Player profiles:
(Updated as we go along)
Ray Clemence
Five league titles, two FA Cups, three times winner of the European Cup, three times winner of the UEFA Cup, declared the best goal keeper...ever by Total Football magazine. The last part is ridiculous, of course, but it is nevertheless interesting and an indication of how highly many rate Clemence.
Played with Hughes and Smith at Liverpool, winning the '77 EC with both players.
Terry Cooper
Generally regarded as the best left back in England in the late 1960s/early 1970s and an important part of Revie's famous Leeds vintage of that era. An expert at overlapping and inter-playing with his winger, Cooper had an excellent cross on him. Won the league and the FA Cup with Leeds, plus the UEFA Cup twice – and would have won more too if his career hadn't slowed down due to a nasty injury.
Jan Pivarnik
Winner of Euro '76 with Czechoslovakia, Pivarnik was an offensive, aggressive fullback who won the league twice with Slovan Bratislava. Like many of the era, he didn't play outside his domestic league until he was well past his prime. Pivarnik was named Czech footballer of the year in 1974 and two years later he made the team of the tournament in Euro '76, alongside Beckenbauer and Krol.
Emlyn Hughes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emlyn_Hughes
Tommy Smith:
If Smith isn't named Footballer of the Year, football should be stopped and the men who picked any other player should be sent to the Kremlin.
- Bill Shankly
Tommy Smith was easily the hardest player I faced. I ran into him once and he knocked every ounce of breath out of me. I tried to get up and look like he hadn't hurt me, but he had.
- Jack Charlton
http://www.lfchistory.net/Players/Player/Profile/413
Note on Hughes and Smith: For me an added benefit of picking this legendary Liverpool pair is their versatility. Both players can be fielded both as centre halves and as fullbacks (and even at a push further up the pitch in some sort of DM role).
Billy Bremner:
There were those who said we would be crushed when we were forced to field a weakened side in our UEFA Cup tie at Hibernian in the autumn of 1973. Billy wanted to make them eat their words, and he did. His performance at Easter Road that night in November was the finest I have ever seen from any individual in all my years in the game. It was a classic exhibition of reading the game, controlling the game of passing, of incredible confidence, Billy, playing in a new role for him of sweeper, was a revelation. Even the furiously partisan Edinburgh crowd had to rise to their feet to cheer this miniature gladiator off the field at the end.
It is one thing in football to have that star quality which makes you stand out from the crowd. It is quite another thing to have star personal quality and leadership qualities so strong you would follow him to the ends of the earth. But that is Billy Bremner. No manager could wish for a greater leader or a greater player. If I was in the trenches at the front line, the man I would want on my right side is Billy Bremner.
- Don Revie
Volodymyr Muntyan
A player who mastered multiple midfield roles (central, attacking, even defensive and wide – or wide-ish at least, in Lobanovsky's version of the 4-4-2) and who was characterized both by his tenacity and his technical proficiency. An allrounder who proved himself as such at the highest level with both the USSR national team and Dynamo Kyiv (both under Maslov and Lovanovsky). He won seven league titles and the Cup Winner's Cup with DK, while also making deep runs in the European Cup proper, including a narrow S-F exit to M'Gladbach in '77 (the year a trio of his team mates here won it for Liverpool).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Muntyan#Honours
Mario Corso
Considered one of the finest Italian wingers ever, most famous for his left peg,
il piede sinistro de Dio, with which he frequently both shot and passed the ball in the “dead leaf” style perhaps most immediately associated with Didi. Corso, however, had more strings to play on: A fast, technically superb and intelligent player, he was a crucial component in Helenio Herrera's famous (infamous, some would say) Inter side, with which Corso won multiple trophies, two European Cups on the trot (and two successive wins against Independiente in the following Intercontinental Cups) most notably. His career for Italy was less impressive on the face of things, but most would agree that this state of affairs wasn't down to footballing reasons as much as personal differences (and preferences).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Corso#International
(I won't rely on him for goals primarily, but he was, as one might imagine, a great free kick taker).
Peter Lorimer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lorimer
Jimmy Greaves
124 goals in 157 games for Chelsea.
220 goals in 321 games for Spurs.
44 goals in 57 games for England (including a record six hat-tricks).
More goals than any other player in the history of the English top-flight.
But this is my favourite, actually. Greaves' brief spell in Milan was for various reasons a fiasco. He only played a dozen times for AC. But he bloody well managed to score nine goals in that dozen.
(A selection of his goals).
Mike England
Edson...something or other, some Brazilian bloke.