Christian Pulisic may well have been dubbed “Captain America” by his new Chelsea team-mates, but it was a sojourn in a small Northamptonshire town in 2005 that played a crucial role in his remarkable rise from Pennsylvania.

Long before the 21-year-old became America’s most expensive footballing export at £58 million, Pulisic was uprooted from his family home in Hershey, Pennsylvania and taken to Kidlington, Oxfordshire. The leafy village, little over an hour outside London, was where his mother, Kelley, had won a scholarship for a teaching exchange, while his father, Mark, was doing a football coaching course at Bisham Abbey in Buckinghamshire.

During their time in the UK, Mark wanted his son to play for a football club and made contact with Robin Walker, then