The Manchester United Way, the Tottenham Way, the West Ham Way. Many teams, with various degrees of self-aggrandisement, have declared that there is something beautiful and unique about how they play the game.

One might add in the Barcelona Way, the Juventus Way, and, circa their 1996 “Spice Boys” FA Cup final single, the variant “Liverpool Groove”, as in “pass and move, it’s the Liverpool groove.”

All these ways, and groove, seem to amount to the same thing: winning by playing nice football. No doubt every country has some variant: the Ulaanbaatar United Way, the Internazionale Chad Way, even in Scotland, or so a popular search engine reveals, there is a Heart of Midlothian Way, which is presumably where you pelt the opposing manager with coins.

Admirable Ways most of these may be, but none of them hold a candle to the ethos associated with one particular outfit in the seventh-tier Isthmian League Premier Division. I speak, of course, of Corinthian-Casuals FC, whose “Corinthian Spirit” has been a byword for fair play, decency and doing it for the love of the game since the 1880s.

A BT Sport documentary this week tells the story of Corinthian FC, formed in 1882, the amateur club, once the finest football team in England. They twice contributed all 11 players to the national side, beat Manchester United 11-3 and defeated the Preston North End Invincibles. They would neither score, nor attempt to save penalties because a gentleman would never commit a deliberate foul on an opponent. Their gentleman amateur ethos was typified by polymath players like CB Fry, Charles Aubrey Smith and Max Woosnam.