It hardly feels incongruous to find Manchester City and England midfielder Jill Scott in a sports centre in Newcastle during half-term coaching 60 schoolchildren for Prince Harry’s grass-roots campaign Made By Sport. After all, she has run soccer schools for years. The JS8 coaching camps are part of a nest egg also encompassing motivational speaking – “Success is the problem, failure is the formula’, reads the latest keynote script – as Scott looks to life after football.

“People keep talking about coaching and retiring’ I think they’re telling us it’s nearly time,” she chuckles. “[Coaching] is something I’ll definitely go into, but I don’t know in what capacity. When I joined Manchester City, they looked at a plan in terms of what you want to do next. It got mentioned from the age of 26. It does cross my mind because I know I’m not going to be able to go forever. It’s probably time to pass the baton on in a couple of years. I’m 33 now, still feeling good. I wouldn’t want to stop now and think, ‘what if I’d gone another year?’ I think I’ll know.”

What does feel incongruous is to even discuss retirement with Scott given that there is so much left to do internationally. This month brings the SheBelieves Cup, in which England will encounter the United States for the first time since their 2-1 World Cup semi-final defeat. Then Scott’s attention will turn to the Olympics and the home Euros in 2021.

Phil Neville has earmarked Scott as a possible for even the next World Cup, in 2023, by which time she will be 36. Could she do it? She covered more miles than any other England player in France and is second in the fitness tests only to Lucy Bronze. Scott was 12 years older than Georgia Stanway, then 20 and the youngest Lioness at the tournament.

“People always say, ‘You’re naturally fit’, but it takes a lot to keep up with the 18-year-olds. I do eat a lot of calories. I’m quite naturally thin, so I have to make sure I’m fuelled all the time. People always go, ‘That must be the best thing in the world, just to be constantly eating food’. But honestly, it’s really not – I hate it sometimes. You feel sick but you’re still trying to get those calories on board because I cover a lot of ground.”

In three games a week she can cover 22 miles. “You’ve just got to look after yourself. You can’t get away with anything now. The last glass of wine I had was probably one with my Christmas dinner.”

SheBelieves will be England’s first camp with Dawn Scott, their new physical performance manager, whom Scott has encountered previously at international level. “She was hard,” Jill Scott says. “So hard. We didn’t actually have many resources, because it’s going back 13 years, but she always found a way. She made us do training sessions in coats in the middle of summer, because she knew we were going to China and we had to acclimatise. We had running programmes that you thought you were going to be sick at the end of.”