Of course, it can’t be denied that he was here for two years, and then sold. But then, you’d probably sell, say, a much-loved sports car, too, if someone came along and offered you approximately twice what you knew it to be worth at the time. Fifty million pounds, no questions asked? You’d be mad to refuse. And then, if two years later, when, completely out of the blue, the person who bought it from you suddenly offers to sell it back, and for £20 million less than they paid you for it, you’d be equally mad not to take it back.

Especially when you consider the crucial difference: footballers mature. Cars don’t. Cars only get worse. Your old car doesn’t win the treble and end up in the FIFA Team of the Year in its first season with its new owner, like David Luiz did. It doesn’t end up winning the championship and being in the Ligue 1 Team of the Season the year after that, either. Nothing about it gets better with age. It only gets worse.

That whole ‘Clown Prince’ thing has been mightily overplayed anyway. It arose mostly from Gary Neville’s now famous ‘PlayStation operated by a 10-year-old’ analogy – and people only feasted upon that because it was a vanishingly rare example of a television pundit coming out with a memorable phrase. (Other examples: Alan Hansen’s ‘You’ll win nothing with kids,’ and… er, that’s about it, isn’t it? I think we should maybe admit that history probably isn’t going to need a library to store the products of televised football punditry’s gifts to memorable lines.)

But PlayStations aren’t the first thing we think of round here when we think of David Luiz. The first thing we think of is Munich, May 2012. The penalty shoot-out. Bayern going first. Lahm scoring, Mata missing, Gomez scoring. We were 2-0 down and trembling on the brink when David Luiz stepped up. The pressure on him at this point was arguably as intense as the pressure that would later sit on the shoulders of Didier Drogba when he stood over the penalty that would win the trophy. In fact, it was possibly greater. If Drogba had missed, it was still to play for. If David Luiz had missed it was all but goodnight and thanks for coming.

Yet in he came – and off a worryingly long run-up, too. That wasn’t a penalty taker’s run-up, it was a triple-jumper’s run-up. I know, at the time, where I thought that penalty was going to end up, and it wasn’t in the goal. It was somewhere in an outlying suburb of Munich.

Wrong, as so often. Wham. Goal. It was one of the greatest penalties ever taken. It was a penalty fit to lift an entire team. It was a leader’s penalty, in the temporary absence of a leader. And with that, the comeback was underway and shortly afterwards, we became Champions of Europe. (The penalty can be viewed in the video below)