Stanley Matthews

The inaugural Ballon d'Or went to a man of 41, which remains the most quietly astonishing fact in the award's history. Stanley Matthews had already played twenty years of professional football by the time France Football's journalists convened in 1956. He would play another five. He never lost his pace, never lost his hair, and by every account never once tackled an opponent harder than politeness required — he was booked only once in his entire career, and apologised.

The Footballer of the Year in England in both 1948 and 1963, a span of fifteen years that no modern player will ever repeat, Matthews turned wing play into a kind of civic event. When he left Stoke for Blackpool in 1947, thirty-two thousand people turned up to his testimonial. He played until he was fifty, was knighted while still playing, and died in 2000 aged 85 — ninety minutes after the final whistle of an England match, a detail no novelist would dare invent.