“Right now, Patrik doesn’t have the muscles, but you can just imagine him in two or three years,” enthused the 2003 Ballon d’Or winner Pavel Nedved this month. “He reminds me of Zlatan Ibrahimovic because he was like that when he came to Juve. He didn’t have the muscles either.”

As meteoric rises go, it is hard to beat the story of Patrik Schick. The 21-year-old Czech Republic forward was having a medical on Thursday to seal a €30m (£26.4m) transfer from Sampdoria to Nedved’s former club Juventus. Thirteen months ago he had just returned to Sparta Prague from a loan spell at Bohemians – the third-best-supported team in the Czech capital and the club where the 1976 European Championship-winning hero Antonin Panenka is the honorary president.

At the end of May 2016 Schick was handed his senior international debut by the former coach Pavel Vrba having scored eight times as Bohemians finished 13th, with a goal against Malta after coming on for Tomas Rosicky confirming what scouts from several European clubs had seen: the product of Sparta’s youth system was quickly developing into something very special.

Despite having played a grand total of 36 league minutes in Sparta’s first team and failing to make the cut for the Euro 2016 squad, Sampdoria took the plunge to sign him for €4m last summer and the gangly forward made his first Serie A start in a 4-1 thumping by Juventus in October, scoring 12 minutes into the second half with a left-foot shot. Nedved, the former Sparta player who became Juve’s vice-president in 2015, took note.

Schick, beset by homesickness and struggling with the language in his new home, then had to wait nearly three months to make the starting lineup, even after finding the net in three successive matches for Marco Giampaolo’s side before the turn of the year. But a run that saw him end the season with 11 goals – including a Dennis Bergkamp-like flick and cool finish in the game against Crotone in April – and three assists despite playing only 1,507 minutes were enough to convince the perennial Italian champions they had found a potential successor to Ibrahimovic.

So a few hours after Schick and his team-mates celebrated their surprise 3-1 victory over Italy in the European Under-21 Championship on Wednesday night, he and his agent, Pavel Paska, were whisked to Turin on Juve’s jet to finalise a move that will bring Sampdoria a club record fee and see Max Allegri’s side pay €5m more than the release clause because they will spread the payment over three years.

Patrik Schick, centre, initially suffered from homesickness at Sampdoria but has settled successfully in Italy. Photograph: Francesco Pecoraro/Getty Images

“We have been waiting for a player like this for a very long time,” says David Cermak from the Czech newspaper MF DNES. “Nobody believed that he would make such a big jump into Serie A because he was part of a team that was battling against relegation from the Czech league so recently. He seems to be coping very well with all the pressure considering that he didn’t even start a league match for Sparta. One or two years ago we were really in big trouble and people were wondering what we would do after Rosicky retires, and Nedved had stopped playing a long time ago. Now supporters are very hopeful that he could be a big star and they are expecting a lot from him.”

Earmarked as a potential superstar in his days at the Sparta academy, Schick developed a reputation for not always pulling his weight in matches despite his obvious talents. “When I talked to him at training and before games, I used to scream in his face to incite him,” remembered his Bohemians coach Roman Pivarnik in an interview last year.

But, according to Cermak, a season playing against Serie A’s rugged defenders has toughened Schick and transformed him into more of a team player. “He has been a surprise for me in this tournament because he has been working very hard for the team and that is not something you used to expect. I think Italy has changed him a lot. After 70 minutes of the game on Wednesday he told the coach he was totally exhausted because he had given everything and had to be substituted.”

Schick has not scored yet but his deft header set up Michal Travnik for the opening goal against Italy. It was the performances of his less well-known team-mates which have really taken supporters by surprise, though. The central defender Stefan Simic will return to Milan next season having spent the last campaign on loan at Belgian club Mouscron, and the midfielders Antonin Barak and Jakub Jankto are also in Serie A, with Udinese. The trio left their homeland at a younger age than former greats such as Tomas Skuhravy and Nedved.

“After the velvet revolution this started to happen a lot more because it wasn’t possible to go abroad before then,” says Cermak. “Players would traditionally stay in the Czech league until their late 20s but now they tend to leave when they are still teenagers.”

The Czech Republic – who won this tournament in 2002 with Petr Cech in goal – could advance past the group stage for the first time since 2011 as best runners-up if they can beat Denmark on Saturday and better Portugal’s result against Macedonia from the night before. If they do, more than 10,000 supporters who have crossed the Polish border will be staying a little longer.

“After the first game against Germany people were pessimistic about our chances but now everything has changed,” adds Cermak. “The win against an Italian team that has famous players like Gianluigi Donnarumma means there is now a big expectation on the team.”