Too fat, too lazy. The report cards were in for Tanguy Ndombele, and they did not make for comfortable reading. First it was Guingamp who cast him out, deeming him not worthy of a professional contract, and now it was Amiens who were saying a firm no to this shy young midfielder with a protruding belly.

Ndombele had joined Amiens in 2014, when he was 17. At that age, the most talented players are often beginning to forge their paths into senior football. Ndombele’s route pointed in the other direction, away from the professional game and back towards home.

They welcomed him with open arms at Linas-Montlhery, the amateur club that Ndombele thought he had left for good four years earlier. There was some surprise, though — if not a little shock — at the state of his body. “When he came back from Amiens, he came into the shower room,” says Mickael Bertansetti, the club’s president. “He was a teenager, but he had the physique of a 30-year-old.”

Cold reality slapped Ndombele in the face. Five other professional clubs had said no, too. “He was hurt,” says Bertansetti. Something had to change for Ndombele, unfit and unwanted, and that journey home ultimately became a defining moment for the boy who would go on to become the most expensive player in Tottenham Hotspur’s history.