History has not judged Pierre van Hooijdonk kindly. The original footballing “striker” was castigated by his manager, team-mates and the media for downing tools for Nottingham Forest ahead of the 1998-99 Premier League season. Twenty years on, that mud has largely stuck.

Yet for better or for worse, Van Hooijdonk revealed a newfound nuclear option for many of his 21st century contemporaries to force moves from clubs. Just this week, we have seen Neymar and Antoine Griezmann reportedly go on strike at Paris St-Germain and Atletico Madrid respectively to engineer transfers to Barcelona. Few people blinked an eye when they did. Indeed, there seemed to be more surprise when Paul Pogba opted to report for Manchester United’s pre-season tour to those footballing hotbeds of Australia and Singapore.

Van Hooijdonk’s actions though were virtually unprecedented at the time. There had been strikes before, not least by George Eastham at Newcastle United in 1960 in a move which effectively led to the end of the retain-and-transfer system. Yet Van Hooijdonk went a step further by staying home in Holland for four months in order to force the club to transfer him. Of course, this went down as well as a foreign ambassador’s summation of Donald Trump’s character defects.