Alongside it, you’ll most likely see a solitary page reference to turn to. Leaf back through the book and, typically, you’ll come to rest at a paragraph or two bearing a set of names that you’ve heard before. Names that you know, somewhere deep inside, even if at only the hinterlands of your memory.

Of the 23 people that lost their lives following the crash at the end of a snowbound runway in Bavaria on 6 February 1958, they are the ones who were not championship-winning footballers. Or prominent sports journalists. After their name is usually a word or two to explain who they were.

Tom Cable – a Welsh cabin steward, who knew the players well and was reported to be a fan who’d swapped shifts to go on the trip. Bela Miklos – a travel agent, whose wife, Eleanor Miklos, survived the crash. After Willie’s name, there often follows just a simple epithet: supporter.

“Everyone goes on about the players, but what about the other people who died?” demanded United goalkeeper Harry Gregg years later. demanded United goalkeeper Harry Gregg years later.

But as Jeff Connor notes in The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich, the nature of history pushes the more obscure names to the margins: ‘The truth about any tragedy on a grand scale is that the most famous are remembered first. Only the most devoted music fan can name the others in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly almost 12 months to the day after Munich.’

A salient reminder of that point was delivered again only recently, when seven others died in a helicopter crash alongside legendary basketball star Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna in Calabasas, California.