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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Thankfully for Raynor, a chance meeting with England pair Matthews and George Hardwick before the opening match of his tenure against Switzerland handed him an advantage that he would never throw away. "Matthews and Hardwick had just played against the Swiss side [for an RAF XI]," Raynor recounted. "So I pumped them both for information, and after a long chat I knew everything there was to know."

It showed too, as Sweden romped to a 7-2 victory that eased the minds of the Swedish FA and provided Raynor's new charges with a massive injection of self-belief as the team headed to London for the 1948 Olympics.

It's ironic to think that the Olympics that became known as the Austerity Games provided a showcase for Sweden's finest talents and enabled the likes of Nils Liedholm, Gunnar Nordahl and Gunnar Gren to earn the chance to turn professional and earn huge sums of cash playing in Europe's richest league, Italy's Serie A. Liedholm - who would later manage Roma in a European Cup final against Liverpool - formed one part of the fabled 'Gre-No-Li' trio for AC Milan in the 1950s, but in 1948 he and Raynor had other things on their mind.

After establishing their camp in Richmond on the banks of the Thames, Sweden brushed aside Austria, South Korea and Denmark before overcoming Yugoslavia 3-1 at Wembley in front of 60,000. "Ah, English referee, English coach. Communist. It is bribery," one Yugoslav official ranted at the final whistle. But Raynor didn't care, he had just picked up a football gold medal at the Olympics - a feat that no other Englishman has repeated since. The sharks, meanwhile, were circling.

Italian clubs began offering Raynor cash in exchange for turning the heads of Swedish players. He later admitted such approaches "horrified" him, but they kept coming.

A delegation from an Italian club even tried to enter Sweden's dressing room before their semi-final against Denmark, and when Raynor was personally offered £1,000 and a car, he realised he was fighting a losing battle. "I knew that money, as always, would talk in the end," he said. England's top players knew just how the likes of Liedholm and Gren felt. Still earning a maximum of £12 a week - a ceiling that would continue until 1961 - the likes of Matthews and Tom Finney nevertheless travelled to Brazil for the 1950 World Cup confident that they could bring home the Jules Rimet trophy at England's first time of asking. How wrong they were. While Raynor's Sweden - even without Gre-No-Li - would finish third, England headed home in disgrace after a disastrous display in the group stages, which included a 1-0 defeat to the USA.

Sweden's dreams of glory were ended, not for the first time, by Brazil. Although, according to Raynor, "we had two chances before they even moved", a 7-1 defeat, coupled with a 3-2 loss against eventual winners Uruguay, meant that Sweden would finish third - a feat they would repeat at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

In the run-up to the Brazil World Cup, Raynor had left no stone unturned. He arranged for a dozen South American balls and 50 pairs of featherweight boots from Rio de Janeiro to be sent to Sweden's pre-tournament training camp. He even tracked down a Swede by the name of Mrs Petersen who was living in Rio and hired her to supervise the cooking and food preparation for his squad.

"It was on her advice that we left Sweden with a precious carton of famous hard Swedish biscuits, about a hundred pounds of cheese and home-cured hams," said Raynor.

His success in the international game was once again catching the attention of some of the biggest names in Italian football. Raynor had already turned down an offer of £10,000 to manage in Serie A in 1951, but when the opportunity arose following Sweden's failure to qualify for the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, Raynor realised it was too good to turn down.

"Please say if you're interested in coming to Italy and what your terms are," read a telegram message sent to Raynor's home from an Italian agent. "If I could have a choice of club in Italy I would choose Juventus," Raynor replied.

Within weeks the Yorkshireman was in Turin in the company of Juve owner Giovanni Agnelli, who took him to his Fiat factory. "Which one would you like?" the Italian asked.

He may have been driving a top-of-the-range Fiat, but Raynor's ride in Italy was anything but smooth. He signed a two-year contract with Juve, but just months later would find himself loaned to manage Lazio - where for the first and only time, England had two coaches in charge of both clubs in the Eternal City in the form of Raynor and Roma boss Jesse Carver.

In the summer of 1955, after becoming increasingly disillusioned with life in Italy, Raynor headed home with Carver as the pair took charge of Division Three South side Coventry City. "I was happy to leave Italy, for I wanted no part of a football set-up that seemed to me to be contaminated with bribery," he wrote. The arrival of Carver and Raynor represented a remarkable achievement for a Coventry side desperate to climb out of obscurity and into the big time. "Earl Shanks [the Sky Blues chairman] persuaded two managers working in Rome to come to Coventry, which was obviously a massive
coup," says City historian Jim Brown. "Mind you, the club was paying silly money."

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Carver and Raynor's revolutionary approach to training won them the admiration of players used to far more primitive methods. "They changed the old attitudes towards training," says former Coventry midfielder Lol Hardy. "They were so far advanced - we started training the way that players do today. All of a sudden we were wearing continental tracksuits and sandals in the shower - the way they changed everything was unbelievable."

But sadly, the experiment was not a success. Carver would leave just months into his contract to head back to Italy, while Raynor only stayed until the end of the season. By that time, Coventry were no nearer promotion and while the side became known for flowing football at Highfield Road, away from home they were, according to Brown, "kicked to bits".

Raynor's dalliance with football in his home country had once again turned sour. He began coaching Hungarian refugees with the National Coal Board, when a call came in that would once again thrust him onto the world stage. Sweden - desperate to avoid humiliation at a World Cup hosted in their own country - were begging Raynor to return. And with the likes of Liedholm once again eligible for the national side (thanks to the lifting of a ban on professional players), Raynor took little persuading.

"The players in that World Cup are legends," says Lagerbäck. "Everyone in football knows their names - they were my idols."

The team that Raynor moulded began as unfancied outsiders in a tournament at which England, still under the management of Winterbottom, once again failed to make an impact, losing a play-off to Russia after the teams finished level on points in the group stages. Raynor, meanwhile, watched his side swat aside Mexico and Hungary before a 0-0 draw with Wales (who would lose to Brazil in the quarter-finals) set up a last-eight date with England's conquerors, Russia. A 2-0 win followed by a 3-1 victory over reigning champions West Germany in the semi-finals meant that only Brazil stood between Sweden and World Cup glory.

"The excitement in the country just grew and grew," says Lagerbäck. "The first time I ever watched television was when Sweden played the semi-final against West Germany. After that match the players travelled by train from Stockholm to Gothenburg and were mobbed at each station by supporters - it was an incredible time for the whole country."

Although the majority of English journalists flew home from Sweden following England's defeat, there were some who were beginning to appreciate the impact that Raynor was having on a side that had been written off throughout the tournament. "The Swedish team, for all its individual ability, has undoubtedly been helped by Raynor's leadership," wrote H A Pawson in The Guardian. "His instructions to his players are simple and direct, and even at press conferences, where others are non-committal or evasive, he is frank and clear."

Raynor believed that an early goal would see Brazil "panic all over the show", but although it was provided by Liedholm after just five minutes, Vicente Feola's side kept their heads and ran the hosts ragged as Garrincha and a 17-year-old Pele inspired them to a 5-2 win. "We read about Pele but the biggest player was Garrincha - everybody wanted to be Garrincha," says Lagerbäck.

Ever the pragmatist, Raynor took defeat with typical good grace and headed back home in the expectation that his achievements would have alerted some of England's top clubs. But even with his undoubted foresight he could not have predicted where he would end up. "George bought a bungalow overlooking the North Sea in Skegness," recalls former Skegness Town player Mick French. "He couldn't get a job anywhere so the owner brought him in to coach the first team, who were in the Midland League at the time."

Despite their lowly status, the club's owner, Harold Swift, was a wealthy benefactor (although Raynor would be paid just £10 a week) and still offered the coach the opportunity to live the high life. "Skegness went to play a team in Northumberland and travelled up in first class," recalls French. "The Arsenal team were on the same train but were sat in economy."

A year later, Raynor, coaching Sweden alongside his job at Skegness, would lead his adopted country to a 3-2 victory over England at Wembley. "I feel like a football fifth columnist [a spy]," he told reporters in a post-match interview as Sweden become only the second foreign nation to beat England at home. "I got some sort of satisfaction out of the result, but not enough. I would much rather have been doing the same sort of thing for the country of my birth. I want to work in England. All I consider is that the people of England have had their chance."

When Raynor died, aged 78 in 1985, incredibly there was no mention of his passing in the English press and no delegation from the FA beating a path to his funeral to say a final goodbye. According to French, the Yorkshireman even died wearing his Swedish World Cup tracksuit.

A thoroughbred in Scandinavia but a mongrel in England - for Raynor, it was a dog's life in his own country until the very end.