James Hagan was born in Washington, County Durham, on 21 January 1918 and died on 26 February 1998. An inside-forward of rare technical quality, he played for Derby County and then for Sheffield United from 1938 to 1958, making 442 appearances and scoring 117 league goals. He was widely held to be one of the finest English players of his generation, but the war took his best years and he won a single England cap, in a goalless draw with Denmark in September 1948. As a manager he took Peterborough United into the Football League and then ran West Bromwich Albion from 1963 to 1967, where his refusal to let the players train in tracksuits in freezing weather provoked a players' strike in December 1963.

He arrived at Benfica in August 1970, in the last years of the Estado Novo dictatorship, and stayed until February 1974, 126 matches of which he won 98. He won three consecutive championships, in 1970/71, 1971/72 and 1972/73, and the Taça de Portugal in 1971/72, and was eliminated from the European Cup by the Ajax side that went on to dominate the competition.

The 1972/73 season was the most complete in the history of the Portuguese league. Benfica played thirty matches, won twenty-eight and drew two, lost none, scored 101 goals and took the title by eighteen points, with Eusébio scoring forty and winning the European Golden Boot. Hagan achieved it through a discipline the Portuguese game had not seen: brutal fitness work, fines for indiscipline, and a fast, direct, relentlessly attacking style that pinned opponents in their own half.

He left in February 1974, weeks before the Carnation Revolution, and stayed in Portugal, coaching Estoril, Sporting, Vitória de Setúbal, Belenenses and Boavista, before returning to England. He is remembered at the Luz as the hard Englishman who turned a talented team into a machine.