The anguish is still acute, pushing up from Julian Nagelsmann’s throat to punctuate his words as he recounts a half-year period, aged 20, that tornadoed his life.

Having suffered cruciate ligament damage, he sacrificed weeks of sleep while wrestling with the decision to prematurely end his playing career. Then, far more cruelly, his father Erwin unexpectedly passed away after a short illness.

“The big dream to become a professional player broke down and this certainly hurt,” the Hoffenheim manager, who first pulled on boots as a three-year-old to join his village side FC Issing, recalls to JOE. “I felt and thought back then that I wasted all my youth, that it was all for nothing. It just felt terrible. First, there was that decision I had to take to stop playing and then, more painfully, was the death of my dad. That changed a lot of things in my family.

“We were a very close and happy household. Along with my elder brother, I have an older sister and we all went on holidays together a lot. We got along very well, and then suddenly, we lost our father. That was a huge cut in my life.”

Nagelsmann, who had moved to Bavaria’s capital at 15 to turn out for 1860 Munich’s youth team as a defender before signing for Augsburg, immediately returned to the family home in the southwest town of Landsberg am Lech. With his senior siblings remote, he assumed administrative duties after his dad’s passing.

“I saw it as my responsibility to take care of things and deal with whatever comes with the death of a person, like in our case: selling the house, dealing with insurances, and the car,” the 30-year-old explains.

“I had to organise all things I never thought about before, but that needed to be dealt with. You realise then what it all means. My siblings were away from home and working elsewhere so I took care of most of it. Having to go through all of this helped me to come to terms with it.

“My father was always a very happy man, and certainly would've wanted us to continue to be positive and try to be successful. I managed to find my peace with it: the situation was like it was and nothing could be changed about it.

“I realised later that it all made me more mature and grown in my life. I did maybe things that were not normal for somebody my age.”