Ever heard the one about the international footballer who was so keen to leave Planet Earth his club put a clause in his contract banning him for travelling into space?



“It’s true,” Stefan Schwarz tells The Athletic, recalling the negotiations that took him to Sunderland from Valencia in 1999. “I would have loved to go into space. It was my agent’s idea. When we were discussing the contract Moonraker, the James Bond movie, was on television. It was a film I liked. My agent said, ‘let’s get this contract done and we’ll go.’ But then Sunderland got to hear about it and they were not so keen.”



Sunderland had just been promoted to the Premier League under the management of Peter Reid and, needless to say, were not too enthused about the idea of their new acquisition climbing into a tin can attached to a rocket to be blasted into the heavens.



“The bottom line was to protect the club,” John...