated his fifth FA Cup victory by standing on his head in front of the stands. He played up front and in goal, when the fancy took him, and scored one of the very first recorded own-goals, in the FA Cup final of 1877.

A renowned ‘hacker’, Kinnaird was known to go for the shins. Once, when Kinnaird’s wife worried that he might return home with a broken leg, a friend commented, ‘You must not worry, madam. If he does, it will not be his own.’

Lord Kinnaird was president of the English FA for 33 years until his death in 1923.

A difficult genius, Cruyff ruined the Dutch squad’s unique alphabetic numbering system for the 1974 World Cup by demanding to wear his trademark number 14 shirt. The Puma-sponsored star also refused to wear Adidas’s trademark three stripes on his shirtsleeves, playing in a specially altered two-stripe strip. He didn’t turn up at all for the World Cup in 1978, following kidnapping threats and his protestations against the Argentinean Junta.

Born in 1947, at club level Cruyff played for and managed Ajax and Barcelona. A former 20-a-day smoker, he swapped cigarettes for lollipops in 1991 after undergoing a double heart bypass.

Charles William Alcock was a football pioneer, the instigator of international football, and – albeit inadvertently – the UFWC. As FA secretary in 1872 he noted, ‘In order to further the interests of the Association in Scotland, it was decided that during the current season, a team should be sent to Glasgow to play a match v Scotland’. As an England footballer he missed the match through injury, but later played and scored in a UFWC match against Scotland in March 1875. Alcock, born in 1842, also created the first organised football competition, the FA Cup, with the first round of ties being played on 11 November 1871. The first FA Cup final was won by Wanderers – captained, naturally, by one CW Alcock.

The official UFWC trophy is named in his honour as the CW Alcock Cup.