He knows it was a mistake, motivated by the promise of unprecedented riches, but John Obi Mikel insists he has no regrets about spending the last two years in China.

It's difficult to consider a move that earns you £140,000-a-week a mistake, yet for a midfielder who had won the Champions League, the Premier League twice and three FA Cups during his 11 years at Chelsea, the move to Tianjin Teda FC felt like an admission his best years were behind him.

With hindsight, it was a premature call. Mikel, polite and respectful, cannot deny his spell in the Chinese Super League should serve as a warning to anyone who is tempted to accept the lucrative contracts on offer.

Reality hit as soon as he arrived in Tianjin, a coastal city of 15 million people in the north of the country. He would be well rewarded for leaving his family behind in London, but it was not professional football as he knew it.

“It was two years of a huge culture shock,” Mikel explained, having finished speaking at Middlesbrough's training ground to a group of refugees. “The food was a problem, the lifestyle, the style in which everything was done.

“When you have been at a club like Chelsea in the Premier League, for 11 years, it was very hard to adapt to how things were done. It isn’t at the elite level, let’s put it that way.