Sky Sports' Johnny Phillips: Football’s influencers are brought to book by Jon Driscoll

The two are a match like fish and chips. Lists are the orderly accompaniment to the emotional partisanship of terrace life.

Best players, favourite players, greatest goals, worst games, and on it goes.

Lists help fans compartmentalise their football existence, providing an essential backdrop to a love of the game.

But have you ever thought about which players have influenced this sport the most? Who attracted us to the game? Whose stories have we found compelling and how has our appreciation of football been moulded?

Such thoughts bring us to The 50, a fascinating new book from football commentator Jon Driscoll, which highlights the most influential players in the world.

Now, any list purporting to be definitive is open to dispute, which is why The 50 has a particular charm.

The author is not claiming these are unquestionably the most influential players, rather he has tracked the timeline of the game’s history around these individuals. It makes for an informative and navigable read which sparks some interesting debate.

“I wanted to write a football history book and football is a story of players,” Driscoll explains. “I’m not ranking them, they are chronological. The idea is to weave through the developments on the field whilst also taking detours into characters like Lily Parr, who was responsible for that upsurge in women’s football that the FA brutally killed off a hundred years ago.

“Jean-Marc Bosman is in it, too. He’s nowhere near the level of most of the players in the book but his story had a huge effect on the future of the game.”

The game’s greats are included, of course. Puskas, Pele, Cruyff, Maradona, Ronaldo, Messi; they have delighted through the generations. But it is the human element as much as the on-field success that Driscoll enjoyed exploring when compiling his list.

“I like a complex character and, in many ways, I think Garrincha is the one you’d love,” he says. “He had this fabulous spell at the 1962 World Cup when Pele was struggling with an injury.

“He had the heart of a child, he was universally loved. But he was an alcoholic as a kid, he was utterly irresponsible and hopeless in his personal life.

“He’s not the only one, Gazza and George Best are in the book too.

“But Garrincha’s story is just incredible. In one drink-driving incident he ran over his father and then some years later he killed his mother-in-law in another accident. His life descends into chaos, he can’t look after his money. For all the huge affection for him, he dies in poverty at the age of 49.”

We all have our own characters who have captured the imagination. Personally, as an impressionable youngster, it was Diego Maradona who left an indelible mark back in 1986 when he secured Argentina’s second World Cup in Mexico, almost single-handedly.

His life has always been played out in the public eye, with every triumph and tribulation pored over in forensic detail.

His success at Napoli was similar to that with his country, dragging a team from mediocrity to the pinnacle.

His time in Naples in the latter half of the 1980s brought both huge success and wild excess.

There was something of the macabre about his worst moments.

Maradona is a figure who has for so long appeared to be clinging to life by a thread, but his genius and greatness on the pitch can never be disputed. Driscoll goes back to the very first chapter when asked for his most influential British player.

“It’s Charles Alcock, because back then it was genuinely in the balance that the game we now recognise as football would materialise,” he explains.

“When you look at the first set of FA rules, you could catch the ball and call a mark. Around that time the Australians came up with their own version, which became Aussie Rules.

“We could easily have ended up with a game like that or Gaelic football. But because Alcock had these diplomatic skills, and he became FA secretary while he was still playing, he insisted on football being played in the way we know it today.

“He was such an industrious and energetic guy, he managed to keep football together while other sports, like rugby, split between amateur and professional.”

If you enjoy dipping into chapters on an occasional basis then you will certainly enjoy plotting your way around the characters in The 50, but it is also true to say that it is hard to put the book down from first chapter to last.

The 50 is certainly a catalyst for discussion, with every generation catered for.

Quite how the author whittled down his cast of thousands to settle on 50 players is another question altogether. There must have been many agonising hours as players were added to and then erased from the final draft.

“The list isn’t perfect; it was like completing a moving puzzle,” Driscoll concludes. “The Brits dominate early on, before I spread my gaze wider.

It was painful to leave out some of the best-ever footballers, and I’m sorry if I missed your favourite player.”

Yes, quite. Where was Steve Bull?