Chris Upton reflects on the life of a Midland footballer who became the game's first superstar.

So all-powerful has the football industry become that it now has the capacity to create its own saints. Outside every ground the statue of one or more of its heavenly beings – manager or player – is on display, where wreaths and candles are laid at moments of public sorrow.

Before every home game at Pride Park – the Derby County stadium – the tannoy pipes out a hymn to one of those sainted few.

Steve Bloomer’s watching,
Helping them fight,
Guiding our heroes
In the black and the white...

None in the ground, I imagine, would be old enough to have seen Mr Bloomer kick a ball, let alone play for the Rams.

The player in question died 73 years ago, even before the Second World War.

Yet Steve Bloomer is one of those soccer immortals, up there with Wright and Matthews and Duncan Edwards, and arguably the very first superstar the game produced.

There is a bronze bust of him next to the home dug-out at Pride Park, and another memorial plaque in his home town in the Black Country, was unveiled in the presence of Nat Lofthouse, Tom Finney and Wilf Mannion.

Could there be a higher endorsement of Bloomer’s pedigree than this ?

So Steve Bloomer came kicking into the world in Bridge Street, Cradley, the little Worcestershire town now in the borough of Dudley.

His father was a puddler, and there were Bloomers still active in the Black Country iron trade as late as the 1990s.

Steve Bloomer was born in 1874. Had his parents – Caleb and Merab – remained in the area, their son would surely have joined the ranks of the Albion or the Wolves.

But they moved to Normanton in Derbyshire, when their son was about five years old, and so Bloomer’s footballing career was nurtured there, along with a brief spell at Tutbury Hawthorn.

Initially he found work in a foundry, but by 1892 Bloomer had signed for Derby County at a weekly wage of seven shillings and sixpence; three years later he was playing for England.

Bloomer was a centre-forward of the old school, powerful, good with both feet and blessed with a lightning turn of pace. The Black Country tended to forge footballers of that ilk.

Bloomer’s goalscoring record, for club and country, was nothing short of phenomenal.

For England (where internationals were few and far between) he scored 28 goals in just 23 internationals, and was the first player to score four goals in a game for his country twice. He scored five in a single match against Wales.

Over the 22 years of his professional career – with Derby and Middlesbrough – Bloomer found the net 392 times in 599 appearances, and this with two clubs that were rarely challenging for honours, and he was the leading goalscorer at Derby for 14 consecutive seasons.

When he joined Middlesbrough in 1906 it was for a hefty fee of £750.