My Autobiography by Tom Finney

George Best, who knows something about great beginnings and sorry endings, recently said of the Evertonian prodigy Wayne Rooney, "If he thinks he's got pressure now, things are going to get 10 times worse." Best was the first footballer to have the fruits of modern celebrity dangled before his eyes. Before that, temptation was not on the menu.

When Tom Finney made his debut for Preston North End in 1946, expectations were as high as they are now for Rooney. "Viator" of the Lancashire Evening Post was enraptured with "Finney's composure, mastery, artifice and tantalising finesse". Within a few weeks of his club debut, Finney was playing for England.

There, by and large, the similarities end. Finney was 24 when his professional career got under way, thanks to the Second World War (in which he drove tanks). It was a lot easier in Finney's day to stay on the rails; in fact, it was difficult to do anything but. Some years later, when Finney asked Preston chairman Jim Taylor for a pay rise, the response was paternal but curt: "Just get on with your football, Tom. That's what you should be concentrating on, nothing else."

In 1952, Finney was approached by the owner of Palermo in the Italian league, with an offer of £130 per month and a £10,000 signing-on fee. Nat Buck, who had succeeded Taylor as chairman, told him, "If tha' doesn't play for Preston then tha' doesn't play for anybody." Finney knuckled under.

But he felt honoured, like most of his peers, to be paid anything at all for simply playing football as best he could. His humility shines through this warm, nostalgic book. Finney is grateful for the life his talent made possible.

He knew he was being exploited, thanks to the maximum wage and the retain-and-transfer system that decreed that footballers, glorified wage slaves, belonged to their clubs. And where did all the money go? "Some of the profits went on team-strengthening of course, and there was a degree of investment in ground development" – though not much – "but whether that accounted for it all remains unclear."

That's about as close as Finney comes to questioning the status quo, and the closest this book comes to anything like cynicism. Finney, along with Stan Matthews perhaps England's greatest postwar sporting hero, belonged to an age of deference.

"The Preston plumber" kept up his second career, tending to the town's waterworks as expertly as its dreams. Much later, he was the sometimes beleaguered chairman of the local health authority. A few years ago his wife Elsie developed Alzheimer's, and he writes movingly of being her full-time carer.

In an age when knighthoods are handed out merely for political donations, Finney scandalously had to wait until 1998 for his. Not that he is complaining, and this book represents a huge thank-you to whichever deity gave him such a rare talent.