It is five years now since Ryan Gauld, the one-time “hottest property in Scottish football”, joined Sporting Lisbon from Dundee United. Gauld is still 23 and, despite many thinking otherwise, remains unrepentant about his decision to move to the Portuguese giants in 2014. “If I could go back in time and make that decision all over again — the one to leave Dundee United and go to Sporting — then I would make the same decision again,” he told me this week.

The sentiment seems all the more surprising, given that, in the five seasons that have passed since that move, Gauld made a grand total of five appearances for Sporting and grew increasingly disenchanted before his recent move on a permanent transfer to Farense,