Priceless legacy of the Preston Plumber Sir Tom Finney

To buy him now, most concluded, would require a Gareth Bale-sized sum of transfer money.

This was entirely wrong. Money could never buy what Sir Tom brought to football.

The £90m Real Madrid paid for Bale last summer will be easily absorbed by the Spanish giants from their huge pot of earnings.

But the legacy of the Preston Plumber, a nickname that captures perfectly Finney's lifelong humility, is priceless and shines forever, even as his home town prepares to say a breathless farewell.

It was inevitable contemporary commentators would try to translate Sir Tom's greatness, which as a player peaked more than half a century ago, in monetary terms.

Money, after all, has become the defining currency of modern football. How much do you earn? What's your contract worth? What car do you drive? How many homes do you own? These are too often the questions that dominate young footballers dreaming of careers paved with gold.

The mourning for Finney has co-incided with perhaps the most startling narrative of all as an English footballer signs a contract worth £300,000. A week.

Now there is no doubt that Wayne Rooney deservedly holds the mantle of being the finest player of his generation.

It is not his fault that Manchester United want to pay him so much, more in a week than Sir Tom would have earned in his 20-year career. Either in real or actual terms.

It is not Rooney's fault that he is operating in a far less-forgiving era in which media intensity perhaps bars him from the easy contact with the streets from whence he came. At 28, and a product of this money-obsessed age, perhaps it is too much to expect United's star turn to understand the lesson Finney's life provides. He has been – at times – a fairly graceless lump off the pitch to match some of his excesses on it.

But as the nation lays Sir Tom to rest today, the story of this wonderful old player's life reaches out to send its message to Rooney and his class of 2014.

Remember where you came from for that is where you return.

And whenever Sir Tom removed either the white shirt of Preston or England, he returned to an embrace from his public which is nothing less than loving. From his rivals and opponents too.

Ron Flowers shared the pitch with him, either in some epic Wolves-Preston games, or as team mates for their country. The Wolves legend's memories align with everyone else's.

"Oh, he was a brilliant footballer. Tommy Docherty used to say if ever they were tired, they could give it to Tom and have a rest for five minutes! It was probably true. Everything was natural for him. There was never anything difficult about the game for him...you saw that in all his movements.

"You always knew he was something special but he was a man who went about his business in his own quiet way, whatever he did. I wasn't a friend in that sense, but I knew him. And it is true what people have said, he was the most wonderful fellow. It seems to be a common feature of so many of our greatest players . . . they were lovely men away from the pitch."

It is this which Finney leaves us, perhaps more than the memory of his football consigned as it is now to an ancient age, when the game was more regimented, the pitches more agricultural, the defending more brutal and its public less sophisticated.

But what still means everything about this man, and always will, is how he carried himself. Such a gentlemen, so modest, so humble and . . . well, so damn lovely.

Brian Clough remembers his first England call-up and going down for breakfast in his Three Lions blazer and tie, proud as punch. Food was spilled all over it. Clough, surrounded by his peers and heroes, was hugely embarrassed and felt a tap on his shoulder. It was his greatest hero of all.

"Not to worry lad," he said simply, "You nip back to the room and get changed and I'll sort it out."

The humble legend then arranged for the young Cloughie's clothes to be washed, pressed and back to him before lunch.

"Kindness such as that, you remember for the rest of your days," said Clough, years later.

As a player in his prime, Italian club Palermo offered Finney a £10,000 signing-on fee and £120 a week wages to leave Preston. In those days, footballers were the chattels of their clubs and Preston's chairman simply said: "Over my dead body."

The fortune he could have made was deprived of him. But the fortune he left us – and especially Rooney and his contemporaries – grows in value with each tale of today's financial excess.