Whereas a brainstorming joint effort by coaches and support staff to wring an extra one per cent - effectively the difference between success and failure - from athletes performing virtually to their maximum potential has been proven as effective among those on two wheels, it is not so, Lane believes, for the vast majority of those on sponsored boots. Because, simply put, footballers don’t operate even close to their maximum capability.

“About 80 per cent of players in the Professional Leagues are operating at 60 per cent of their individual capabilities,” writes Lane, who contends that the culture within football has reached a level where training for 90 minutes a day “is the norm and is acceptable.”

He cites a period when he was working with Rotherham United and occasionally sharing the same training facilities as Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis:

“She would be there two to three times a day for two to three hours a session,” Lane writes.

“The players would look on amazed when they would see her leaving after her early morning session and then again a little later on in the day as they were heading home. Their way of rationalising her actions was to say it was because she was an Olympic athlete. I would then point out that it was through that training regime and discipline that she became an Olympic athlete!”

Lane adds that the notion that “footballers are players not athletes” has been “thrown around by managers who have a poor understanding of the physical demands of the game.”

The late Bill Shankly, who became a manager of legendary status at Liverpool in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would have agreed with Lane’s first statement, and would have strongly refuted the second.

In Rob Hughes’s “Trevor Francis - anatomy of a £1m player” (World’s Work Ltd, 1980) the author recalls a conversation with the former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly  in which the legendary Scot was asked to reflect upon the relativities of nature and nurture when it came to producing a great player.

“Aye, ye can help a man be a better player,” Shankly reflected. “Ye can get him fit to play - fit for football, not for running miles.  Derek Ibbotson came to Huddersfield to train when I was manager; he could run the mile in 3 minutes 57 seconds, the players couldnae do that.

“But he was finished in half-an-hour at five-a-sides. See what I mean, son? You’ve to get fit for football.”

Lane himself recalls hearing that Tottenham Hotspur’s manager between 2012 and 2013, Andre Villas-Boas had banned the use of GPS and HR monitors and didn’t want his players doing strength training in the gym because “they were footballers and not athletes".

But Lane insists that footballers can be developed by specific fitness exercises, and challenges them to take a more pro-active part in their training rather than passively waiting for guidance from coaches.

He would have applauded Shankly’s application during a career playing for Carlisle United, then Preston North End, and Scotland.

Shankly made a name for himself as a dedicated trainer who would work on his own during the summer months. After his first season as a professional he taught himself to produce long throw-ins by practising throwing over a row of houses and having boys from his village help by fetching the footballs back for him.

That approach carried over to his managerial career, with England’ 1966 World Cup winner Roger Hunt commenting that the secret of Liverpool's success was that, under Shankly, "we were the fittest team in the country."

Lane concludes: “Psychology will be the next major area of focus within football over the next five to 10 years.”

The focus may intensify, but this is far from being a new approach - as Shankly, or indeed the two men who guided Francis, and Forest, to that 1979 European triumph, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, would have been swift to confirm.

Shankly, famously, worked on the minds of the media and his rival teams after signing former slaughterhouse worker Ron Yeats, a burly 6ft 2in centre half, from Dundee United in 1961, telling journalists: “The man is a mountain. Go into the dressing room and walk around him.”

As for Clough and Taylor - well, the way they worked on the mind of the amiable but resolute Francis was emblematic of their intensely aware psychology.

Having signed him for a record fee from Birmingham City, they obliged him to play in freezing conditions for the third team on his first day at the club - indeed, even before he had signed his official papers.

The £1 million ($1.5 million/€1.3 million) man was then encouraged to be the man to pour out the tea for the players at half-time and to collect their shirts after matches. It was explained to him that this was the way things were done at Forest. A million pound player was no different from anyone else.

Clough and Taylor knew better than that, of course. They had not just doubled the British transfer record for a cog. Francis was a big wheel - but one who was swiftly schooled in the notion that what goes around comes around…