On the wall of his modest living room in his Doncaster bungalow, one of England's most successful ever coaches hung two flags - one English, one Swedish.

On his mantelpiece were the mementos of a career in Sweden that included a runners-up medal from a World Cup Final and an Olympic gold (and bronze) medal. Yapping at his feet was the one thing given to him by the English game - a mongrel by the name of Busty, which had been gifted to his wife during a brief, inglorious spell in charge of Coventry City.

If ever George Raynor needed reminding of the indifference he was viewed with by the football community in his home country then here, in his own front room, Busty provided it.

The son of a Yorkshire miner, Raynor spent a decade dragging Swedish football up by its bootlaces with revolutionary methods that were greeted with enthusiasm in Scandinavia but ridiculed by those in English football's corridors of power.
Even when Raynor tried to suggest to a senior figure at the FA that the best way of countering the seemingly unstoppable Hungary side of 1953 was to introduce zonal marking to negate the threat posed by Nándor Hidegkuti - who just days later would orchestrate a 6-3 demolition of Walter Winterbottom's side at Wembley - his idea was met with contempt. "Can you honestly imagine us asking Stanley Matthews to track back?" was a response that left Raynor shaking his head in disbelief - and subsequently left England's previously proud unbeaten home record in tatters.

But that snub was nothing compared to the bloody nose that English football delivered Raynor in the aftermath of his greatest triumph at the 1958 World Cup finals. Raynor led his unfancied Swedish side to the final, against eventual champions Brazil, and returned home convinced that his achievements would finally open doors for him in the country of his birth.

To his disbelief, the only team prepared to take a punt on his talents weren't Manchester United or Liverpool, but Skegness Town, then to be found in the humble surroundings of the Lincolnshire League. It represented a remarkable fall from grace, but worse was to come. After taking a 400 per cent drop in pay at Skeggy, he would later be forced to take a job as an assistant storeman at the local Butlins to pay the bills. And while just months before he had been preparing to nullify the threat of Pele and Garrincha, he would spend the winter of 1958 judging ‘Guess how many peas are inside the bottle' competitions on Skegness seafront.

In Sweden, Raynor is still feted to this day, with his influence on football in the country spreading well beyond that final in Gothenburg and extending into an era that saw the likes of Sven-Göran Eriksson come through a coaching system that Raynor helped to put in place.

"When people talk about the World Cup in 1958, they talk about George Raynor," says former Sweden manager Lars Lagerbäck. Yet in England, the man described by Geoffrey Green of The Times in 1974 as "a prophet without honour in his own country" remains virtually unknown.

Born in 1907 on the outskirts of Barnsley, Raynor never rose above the ordinary as a player, with his career taking in the football outcrops of Rotherham, Mansfield, Bury and Aldershot, after a short spell at Sheffield United. When war broke out in 1939 it signalled the end of Raynor's playing days. But when he was posted to the Middle East with the Ninth Army to quell an uprising in Iraq two years later, it handed him a unique opportunity.

By the time Raynor's division arrived in the country, the uprising was over, leaving him free to concentrate on what he knew best: football. He joined the British Military Mission in Baghdad and was then asked to lead a representative team on a tour of the Arab states. Compared to what was happening elsewhere at the time, it seemed a cushy number - at least until his side arrived in Damascus to play a Syrian Select XI.

"We had been warned that there was a likelihood of trouble," Raynor wrote in his autobiography, Football Ambassador at Large, published in 1960. "We decided that if anything happened, the players had to crowd round me and we would cut across the field to the river. Trouble did break out and during the riot about eight people were killed and some 200 injured."

Despite that incident, the tour was a huge success. Indeed, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri-as-Said was so impressed by Raynor's stoicism that he wrote a letter to Sir Stanley Rous, the English FA secretary, commending the Yorkshireman.

It was an endorsement that would transform Raynor's previously unremarkable career and set him off on a road that would eventually lead him to the top of the global game. However, if he was hoping for work in England, he was left sorely disappointed.

Although Rous sent Raynor a letter to tell him there would be "plenty of jobs in English football after the war", he was given the boot as reserve-team coach at Aldershot at the end of the 1945-46 season. "Coaches were regarded as cranks who would soon fade away from the scene so that the game could continue," said Raynor.

His break would finally come across the North Sea, in a country more renowned for its athletes and skiers than its football team - something that this genial unknown was about to change for good. "George was always a man who made anything seem possible," Bengt Agren, general manager of Sweden during the 1958 World Cup, tells FourFourTwo. "He would never dwell on the negative - he was only interested in the positive."

It was a trait he would come to desperately need in the latter stages of his career, but in 1946 he arrived in Sweden with a blank canvas. Yet his new career almost ended in ignominy before he had even taken charge of his first competitive match - thanks to the players of Birmingham City. At a post-match banquet on the Blues' pre-season tour, the Swedish FA were shocked to learn that none of the Birmingham players had ever heard of Raynor. When the country's press got wind of the situation they immediately rounded on the governing body for employing someone with so little footballing experience.

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