It is a slightly surreal story and one that 20-year-old Patrick Bamford tells with a smile as he explains how he found out via One Direction’s Niall Horan that José Mourinho not only knew all about him but had been sending text messages to the singer every time the Chelsea striker scored for Derby County.

Already out on loan at MK Dons when Mourinho returned to Stamford Bridge last summer, Bamford never had chance to speak to the Chelsea manager until he was invited for a meeting a couple of months ago, when the possibility of being the Premier League club’s third-choice striker next season was discussed.

It was a few weeks before that when Bamford learned that Mourinho was following his progress on loan at Derby much closer than he could have imagined, albeit it through an unlikely source. “Niall from One Direction is a big Derby fan, he came down to the club and I was talking to him,” Bamford says.

“Niall said: ‘Mourinho knows all about you, he texts me all the time.’ I said: ‘No he doesn’t.’ He showed me his phone, and because he was doing his treatment at Chelsea, for his knee injury, he knew all the Chelsea boys and Mourinho. And he had texts from Mourinho whenever I scored, saying ‘Bamford again!’ That made me smile. That was the first time I knew that Mourinho knew about me.”

Bamford, who has scored 25 goals in 52 appearances for MK Dons and Derby this season, got to meet Mourinho face to face in March, when Michael Emenalo, Chelsea’s technical director, asked him to come to Cobham along with his father, Russell. “Because I was doing well at Derby and I’d done well at Milton Keynes, it was a discussion about that and the planning for next year,” Bamford says. “They were hinting at a new contract but I don’t know yet what’s happening there.”

Bamford smiles when asked how he found Mourinho. “The first thing he said to me was: ‘What do you want to do next season?’ As quick as I could I said: ‘Play for Chelsea.’ He said: ‘That’s good, at least you know what you want. We’ll see.’

“From what they’ve said, ideally I’ll be third striker, but you never know really in football. Hopefully I get a good pre-season, especially with the World Cup, because a lot of the big players are going to be away, so it’s going to give some of us youngsters the chance to get some game time to try and show him what we can do.”

It is easy to imagine Bamford making a favourable impression with Mourinho with or without his boots on. At the family home in Newark, Nottinghamshire, where he is relaxing before Saturday’s Championship play-off final against QPR, Bamford speaks with great maturity as he rows back over his life story. He is certainly not the stereotypical footballer.

Bamford was privately educated at Nottingham high school, where rugby is the No1 sport and football played “only during break-time”. He was bright, so much so that he sat his GCSEs and A levels a year early and had an unconditional scholarship offer from Harvard University. “I never really felt pushed at school or that I was struggling; it came naturally,” he says.

“I do think I could have done a lot more revision but I always found something else to do and it generally involved football. I ended up with five A*s, three As and two Bs at GCSE. I did French, history, biology, chemistry and general studies at A level. I dropped chemistry after the first year because I thought it was really hard and I ended up with a B at A/S. I ended up with three Bs and a C at A level. And I did an A/S in economics once I had left school and was in my second year as a scholar at Nottingham Forest. I did that to keep me stimulated.”

It is remarkable to think Bamford achieved those results despite spending so much of his spare time at Forest, the club he grew up supporting and joined as an eight-year-old. It was a difficult balancing act at times, especially when Forest offered Bamford a scholarship at 16. His father, a lifelong Forest fan, always insisted education came first, prompting talks that led to the club and the school coming to an agreement to combine football and A levels.

“I can’t really thank my school enough for that,” Bamford says. His football career took off during his second year as a scholar. He made his first-team debut against Cardiff on the last day of 2011 but it was in the FA Youth Cup where Bamford remembers “setting everything alight”. He scored two at Sunderland, five against Wigan and another four in a 5-1 victory over Southampton . Five days later Forest accepted a £1.5m bid from Chelsea. Bamford had played only 12 minutes of first-team football. “I thought the fee was crazy, to be honest. At the time I hadn’t done anything.”

It was a transfer that went down badly with some Forest fans. “I got a lot of abuse, especially on Twitter, saying: ‘You’re going for the money.’ But not many people know what happened at Forest at the end,” Bamford says. “Because I was in the last year of my contract there was a lot of pressure for me to sign another one. My argument always was: ‘You’ve got to show me a development path in order for me to stay.’ Forest told me I was better than the strikers they had but because they needed to put them in the shop window, I was eighth out of eight in line to play.

“At Chelsea Jimmy Fraser [the head of youth recruitment] showed me the plans they had for me. Once I had listened to that and I actually believed it – that was the main thing, for me to believe it – I decided Chelsea was where I wanted to be.”

Bamford was on an extraordinary high but four days later he received some shocking news. During a stadium tour at Stamford Bridge his father telephoned to say that Nigel Doughty, the former Forest chairman, had died. Doughty and Bamford’s father had grown up together, they sat next to each other in the Brian Clough stand for years and were best friends.

Their sons, Patrick and Michael, had the same sort of relationship and were together the night before Doughty died. “I just couldn’t believe it,” says Bamford.

In January, when he scored on his Derby debut against Brighton, he dedicated the goal to Doughty, who was also his godfather. “It’s weird, because I’m not religious. But before the game I had my head down and I was talking not to God but to Nigel. I said: ‘I’m sorry that I came to Derby,’ kind of having a little laugh, ‘but just help me.’ Because I scored, that was why I [pointed to the sky]. I tried it the next game and I scored again, so I thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s feeling generous,’” Bamford says, with a little chuckle. “I ended up with five in seven and then it stopped, so I thought: ‘He’s given up on me now.’”

Bamford talks excitedly about going to Wembley on Saturday and believes Derby have a “great chance” of beating QPR, after which he intends to take a five-day break before returning to Newark. The plan then is to be put through his paces by Roger Spry, a highly respected fitness and conditioning coach whom Bamford has employed at his own expense to get him in the best possible shape for a shot at the big time. “I think I’m ready now for the Premier League,” he says. “Whether or not Chelsea feel that’s with them or another team remains to be seen.”