Rome, 25 May 1977. The Stadio Olimpico under floodlights, Liverpool in red, Borussia Mönchengladbach in white, and the European Cup waiting on a table by the touchline. It was Kevin Keegan’s last game for the club he had helped carry from very good to genuinely great, and he did not score. He did something harder. For ninety minutes he pulled Berti Vogts, one of the finest defenders in the world, into places no defender wants to go, until Vogts finally brought him down in the penalty area and Phil Neal settled the matter from the spot. Liverpool were champions of Europe for the first time. Keegan shook hands, embraced his opponents, and walked away from English football at its absolute summit.

Most men would have stayed. The adulation was secure, the medals would have kept coming, the city adored him. Keegan chose instead to start again in a country where nobody owed him anything, in a language he did not yet speak. It was the most revealing decision of a revealing career, and it is where any honest account of the man must begin. Because the story of Kevin Keegan is not the story of a genius touched by the gods. It is something rarer and, for the rest of us, something far more useful. It is the story of a legend built entirely by hand.