Kevin Keegan certainly faced challenges when he took the plunge and blazed a trail by signing for Hamburg and moving to Germany in the summer of 1977.
There was the language barrier, manifested when he and his wife tried to buy a fuse in a hardware store and were reduced to gesturing what they wanted. The shopkeeper brought out a plug. When the Keegans said ‘nein nein’, he disappeared and returned with a Christmas tree.
It wasn’t easy making a move like that back then. Liverpool manager Bob Paisley, whose club took £500,000 in cash for Keegan, declared he shouldn’t be picked for England and Brian Clough mocked him on national TV before the 1978 World Cup.