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There are two passages in Duncan Hamilton’s The Footballer Who Could Fly that capture the dynamic between chairmen and players during the Retain & Transfer era. The first involves Jackie Milburn’s attempt to leave Newcastle United in 1948.

Milburn had wanted to move south. He remembered being asked to stand up in front of the club’s directors ‘to defend his case, as if occupying a court dock’. Hamilton described it as a junior boy being dressed down by the masters of a ‘run-down public school’.

Milburn was a long way from becoming the club’s record goalscorer by that point, even further from being their eternal icon, but it encapsulates the balance of power and the attitudes of the time.

In the end, they just said no and, affronted by his impertinence, dismissively waved him out of the room.

Hamilton’s second anecdote is the more descriptive, involving Frank Brennan setting up his own sports shop in Newcastle. Brennan was one of the club’s centre-halves at the time and his fledgling enterprise was opposed by a vicious PR assault led by Stan Seymour, himself a former player but also, by then, a club director.

Any reading of that episode portrays Seymour in an unflattering light. He seemed affronted that Brennan was even trying to supplement his income and made regular, disparaging comments about his need to focus on his football.

Of course, Seymour owned his own, more established sports shop in Newcastle and was acting both out of naked self-interest and, also, a transparently pejorative belief that – really – Brennan should know his place.

Through modern eyes, it’s a difficult atmosphere to understand, but it was one architected by the inhibiting factors of the time. The Maximum Wage, which would cap a player’s earnings at £20 per week until 1961 and, of course, the Retain and Transfer system.

Those twin forces, hardened by teflon class attitudes, combined to create a sort of semi-serfdom within football. Mill owners and workers, in effect, for whom rights, realities and earning expectations were very different.

By 1951, the Maximum Wage was on borrowed time. It was raised four times in seven years, from £14 to £20 by 1958. Finally, through strike action threatened by PFA chairman Jimmy Hill in January 1961, it would be abolished, with Fulham’s Johnny Haynes becoming the first £100 per week footballer within days.