Derek Dougan was a brilliant, outspoken footballer who never bowed down to the establishment. He was an international team-mate of George Best, whose coffin he helped to carry in December 2005. Like Best’s, Dougan’s father worked in the Belfast shipyards.

He moved from Lisburn Distillery to Portsmouth in 1959. His playing days were characterised by wanderlust: he submitted a transfer request on the eve of turning out for Blackburn Rovers in the 1960 FA Cup final. Rovers promptly lost 3-0 to Wolves, his future employer.

He scored at a prolific rate in club football, moving on to Aston Villa, Peterborough United and Leicester City before finally signing for Wolves for £50,000 in March 1967. He promptly scored a hat-trick on his home debut against Hull City and a nine-goal burst helped to lift the venerable old club back into the First Division (now the Premiership). “When I came to Wolves, it was to a club with a great reputation, a great history, a great standing,” he said in Running with Wolves: Tales from the Gold and Black Country. “It was only after I’d been here a few years that the gold of that strip got into my blood. I was as proud to wear that shirt as Billy Wright [Wolves’ England captain throughout the 1950s] was.”

Dougan became an iconic figure during his eight years as a player at Molineux, scoring 123 goals in 323 games. With his theatrical presence, long, loping run and increasingly wild hair, he stopped his wandering once he settled in Wolverhampton, with Jutta Maria, his German wife, and Alexander and Nicholas, their two sons. He had an uncanny knack of being able to jump early and seemingly hang in the air, where he fed off the crosses of Dave Wagstaffe and Ken Hibbitt, the Wolves wingers, to head the ball down for John Richards, for a spell the most prolific young striker in English football.

Wolves returned to the upper echelons of the First Division and competed once more in Europe, reaching the Uefa Cup final in 1972, where they lost to Tottenham Hotspur, and winning the 1974 League Cup final, beating Manchester City at Wembley. Dougan barely played in his final year at Molineux, before being given an emotional farewell, at the age of 37, on the last day of the 1974-75 season. But fans had not heard the last of the man they called “the Doog”.

The self-confidence of the best-dressed man of 1972, according to the Tailor and Cutter, knew no bounds. Dougan seldom missed an opportunity in football’s political arena, where his ideals were tempered by the Troubles and a rejection of the loyalist values he had been surrounded by as a teenager. He won 43 caps for Northern Ireland and captained the side for four years. But he believed passionately in an all-Ireland side and in 1973 met the Irish Football Association to propose this idea. He never played again for his country; something he always blamed on the stunned reaction of officials at that meeting. Certainly the idea won him scorn in East Belfast, where his face on a mural was defaced by Loyalists.

Dougan became a pundit for ITV during the 1974 World Cup finals. He was also chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, the players’ union, to which he made some visionary contributions.

Players in the modern game can leave at the end of their contracts for no transfer fee, thus negotiating their own, often massive signing-on fees. In the higher levels of the game they can become millionaires overnight. Dougan was fighting the case for freedom of contract a generation earlier. “I regard this as a greater step forward for soccer than the abolition of the maximum wage,” he told The Times in November 1975.

Such outspokenness did not always endear him to his managers. “I was a different personality to David Beckham but it was a similar situation,” he said. “I was never off TV, I was writing for a national newspaper, I was captain of my country, I was running the players’ union and I never had to ask permission about anything. He [Wolves’ manager Bill McGarry] hated it.”

Dougan became chief executive and centre-forward at Kettering Town in the Southern Premier League upon leaving Wolves. He introduced shirt sponsorship, nowadays considered de rigeur as part of a club’s income. The Football Association was up in arms. Unrepentant, Dougan said: “I could finish up in Sing Sing or Strangeways, wherever the food is better,” he said. “I find it inconceivable that petty-minded bureaucrats have only this to bother about.”

Already a legend at Wolves, Dougan returned in 1982 to help to save the club when they were reportedly within 24 hours of going out of business. As chief executive, he promised a rejuvenation of the club but his backers, the Bhatti brothers, proved to have little substance and in January 1985 Dougan resigned. By 1986 Wolves had matched Bristol City’s record of dropping from the top division to the fourth in three calendar years. The affection held in Wolverhampton for Dougan suffered a decline too.

A man of considerable charisma, presence and enthusiasm, Dougan attacked mainstream Unionism in his second autobiographical tome, The Sash He Never Wore. He wrote several books and was planning another last year. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Derek Dougan, footballer, was born on January 20, 1938. He died of a suspected heart attack on June 24, 2007, aged 69