There was disbelief in the NBA community when LeBron James moved back to the Cleveland Cavaliers this summer. “It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried,” he wrote to justify leaving Miami Heat.

Nemanja Matic’s return to Chelsea last January was somewhat different but nevertheless surprising as he had been discarded by the club once and he had no special links tying him to south-west London. He walked, ran and cried in the small Serbian village of Vrelo whose tiny church he says is “more beautiful than Big Ben”.

The eldest son of Dragan, a Yugoslavian second division centre-back in the 1980s, and Biljana, an occasional basketball player, the tall boy who now stands at 6ft 4in and his younger brother Uros, a footballer for NAC Breda in the Netherlands, began playing football in the local club’s youth team formed by their father.

There were early signs of the resilience which has come to define his career. Every day he would complete the kilometre separating his house from the training ground doing keepy-uppies. When the ball accidentally hit the ground he would return home and start all over again.

He left Vrelo aged 12 and moved to the capital Belgrade where he joined Red Star’s academy. “He always put football first,” recalls Jan Kozak, who brought him to the Slovakian first division after Red Star and later Partizan rejected him for being too frail, leading his agent to propose the 18-year-old’s services to MFK Kosice in a package including Marko Milinkovic, now at Slovan Bratislava.

His personality quickly endeared him to the coaching staff. He learned Slovakian in a few months, eventually gaining dual Slovakian citizenship. “He sought to improve in every training session,” remembers Dr Stefan Tarkovic, formerly the head of youth development at MFK Kosice now assisting Kozak at the helm of Slovakia’s national football team.

Establishing himself as a holding midfielder, his unhurried elegance soon attracted foreign interest. Middlesbrough were close to sealing an agreement in 2008 but his trial there was cut short when he received a debut call-up for Serbia Under-21s.

His performances for MFK Kosice had been noticed by Vladimir Vermezovic, the coach who gave him a trial at Partizan years earlier and was active in Slovakia at the time. He recommended the player to the Serbia Under-21 manager, Slobodan Krcmarevic, a former Partizan colleague.

It triggered the chain of events which led Chelsea to sign the midfielder for £1.5m in August 2009 after Carlo Ancelotti noticed him during the European Under-21 Championship, although he only took part in Serbia’s opening game against Italy where he played until the 85th minute despite a broken metatarsal and spent his first weeks at Chelsea receiving treatment.

He was joined by his childhood sweetheart Aleksandra, who became his wife a year later after he proposed via a Serbian newspaper with the headline: “Would you marry me?” Her name adorns his shinpads alongside that of their son Filip, aged three. Since last May he has been looking for a place to add the name of their newborn daughter.

Upon being cleared to play by Chelsea’s medical staff, his commitment quickly earned him praise reminiscent of his spell in Slovakia. “The best person is Nemanja Matic, he has been outstanding and we have a first-class professional on our books,” the then assistant coach Ray Wilkins said in December 2009.

A central midfield brimful with the talent of Frank Lampard, Michael Ballack and Michael Essien, however, meant the young midfielder struggled for game time and he managed only two league appearances. He was still named in Serbia’s shortlist for the 2010 World Cup, based on his showings with the reserves.

His reward nearly came in the 2010 FA Cup final against Portsmouth. At the end of the first half, Ballack suffered a bad tackle from Kevin-Prince Boateng and went off injured. The German captain’s World Cup dreams were shattered, those of the young Serb sitting on the bench on the verge of ignition. Instead Ancelotti went with the experience of the full-back Juliano Belletti to plug the gap in midfield.

Chelsea might have saved £20.75m and Matic’s chequered career would have looked a lot steadier had he entered the Wembley field that day. The Blues secured a historic double and washed away the failure of their premature Champions League exit to José Mourinho’s Internazionale, but the defensive midfielder failed to make Serbia’s final World Cup squad and was sent to Vitesse Arnhem on loan.

His time in the Netherlands proved underwhelming as he was shifted to attacking midfield, unsuccessfully tasked with emulating his idol Zinedine Zidane.

Six months later he was a makeweight in the deal which brought David Luiz to Stamford Bridge. His career took a downward trajectory as he once more played second fiddle, this time to Javi García and Axel Witsel, but he trained ever harder to earn the trust of the Benfica coach, Jorge Jesus, who two years later lamented the loss of “the best defensive midfielder in the world”.

He seized his opportunity after Manchester City completed the acquisition of Javi García in August 2012 and became Benfica’s cornerstone. His goal against the reigning champions Porto was nominated for the Fifa Puskas Award as he was crowned the 2012-13 player of the season in the Primeira Liga, three years after David Luiz.

When Benfica faced Chelsea in the Europa League final, his nearest rival in the opposition midfield was the man who had replaced him in south-west London. Ivanovic’s stoppage-time header overshadowed the performance of his countryman in the other team but both friends were shortly reunited, starting at Manchester City away last February.

Once again Ivanovic scored the winner but it was the midfielder who grabbed the headlines, capping a commanding debut with a 30-yard shot belting the crossbar as Sky Sports named him man of the match. Their reporter received a confident one-word answer after the game to his question of whether the Serb had expected to start such a vital game.

“I am proud to have improved a player of his quality,” reflects Kozak, now head coach of Slovakia. “Imagine what my midfield would look like with Matic playing with Marek Hamsik,” jokingly referring to the midfielder’s dual citizenship after he was ostracised from the Serbia national team by the former coach Sinisa Mihajlovic.

Now a mainstay for Chelsea and Serbia and looking forward to Wednesday’s Champions League trip to Maribor, Matic has mirrored Mourinho’s own return to Stamford Bridge, the player’s work-rate fitting the trademark features of the manager’s teams over the years. His progression as a player also echoes Chelsea’s since last season as the Blues chase their first league title since 2010, the year they let their unlikely symbol go.