Trevor Francis - a prodigy and the harbinger of mega millions in football

The price tag almost always matters. Ask Eden Hazard, who in 2019 became the most expensive purchase in the history of Real Madrid, a club who have pierced the €100 million barrier for a single transfer fee more than most.

Hazard cost that much. He is currently unemployed, after four years in the capital of Spain spent looking increasingly burdened by the vast money that had been spent – with little yield – on him.

The price tag always seemed to follow around Trevor Francis, whose death at the age of 69 was announced on Monday. In the affectionate and admiring obituaries of Francis, the fact that he fetched a record-breaking price during his career is usually in the foreground.

Francis made a landmark transfer 40 years before Hazard, as the first footballer to move for £1 million when he joined Nottingham Forest, then a startlingly upwardly mobile team, from Birmingham City. It set a British record. He was to score the decisive goal in a European Cup final barely four months later, collect a second winners' medal in the same competition and played more than 50 times for England.

Yet there lingered around him the idea that he never consistently attained the peaks, the prolonged superstardom forecast for him first as a young tyro and then as the bearer of that £1 million price tag.

Take away the fee, and Francis might have been judged more generously. After all, he played the figurehead role in one of the most captivating fairytales in the story of the European Cup – now the Champions League – with Forest having added him to a squad that had only been promoted from England’s second tier less than two years before Francis headed in the only goal of the 1979 final against Malmo.

But the hefty fee meant he was viewed through