Leeds Parish Church, St David’s Day. Mourners are celebrating the life of a pioneer. It is the funeral of John Charles, late of Wales, Leeds United, Cardiff and Juventus, the finest British footballer to take his talent abroad. The service reflects a varied life. The choir sings Cwm Rhondda and an Italian aria. The readings include a poem written and delivered by its author in a rich Welsh voice. The reader is a tall man, well over 6ft, who used to clean Charles’s boots as an apprentice player and babysit his sons. As a child he would crane his neck while perched on a wooden box on the terraces at Ninian Park, to see how Charles “seemed to fill the mouth of the players’ tunnel as he led Wales out for international games”. John Toshack worshipped John Charles before he had ever met him. Then he idolised him.

The congregation filters towards the church door and reminisces. A small, elderly man in a camel-hair coat approaches Toshack. They speak in Spanish. His name is Omar Sivori, the other act in a legendary Juventus forward line of the 1950s. “Sivori was a right little rogue on the pitch, John used to tell me,” Toshack says later. “But there he was, aged 71, like butter wouldn’t melt, white hair and glasses like a little Ronnie Corbett. I said to him, ‘I used to play with a little fellow like you’. He answered immediately, ‘Yes, Toshack and Keegan, at Liverpool. And then you were manager of Real Madrid’.”

A little later, Jack Charlton joins Toshack and asks, with the bluntness allowed among intimates: “How old are you now, John?” Fifty-five, answers Toshack. “So,” says Charlton, “you’ve got another 10 years as a manager yet.”

“Hang on, Jack,” replies the Welshman. “How old were you when you started as a manager?” Thirty-eight is the answer.

“I was 28. So you can call me 65 in management terms.”

Charlton takes the point, which is not that Toshack feels weary or looks grey — he doesn’t — but that he’s lived a bit.

It is more than a quarter of a century since Toshack first sat in a dugout at Swansea City in the old Fourth Division. Tonight he will patrol a technical area in Madrid, as coach of Real Murcia, for nearly the 500th time in a Spanish first division game. Between those bookends are tales from six countries, nine clubs and one national team.

It has been some journey. Toshack has worked not once, but twice, for football’s most overbearing employer, Real Madrid; he has taken jobs in some of the fieriest corners of Europe: Istanbul, Sicily. He has been adopted as one of their own by places as passionate in their enmities as they are loyal in their friendships: the Basque Country, Merseyside. Not all of his past bosses will describe him as easy, not all his former players send Christmas cards, but some of the better ones beam when they tell how he gave them their break, and he seldom goes long without a new offer, and often gets asked back.

Charlton and Toshack return to their memories of Charles, and how he loved telling the same one-liners again and again. “It was a very emotional day,” Toshack reflects. “You can call him my idol, my mentor, my role model, whatever you like. I just thought the sun shone out of his backside.”

Let’s stick with role model. Toshack still keeps a home movie, black-and- white, of Charles heading the ball. The student would copy the technique well enough to lead the best front line in English football, even European football, in the mid-1970s. But the enduring impression his mentor left was from evenings in Charles’s living room in south Wales, when the idol was 33 and the apprentice was a teenager.

“John would pick up the phone and be talking in Italian, and I used to think that was marvellous, wonderful.”

Something in Charles had stirred the pioneer in Toshack.

HE FLEW back from England soon after the memorial service. Spain has been his home for most of the past 20 years, although this place is still new to him. It is Murcia, a city not built to disguise its priorities: there’s the cathedral, the river, and on prime real estate, a bullfighting arena that backs on to a football stadium.