Swan was not involved in the recent love fest with the 1966 World Cup squad. He probably would have been but he was serving a life ban from football for defrauding bookmakers when Bobby Moore and Co were becoming indelible icons. Along with his Sheffield Wednesday team-mates, David Layne and Tony Kay, Swan was sentenced to four months in jail the previous year and branded with the stigma of being England’s very own fixer.Now, with Italian football in the throes of a revolution after its own elaborate scandal, Swan’s story is as pertinent as ever. “I’d be amazed if footballers aren’t betting on matches,” he said. “Where there’s money there will always be a fiddle. Even with honest people there is temptation. I could put my hand in the till now. I don’t, but the temptation is there.

Now a publican in Chesterfield, Swan, 67, has rarely spoken about his role in the saga and, even now, breaks down in tears at several points. He is not about to pretend that he has no regrets because they drip from every reminiscence.

“David [Layne] and I have asked ourselves many times why we did it,” he said. “What fools we were. I was banned from going to all football matches. When the wind blew you could hear the roar from Hillsborough at our house and that was hard. I played for a pub side and they got fined for having me.

“I wasn’t even allowed to go and watch my son, Carl, play. It was like they’d cut my legs off. You think about what you could have done and you feel like busting a vein.”

It was December 1962 when Layne went to watch his old club, Mansfield Town, play West Ham United. He bumped into another player, Jimmy Gauld, and heard about how players were making money from bets. Gauld needed another fixture and Layne reasoned that Wednesday always lost to Ipswich. He put it to his friends, Swan and Kay, at training and the fix was sealed.

“We lost the game fair and square,” Swan said. “But I still don’t know what I’d have done if we’d been winning. It would have been easy for me to give away a penalty or even score an own goal. Who knows?” Eventually the net closed in on Gauld, who wanted one last pay day. He told the Sunday People that he had a story that would rock football and then used taped conversations with Layne to back up his story. When it came to court in 1965, Layne tried to carry the can by pleading guilty. Swan was the only one of the three to go in the witness box. “They cut me to pieces and twisted things,” he said. “My solicitor, Mr Arnold, had been very optimistic, but on that day he got into the car and said, ‘Are you prepared to go to jail?’ I said, ‘You’re joking,’ but he said, ‘It’s all gone against us.’ I was frightened to death. We never came back.”

In a Lincoln prison cell with a bucket in the corner, the scale of their foolishness was blinding. A burglar taught Swan to pick a lock and he played for the Thorp Arch prison side. When he got out he received a life ban from the FA. Having once been told by Alf Ramsey that he was “top of the list”, he was now an outcast.

“I got awful stick,” he said. “My mother would ring and say your brothers were fighting on Saturday night. They’d get in trouble because of what people were saying. The worst was the abuse my children took. I had to go and see the headmaster once. And there was the mail. ‘You’ve never been any f***ing good anyway.’ ”

Gauld got £7,000 from the Sunday People but was sentenced to four years. Seven other players were jailed. The life bans were lifted after seven years and Swan returned to Wednesday. Once the Italian media had labelled him the best centre half in the world. Now he was a 34-year-old nearly man whose 19 England caps were supplanted by his work in a bakery, car showroom and a hardware store. He did play for Wednesday again but it was a postscript to a tale of what ifs.

“I was happy for the England team in 1966 and Big Jack [Charlton] did a great job, but you can’t help thinking about what might have been,” he said.

Swan fell out with Kay over his advisory role in a 1997 television docudrama called The Fix. “It made it sound like David had dragged us into it,” Swan said. “It wasn’t like that at all. If anything, David was noble and tried to save us.”

In Swan’s forthcoming biography, Setting The Record Straight (Tempus, £17.99), Jimmy Greaves is among those who says they were treated harshly. “We let a lot of people down and it will be with me until I die,” Swan said.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Trials and tribulations of guilty men

What happened to the other three players involved in the match-fixing scandal?

DAVID LAYNE: A prolific goalscorer, he rejoined Sheffield Wednesday after his ban was lifted, but never made the first team. Played for Hereford United and Matlock Town before injury forced him to retire. Now a pub landlord in Sheffield, he remains friends with Swan

TONY KAY: Became Britain’s most expensive footballer when he moved to Everton for £60,000. Then the betting story broke and he spent 12 years in Spain after selling a fake diamond. He was jailed for a weekend after being arrested on his return home. He earned one England cap, worked as a groundsman in London and now lives in Merseyside

JIMMY GAULD: The Scottish ringleader of the betting syndicate, he was a forward for Everton, Plymouth Argyle, Swindon Town, St Johnstone and Mansfield Town, where he had a broken leg when he met Layne. Condemned by the judge for ending the careers of the Sheffield three, he was sentenced to four years and fined £5,000. He refused to return Layne’s calls when he tried to contact him recently