The story can be traced back to the council-run park, with its faded white markings and weather-beaten goalposts, where an ordinary boy with extraordinary talent came into view almost 20 years ago.

Up the hill, past the cemetery and through the metal gates, word quickly got round that the then five-year-old Morgan Rogers was on another level to the other kids playing on the pitches of Halas Hawks Under-Sevens in the Stourbridge & District Youth Football League.

“Morgan was different to everybody else,” recalls Brian Wilkes, a club stalwart and long-standing committee member. “He was stronger. He knew how to shield the ball. And he had a tremendous shot — if there was a penalty shootout, we had to put an adult in the goal (against him) because it wasn’t fair on the other kids.”

Photographs from the time offer a glimpse into Rogers’ early life, taking his first steps on the journey that has brought him to Chelsea this summer as the most expensive footballer in the English game.

One picture shows a schoolboy Rogers at the Hawks’ annual presentation evening, wearing a tie in their red and blue colours. Others show him, aged six, in a tracksuit top with ‘MR’ on the breast. Or there are snaps of his trophies from the 2009-10 season – one for the most man-of-the-match awards, another as the team’s leading scorer.

“He joined us in 2008 and scored 62 goals in his first season,” says Wilkes. “Even from 20 or 30 yards, he could strike the ball so cleanly. The manager moved him into defence for his second season, and he still managed to get 42 goals.”

Morgan Rogers’ first pitch at Homer Hill on the outskirts of Birmingham (Daniel Taylor/The Athletic)

The scene is Homer Hill, in the Cradley district of Halesowen, West Midlands, just a misplaced kick from the primary school, Colley Lane, where Rogers’ childhood affinity to local club West Bromwich Albion never stopped him trying to re-enact the stepovers of Cristiano Ronaldo, his first football hero, in the playground.

Albion’s ground, The Hawthorns, is just a few miles away — England’s highest stadium, at 168 metres above sea level. Homer Hill, as the name suggests, is also at no little altitude, and bitterly exposed to the elements when winter arrives. Which might explain why another picture of the six-year-old Rogers shows him wrapped up warm in a woolly hat.

Rogers, aged six, in his Halas Hawks kit (Halas Hawks)

A few miles in the other direction is Stourbridge, the town where a young Jude Bellingham used to line up for one of the Hawks’ neighbours.

“They’re good friends now,” says Pauline Hickman, another long-standing part of the club’s operation. “The No 9 bus route takes you from Halesowen to Stourbridge. So, during the World Cup, we nicknamed Morgan and Jude as ‘The No 9 Boys’.”

Did they ever face each other in a Hawks-Stourbridge derby? It seems feasible, though nobody here seems absolutely certain. Bellingham, of course, was quickly snapped up by Birmingham City’s academy, whereas Rogers was only at Hawks for two years before West Brom invited him to join their youth system.

In 2017, Jude Bellingham and Morgan Rogers took this photo together while playing for England U15s 📸🔙

9 years later, they’re at the World Cup together ❤️👏 pic.twitter.com/OqbdAwfG8R

— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) June 3, 2026

He also had an offer from Birmingham’s Aston Villa at the same time but, looking back, the following years were really the making of Rogers.

“He was always a very intelligent and articulate lad,” says Mike Scott, then one of the coaches at West Brom. “We used to say to him, ‘You’ll be a good coach one day’, because he was so intelligent. He really understood the game and, for a boy of that age, he was very curious; always asking questions.”

Scott, now head of academy coaching at Birmingham City, was one of several West Brom coaches who were instrumental in the youngster’s development, from under-nines up to the age of 17.

“He was always classed as one of our elite players,” says Scott. “There was a period, around the age of 13 and 14, when he slowed a little as he went through his growth. Then everything suddenly clicked.”

By the age of 15, Rogers was not only in the England Under-16s squad, while still taking his GCSEs at school, but also training with West Brom’s first team.

“I remember saying to him, ‘You need to make sure it doesn’t go to your head’,” says Scott. “You get some young players who train with the first team and think they have made it. Not Morgan, though. He was always very focused.

“At 16, he started the season with the under-18s and, in the first fixture, he scored two at Newcastle. It was too easy for him. The following game, we played Liverpool, and it was too easy for him again.

“After that, he went up to the under-21s, but he’d still play in the FA Youth Cup, and he was never one of those players who’d struggle if they were asked to come back down (an age level). He would just be the best player.

“We played Lincoln on the way to the 2019 FA Youth Cup semi-finals, and he must have beaten five players for one goal. Then we were drawn against Arsenal, with Bukayo Saka, in the fifth round and Morgan came into his own again.

“In the quarter-finals, against Everton, he was the standout player again. Then we played Manchester City in the semis, and that was probably one of the games that convinced City to think, ‘OK, we’re going to put in a bid for him’. They had been trailing him for a long time.”

Morgan Rogers’ abilities were evident at West Brom as a teenager (Nick Taylor/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Academy reports from the time detail the player’s “fantastic mentality”, making his West Brom first-team debut at the age of 16 – an 82nd-minute substitute in a February 2019 FA Cup fourth-round tie against Brighton & Hove Albion – and winning various trophies, including the National Schools Cup, with Sandwell Academy, the secondary school that runs a football education programme in tandem with the club.

That attitude has served Rogers well during the following years, signing for City shortly after his 17th birthday, then moving on to Middlesbrough and truly blossoming after a February 2024 move to Villa, launching his senior England career in the process.

“He’s the best player I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and see develop,” Scott concludes. “And the kid has earned what has come his way, playing in a World Cup semi-final and being worth all that money, because he had that drive from a young age. He was a coach’s dream, really.”

In this corner of the Midlands, a lot of the people who know the Rogers family talk about the positive influence of his parents, Deborah and Howard, a former firefighter who was known as ‘H’ to his colleagues at Brierley Hill fire station during 30-plus years in the job.

Among the tattoos on Rogers’ left arm, there are the dates of his parents’ birthdays, as well as those of his brothers, Daniel and Ash. Scott recalls there being an “excellent and supportive” family network. Rogers himself has talked about how “my parents did everything for me … they took me to every camp, every game, every training session”.

Well done fire fighter Howard Rogers completing thirty years service today with the wmfs. pic.twitter.com/1BaRo9ktXc

— Brierley Hill Fire Station (@WMFSBrierleyH) July 7, 2016

As for the other influences in his life, Rogers made sure to pay tribute when he heard that Bob Hickman, his first coach at Halas Hawks, had passed away in April. Bob was Pauline’s husband, one of the Hawks’ driving forces since the club’s formation in 1980.

“The football family has kept me going,” Pauline tells The Athletic. “Then my son, Rob, came in with his phone one day and said, ‘Mum, you better sit down, I’ve got something to show you.’ It was Morgan’s Twitter account. He’d heard what had happened and posted three little hearts.

“He was in Italy at the time with Villa, preparing for the Europa League quarter-final against Bologna, and it meant the world to me that he still found the time to remember Bob.”

She and Bob were season-ticket holders at Villa Park.

“I’d always wear something from Halas Hawks to games,” she says, pointing to the club’s badge on her shorts. “So when Morgan started playing for Villa, I wanted to tell everyone in the ground, ‘We coached him!’ I was so proud, and I’m still proud, even though he’s now at Chelsea. To me, he’s still got Bob’s spirit with him.”

Morgan Rogers in his old Halas Hawks kit (Halas Hawks)

The funeral took place on the day of the Europa League final.

“Morgan scored,” says Pauline, recalling Villa’s 3-0 win over German club Freiburg in Istanbul. And now she can smile. “We all said, ‘That’s for Bob’.”

A picture is emerging of a 24-year-old who has never forgotten his roots. Rogers even interrupted his holiday last year to send a video message, via his mum, to the Hawks’ end-of-season awards event.

“He wanted the kids to know that he remembered being in their position, sitting at the presentation, and that if they put in the hard work and had a bit of luck, they could also live their dreams and achieve what he had done,” says Wilkes. “We showed it five times over one weekend, to around 650 players and 1,500 parents, and it got a standing ovation each time.”

Pauline Hickman and Brian Wilkes were significant figures in Rogers’ development at Halas Hawks (Daniel Taylor/The Athletic)

This weekend, Rogers is set to take on Premier League champions Arsenal, who also showed serious interest in signing him over the summer. Instead, he went to Chelsea, linking up again with Cole Palmer, a close pal from their days in City’s academy. He has settled in seamlessly: Xabi Alonso’s team have won their first two Premier League fixtures, scoring seven goals in the process, and the wearer of their No 17 shirt has been at the heart of it, starting both and contributing a goal and an assist.

As for Halas Hawks, they established themselves as the largest junior club in the area, running 52 teams for boys and girls aged six to 17, before merging last year with semi-professional Halesowen Town of the Southern League Premier Division (Central), which is six rungs below the Premier League.

Halesowen, like Chelsea, used to have their own ‘Shed’ terrace at their home ground, The Grove, but junior matches are still played at Homer Hill, where a dedicated team of volunteers store their equipment in a small red-brick building by the side of the main pitch.

It is, in short, a classic scene of grassroots English football.

“If there’s a game on, you’ll see all the little stalls by the side of the pitch,” says Pauline. “That’s how they get their money — selling coffee and tea. It’s a world away from £60million transfers in the Premier League.”

Rogers celebrates scoring his first official Chelsea goal at Fulham last week (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Or, indeed, £117million in Rogers’ case. It’s mind-boggling money – a transfer record for a British player – and a shame, perhaps, that the team where everything began won’t see a penny of it.

“When Morgan left West Brom to go to Manchester City, it was for £4million,” says Wilkes. “So we wrote to City asking if they would consider providing us with a percentage of the transfer fee. It was tongue-in-cheek. We weren’t expecting anything — ‘We’ll try it on’, we thought — so we asked for something really silly, like 0.0001 per cent. It would have worked out at £400. But we got nothing back. No reply, nothing. Not even a bag of balls, which would have been a godsend at our level.”

Maybe Chelsea could spare a few balls. Rogers’ first involvement at Halas Hawks, aged five, was in the Little Kickers section. David Davis, the former Wolverhampton Wanderers (another local pro club) and Birmingham defender, is also an ex-Hawk, as is Josh Marsh, a striker for fourth-tier Crewe Alexandra.

Halas, in case you are wondering, is the medieval word for Halesowen, the town where future Manchester United, Leeds United and England winger Lee Sharpe also grew up. There aren’t too many Chelsea fans here. But it is fair to say a new hero has emerged in a part of the Midlands that, until now, has been better known for its industry — chain-making, mostly — and being one of the country’s biggest towns (population: 60,000) without a railway station.

“We see so many boys and girls wearing England shirts these days with ‘Rogers’ and No 17 on the back,” says Wilkes. “Even as a five-year-old, you could see how comfortable he was with the ball. And that has never changed.

“What you see now with Chelsea and, before that, Villa, he did that with us.”

The doors opened at 6pm. Staff at the Felix Bar & Kitchen prepared as best they could for the event of the year. The white wine was chilled. Truffle negronis mixed. Cocktails were supposed to flow like the River Danube just outside.

It was the night before the May 30 Champions League final in Budapest.

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, European Football Clubs chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin had decided to throw a party. The invite — which has been seen by The Athletic — called it the “first” of its kind, with 35 names on the list. They included heads of Nike, Adidas, Whoop and clothing brand ALO, broadcast chiefs from CBS and beIN Media Group and glitzy former footballers such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Luis Figo. They mixed with Ceferin’s close friend and ally Sandor Csanyi, a banker who was once Hungary’s richest man, and is UEFA’s treasurer and president of his country’s Football Association. Csanyi celebrated bringing club football’s marquee event to the Puskas Arena, the smallest venue to stage the game since the 2004 edition in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Little did the waiters know as they glided around the room that they were setting the table for more than just a sit-down meal. It was a dinner that helped set in motion the biggest transfer window of all time.

Rubin, who has built a business flogging sports merchandising and collectibles, is renowned for his annual White Party in the exclusive Hamptons, near New York City.

This is a man with the eyes of someone on a permanent rave, simultaneously alive and over-tired. After the last get-together Rubin held for the rich and famous, the morning-after photo on Instagram showed him and NFL legend Tom Brady in recovery, both hooked up to IVs. Rubin claims “everybody who comes to that party knows they’re going to meet people around them who are going to be really good for them in business.”

UEFA’s version was presumably of similar intent.

Twelve of the most powerful football owners, chairmen and CEOs clinked glasses and talked shop. This would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Six of the clubs — Barcelona, Manchester City, Milan, Juventus, Arsenal and Chelsea — were past members of the so-called European Super League, the existential threat to the Champions League that Ceferin thwarted with Al-Khelaifi’s help.

But bygones are now bygones. Water under Budapest’s famous Szechenyi Bridge. Regimes have, in some cases, changed. Reconciliation has occurred. It meant current affairs like the game the following day, the coaching market and player recruitment were far more topical.

By September 1, the people in the room that night had completed 18 transactions for more than a billion euros combined, including deals for Ballon d’Or winner Rodri and one of his 2026 World Cup final opponents, Enzo Fernandez.

Many of these transfers were concluded owner-to-owner. The Athletic understands that City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak spoke to Nottingham Forest patron Evangelos Marinakis that evening about Elliot Anderson. The eventual fee of £116million established a benchmark, one that appeared to be used by another guest, Aston Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris, when it came to the sale of Morgan Rogers.

When Sawiris wasn’t busy hobnobbing with Joseph Tsai, co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba and owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, and mutual friend John Elkann, the scion of the Agnelli family and custodian of Juventus, who named both to the Partners Council of his holding company, Exor, Sawiris must have been sizing up Arsenal’s benefactors, the Kroenkes, and Chelsea’s dealmaker-in-chief Behdad Eghbali, the club’s co-owner and Clearlake managing partner.

Both Arsenal and Chelsea wanted Rogers. In the end, Eghbali would make Sawiris an offer the Kroenkes were unwilling to match. At £117million, it was, perhaps pointedly, £1m more than what Marinakis brought in for Anderson. Optics-wise, it revealed, perhaps, how competitive these dinner guests are among themselves, as no sooner did one of them break the British transfer record than the other took it away.

Chelsea co-owner Behdad Eghbali helped oversee a frantic transfer window (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

Beyond setting the price of a Premier League midfielder, counsel was also sought on managers.

One of the drivers of this summer’s transfer window has been the churn in dugouts up and down the Premier League. City, Chelsea, Forest and another guest, Fulham owner Shahid Khan all changed their coach.

Milan’s patron Gerry Cardinale was also at the party, having dismissed his CEO, technical director, sporting director and head coach the day after the end of the season. This signalled a major change on his part. Almost four years after RedBird bought Milan, Cardinale was determined to take a more hands-on approach.

At the time, he was considering Ralf Rangnick for the head of football role and a series of other German/Austrian coaches, such as Oliver Glasner and Matthias Jaissle, schooled in the Red Bull stable’s way of pressing. Oliver Mintzlaff, the Red Bull CEO, one of the 35 in attendance, might have had some insight once he finished talking to Formula 1 boss Stefano Domenicali. In the end, Cardinale appointed Ruben Amorim.

These relationships between owners, some longstanding, others fresh and new, were critical this summer.

It seems to run counter to much of what we’ve been told about how football clubs are or should be run in the past decade.

Premier League clubs professionalised in that time, belatedly adopting the sporting director model instead of letting their manager control recruitment. Moneyball and the FSG model became a reference point. Liverpool were held up as best-in-class for using data, analytics and seemingly magic spreadsheets to compete and win against rivals backed by sovereign wealth funds.

Owners were accordingly expected to delegate to this new executive class and get on with overseeing their vast portfolio of other businesses. But football clubs are the noisiest of all of them, capable of drowning out even politics when the attention economy is at its loudest. Teams increasingly demand more of owners; more capital, more commitment, more command.

One of the themes of this summer, and a growing trend of recent years, has been the number of deals done, if not over the heads of sporting directors, then only after owner-to-owner talks. This has not necessarily delegitimised or diminished the actual football people (some boffins, frankly, struggled to be considered such in the first place). They still lead talent identification, sound out availability and perform other due diligence. But there is currently a main-character energy to owners, particularly in England, that is reminiscent of 1990s Serie A.

What might this reflect? Critics would say ego, the desire to be an actor in the greatest show on earth. Football, after all, provides a level of profile and recognition billionaires don’t get outside their own sector, which can often be a niche. It brings you into contact with states; small but rich ones such as Abu Dhabi and Qatar that were put on the map more by football than oil and gas.

You’ll often hear teams compared with masterpieces in the art world for reasons of scarcity value. There are only so many, and owning one is arguably far more exhilarating than having a Matisse on the wall. You can, after all, influence its composition and design.

Imagine, for instance, standing beside Picasso as he paints. “Pablo, here’s a suggestion…” Football allows owners to take the palette and brush and make a few strokes themselves. To some, it’s their only hobby, too; a genuine passion project. It’s also bigger business than ever before and, as such, increasingly familiar with the day job. A trading game.

Given the unprecedented levels of money involved and how clubs, in some cases, are assets to be managed in order to, one day, deliver a return to investors, you can understand why people like Eghbali have taken such an extreme interest in running his team’s transfer business even when he has doubled, even tripled up on sporting directors to oversee BlueCo’s football activities. If the sporting directors back themselves on football, he no doubt believes he has got to where he is today because of his understanding of finance.

According to Chelsea sources, the club invested approximately £328million in the squad this summer and received approximately £519m in player sales and loan fees. Those figures could not be independently verified by The Athletic. The volume of trading across Chelsea and their French sister club Strasbourg feels like an evolution in the game in England.

Recruitment has gradually gone from manager-controlled to sporting director-led, with the owner now doing much, much more than agreeing a budget and cutting a cheque. Collaboration among all of them remains, but has it ever skewed this far to the owner-operator? The owner as closer?

Eghbali is not an exception.

Take Al-Khelaifi: the Paris Saint-Germain president’s role in their business this summer was apparently central. The back-to-back Champions League winners were Europe’s top sellers, bringing in €400.4million for supersubs and fringe players.

While much of the value creation is owed to how well coach Luis Enrique has developed players sourced by sporting director Luis Campos, selling is undoubtedly harder than buying. This is when owners sometimes feel they can have a decisive role, stepping in to finesse deals.

Nasser Al-Khelaifi, president of Paris Saint-Germain and European Football Clubs chairman, is one of football’s most influential powerbrokers (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

Milan’s club record deal for PSG’s Goncalo Ramos and the transfer that followed for Strasbourg’s Diego Moreira got done because of Cardinale’s strong relationship with Al-Khelaifi and Eghbali. Liverpool’s biggest incoming transfer of the summer, Bradley Barcola of PSG, was brokered between Al-Khelaifi and Richard Hughes and Mike Gordon of their owner Fenway Sports Group. When Juventus returned for Randal Kolo Muani, who they’d previously had on loan from PSG, the personal relationship between Al-Khelaifi and Elkann counted, as did Al-Khelaifi’s rapport with Sawiris when it came to Villa securing the signature of Ibrahim Mbaye from the Parisians.

This is a small circle, one that manifests in another trend of this window — especially in England, where Premier League clubs are doing more and more business among themselves.

The teams that play in the richest league in the world are able to pay fees and salaries that increasingly few in continental Europe can match. This has had a shrinking effect on the market in which they can sell and buy, particularly if, as seems to be the case, there is a preference, when it comes to acquisitions, for the Premier League-proven player over the unproven equivalent from abroad. One of the reasons why some transfers dragged on this summer is not only because of some acrimony between clubs (see Enzo Fernandez), it’s because many teams were in the queue for the same player.

As such, if many of the data analysts and sporting directors at top clubs are coalescing around one target and the relative spending power of these clubs is, if not equal, then not too dissimilar, how do you win the deal? Might it be over dinner? Does the transfer market become more about the relationships between the owners than sporting executives and agents? Is that increasingly what makes the difference?

It’s food for thought when reminiscing about that dealmaker dinner in Budapest and how we digest the window that followed.

It was nearing lunchtime in Dublin on July 19, 1972. The boxers had all weighed in, and the ring — acquired from an amateur boxing club in the town of Edenderry – had been erected.

Muhammad Ali was going to take on Al ‘Blue’ Lewis at Croke Park, a venue more famous as the home of Gaelic games but now hosting a major boxing match for the first time in its storied history.

Both men were shortly due to be ferried to the stadium from their hotels when a pertinent question was raised: Where were the gloves?

A rather essential part of a fight night was nowhere to be seen. Nobody had sorted them. And, to make matters worse, there were no gloves of sufficient quality anywhere to be found in the Irish capital.

A call had to be made to London, to the headquarters of the British Boxing Board of Control, to see if they had any lying around. They were in luck. The gloves were sent immediately to the airport to be flown to Dublin.

The fight started late, but Croke Park did ultimately get its big night with Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali in action against Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in July 1972 (Don Morley/Allsport/Getty Images)

The 82,000-capacity stadium has not hosted a bout since, but today Katie Taylor brings down the curtain on her remarkable career by following in the footsteps of Ali when she takes on Flora Pili of France.

It will be an emotional night, and a fitting send-off for a woman who has changed the face of her sport, but it will need to be very special to eclipse Croke Park’s previous dalliance with boxing in the week Ireland and Muhammad Ali enjoyed a whirlwind romance.

It was at an Irish pub in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, where the first discussions took place about bringing the most famous sportsmen on the planet to Ireland for a fight.

In his book, The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland, Dave Hannigan writes about how Kerry-born Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue, a circus strongman and London publican, met with Ali’s promoter, Harold Conrad.

Conrad had dealt with many people who thought they could bring Ali to their country or city. Initially, he felt Sugrue was another man making promises he couldn’t deliver.

However, Ali was not averse to boxing abroad. He was in the middle of rebuilding his career after his defeat by Joe Frazier and chasing a rematch with his great foe. At 30, he had lost just once but this was before ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ and ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’, and his reputation in the U.S. was bruised by his refusal to be drafted into the military for the Vietnam War.

In the end, the deal got done: Sugrue put up $300,000 to secure Ali, and on July 11, the US fighter arrived on Irish soil. He was handed a shillelagh – a traditional walking stick also used for fighting – and his Eire love affair began.

Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue paid Ali $300,000 to come to Ireland (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Muhammad couldn’t wait to get to Ireland,” Gene Kilroy, Ali’s former business manager, nicknamed ‘The Facilitator’, tells The Athletic from his home in Las Vegas. “His great-grandfather was a man called Abe Grady (who hailed from Ennis in County Clare before emigrating to the U.S.), so he thought it was special.

“I got some of the team to wear green jackets when we stepped off the plane. That was my idea and the people loved it.”

Ali stayed and trained at a hotel in a remote rural spot near the Wicklow Mountains, outside Dublin. “He didn’t really like it up there,” says Kilroy. “He wanted to be in the centre of the action.”

Ali was much happier at the Gresham Hotel in the city centre. Crowds would gather in the lobby, hoping to catch a glimpse of ‘The Greatest’, while journalists camped out every day in the hope of securing stories.

The week was full of trademark Ali PR stunts: a training session in a Gaelic handball alley – similar to a squash court – and a meeting at Leinster House, the home of the Irish parliament, with Jack Lynch, the then Taoiseach (Irish prime minister).

Ali made a point of visiting Dublin’s General Post Office, the hub of the 1916 Easter Uprising against British rule, and asked for a meeting with Bernadette Devlin, an Irish civil rights leader and politician. “He insisted on it,” recalls Kilroy. “He was so interested in Irish politics.”

Ali also did an extraordinary interview with Irish broadcaster RTE during the week before the fight, sitting down for 45 minutes with presenter Cathal O’Shannon to discuss race, politics, civil rights and boxing. The notion of a fighter doing something similar nowadays is unthinkable.

As the years have passed, the number of (possibly apocryphal) tales about Ali’s time in Dublin has flourished — from how he dropped in to people’s homes to enjoy tea with the ladies of the house to him having drinks in pubs around the city.

“We ate in a restaurant called Quinns a few times,” says Kilroy. “The people were so kind in there and generous. When he walked around, the people loved him.”

Crowds descend to catch a glimpse of Ali in Dublin (Independent News and Media/Getty Images)

One event which cannot be disputed was the day Ali tried his hand at hurling. Eddie Keher, a six-time All-Ireland winner with Kilkenny, was at work in Dublin when he got a call asking him to meet with Ali.

“I was looking at him star-struck,” said Keher, in 2012 documentary When Ali Came to Ireland. “He said, ‘You play hurling, that’s a very dangerous game’. I saw he was an ordinary guy. We went out to the press and I showed him the various skills attached to hurling; we had good fun.

“He came up close to me then and said, ‘We will put a show on for these guys’. He raised the hurl and I thought he was going to poleaxe me. That was when I saw the showman.”

Even other boxers were in awe. Paddy Doherty was on the undercard that night. He was supposed to be out before Ali’s fight with Lewis, but the glove delay caused a reshuffle, something which worked to his advantage.

“The whole week was crazy,” Doherty tells The Athletic. “There was security around Ali at all times. But I got to meet him in the dressing room at Croke Park. It was a special moment. Then, when I was heading out to the ring, Ali was coming back and gave me a tap on the head as good luck.”

The only disappointment that week was the attendance at Croke Park for the fight. Just 18,000 tickets were sold. Some felt prices were too expensive, while Hannigan wondered if the availability of Ali to people during the build-up meant many punters felt they had already got their piece of the star.

Yet there were many more people inside the stadium than the official attendance figure suggested. Thousands climbed the walls at the Hill 16 terrace at one end of the ground just before Ali was due to emerge.

“People had told me all week they were coming but when I asked them how much they paid for tickets, they just said ‘We won’t be paying but we will be there’,” says Kilroy. “I liked that!”

Those who did make it inside were not treated to a thriller. Ali was some way short of his best, but knocked Lewis down in the fifth and stopped him in the 11th. Fans still invaded the ring at the end to get close to ‘The Greatest’.

“Muhammad had a cold in the build-up,” says Kilroy. “He thought about pulling out and delaying it, but then he knew how much it had all cost the promoters so he didn’t want to. There were so many people in the ring at the end, I thought it was going to collapse.”

Ali eventually fought his way through the crowd and back to the dressing room to meet the press. He gave an honest assessment of his performance and then headed for the hotel. He left the next day for home.

Ali never fought again in Ireland — although he did return to the country twice: in 2003, to attend the Special Olympics, and again in 2009 to trace his family roots in Co. Clare. But the impact of his first visit still resonates with many.

Ali attends the Special Olympics opening ceremony after-party in 2003, with singer Sinead O’Connor in the background (ShowBizIreland.com/Getty Images)

One such person is Brian Peters, Katie Taylor’s manager and one of the biggest figures in Irish boxing, who played a crucial role in making this weekend’s fight at Croke Park happen.

In April 1992 Peters was in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to watch Irish middleweight Steve Collins fight Reggie Johnson. He found out Ali was in town and went to the hotel where the boxing icon was staying.

By chance, one of Ali’s entourage was at the reception desk when Peters was loitering. After finding out where Ali was located, Peters snuck into the hotel kitchen, got a cheesecake and some milk, and made his way to Room 770.

“So, I knock on the door, and say ‘Room service’,” Peters tells The Athletic. “This big f***ing man, never seen a man as big as him, blocked out the sky, opens the door, and he says, ‘I didn’t order no room service.’

“So, I kind of edge in with my shoulder, push the door open, your man is standing there looking at me, giving me evils, and there’s Ali lying on the couch — hands behind the head, kind of one foot in the ground, looking at me a bit perplexed.

“I said, ‘Look, Mr. Muhammad, Mr. Ali, sorry, not sure what to call you, Mr. Muhammad Ali… I just wanted to meet yourself, and sorry for the way I had to do it. So I went in, told him the story, and he thought it was hilarious, brilliant.

“We had some craic. We started talking about that week in Dublin and he says, ‘I think I was the only black man in Ireland. People are coming up, they’re looking at me and they’re touching me.’ And he might have been right in 1972.

“And I always remember him saying, ‘That show lost a lot of money. I don’t know if I got fully paid. I don’t think I did.’”