It was a Sunday early in May and most Premier League footballers were probably fast asleep when Alfie Mawson’s alarm went off at 7am, telling him it was time to get out of bed to set up a stall at a car-boot sale in Berkshire, only 12 hours after picking up the man‑of‑the‑match award for marking Romelu Lukaku out of the game during Swansea City’s crucial victory against Everton.

Although the Mercedes may have looked a little out of place among the rows of cars parked up on the grass in the village of Swallowfield, not far from where Mawson’s parents live in Wokingham, the England Under-21 international felt totally at home among the other traders as he helped Beth, his girlfriend, display a few unwanted belongings as well as a couple of things that he thought were still in their apartment back in Swansea.

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“My missus loves a car boot, I don’t know what it is about them,” he says, chuckling. “I help put all the stuff in the car and then stand there with her. I think she just likes getting rid of everything, all the clutter, so that she can get more clutter. Even if it’s something of mine that I don’t really want sold, it will be in there somewhere.”

For Mawson, who was playing non‑league football little more than three years ago and helping out on his dad’s fruit and veg stall at Ealing market, mingling with the public still seems a perfectly normal thing to do. Yet times have changed for a man who started 27 Premier League games for Swansea last season and it is hardly surprising the sight of him flogging things from his car boot proved a distraction – much to the annoyance of the lady in charge of the stall.

“My missus told me off,” Mawson says. “I was helping out and then some geezer remembered me from Maidenhead. He said: ‘You used to be at Maidenhead, didn’t you?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, I was.’ He said: ‘You should have stayed there – we got promoted.’ I had a little laugh, then I said: ‘They’ve done really well, National League now.’ He looked back at me, smiled and said: ‘I think you did a bit better, though, didn’t you?’

“Another fella then came up and said: ‘You play for Swansea.’ I said: ‘Do I?’ He said: ‘Yeah, you do.’ He said: ‘I’ve never seen a Premier League footballer at one of these before.’ I said: ‘Well, you’ve got to keep grounded one way or another.’ I remember one bloke said: ‘You can’t need any more money.’ I explained that I wasn’t there for that reason and it was because of my missus. Then loads of other young lads walked by and my missus said: ‘Right, I’m not having this. I haven’t brought you here to talk about football. We’ve had enough of that all week. Sit in the car and play on your phone.’”

It is a terrific story that Mawson tells with a smile as he reflects on how far he has come in such a short time, shaking his head when it is pointed out there were mocked-up images on social media after the Everton match showing Lukaku tucked away in his back pocket. “Yeah, and the next day I’ve earned £40 in pound coins from a car boot!” he says, breaking into laughter.

Mawson’s life has been turned upside down during a journey that has taken him from the greengrocers to the Premier League via spells with Brentford, Maidenhead, Luton, Welling, Wycombe and Barnsley, yet the lovely thing about speaking to him is that he still comes across as exactly the same person. “Sometimes I have to sit back and realise what I’m doing,” Mawson says. “It’s just gone mental. You have to pinch yourself to believe it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfie Mawson in action for England’s Under-21s against Germany in March. ‘I know there’s going to be pressure on us,’ he says of the tournament in Poland. Photograph: Matthias Hangst/Bongarts/Getty Images

This week he is away with England in Poland, competing in the Under-21 European Championship finals, and it is hard to believe there will be anyone prouder to represent the country in Aidy Boothroyd’s squad. Mawson won his first cap last November, a month after making his Premier League debut for Swansea, and his face lights up when he thinks back to how he felt when he got that call-up.

“If you’ve never been with England before, you have to turn up in your club tracksuit, so I sat there in my Swansea gear at St George’s Park. I didn’t know what was going on, to be honest,” he says. “Then I got given my England tracksuit so I put it on straight away and took a photo, which I sent to my mate and said: ‘Look at this – I’ve got the kit!’

“I ended up taking loads of kit home, my mum and dad wear it all the time – they’re proud as punch. I wear it sometimes lounging around, just because it’s cool. But the best bit about being with England was singing the anthem when we were out in France. I stood there and I’ve never been so proud in my life. It was a great feeling and I remember thinking after the match: ‘This can’t be replicated. Will it really feel the same if I sing it again?’ But when I played in the Germany game, in March, it was exactly the same. And this is for the under-21s. I’m not taking that lightly but imagine what it would be like for the senior team.”

This is for the Under-21s. I’m not taking that lightly but imagine what it would be like for the senior team

Plenty of people expect Mawson to find out the answer to that question one day. Signed from Barnsley for £5m last summer, the Londoner was an integral part of the Swansea team that spectacularly turned their season round under Paul Clement, starting every top-flight game under the new manager, scoring vital goals and, more than anything, looking like an accomplished centre-half.

“The manager put massive faith in me but we all bought into what he was like,” Mawson says. “There are a lot of one-on-ones with him. Sometimes I ask for them. Sometimes he calls you in. We’ll watch games back, he’ll say: ‘This is good but I need you to do this better.’ So it’s in your head and you go away and work on it. I had a meeting with him the other day and he said he’d looked at the way I’ve come into the game and recognised that my path was different.

“He said: ‘You want to do well, you want to learn, and what’s to stop you from doing certain things in your career? What’s to stop you from becoming the captain of this club? What’s to stop you from pushing on to a bigger club? What’s to stop you from being a full England international? The only thing that will stop you is yourself.’”

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Mawson has no intention of letting that happen. He talks at length about his thirst for knowledge and desire to improve, explaining that he once played an entire reserve game for Brentford using only his weaker left foot and how he also likes to “pick the brains” of older players, whether that be Paul Hayes and Matt Bloomfield at Wycombe or Gylfi Sigurdsson and Fernando Llorente at Swansea, to soak up as much information as possible. “I want to be seen as a young leader,” says Mawson, who was given the captaincy at Barnsley at the age of 21. “I want to be that player that in five or six years’ time young players come to me and ask for advice.”

Asked where his appetite for learning comes from, Mawson replies: “I think it’s down to where I’ve been, my journey compared to some lads that have been with Premier League clubs, played in the under-23s but not really played in the first team. I think my path was made for me. Now I’m at a level where it’s the big league but I still feel that I’ve got a lot more to do to establish myself as a regular Premier League player.

“My best mate, Charlie Puddle, who was an amateur boxer and is like a big brother to me, said recently: ‘When will you think you’re a Premier League footballer?’ I said: ‘Well, I could say it now because I’m in the Premier League.’ But if I went and asked, let’s say, a 17-year-old scholar at Man City what he is, he’d probably say: ‘I play for Man City.’ But you don’t play for Man City; you play for Man City’s youth set-up. With me, I think I’ve showed what I’m about a bit, but until I’ve played 100 Premier League games, I don’t think I can say I’m established at that level.”

If a couple of personal highlights of the season were that win over Everton and leaving Stamford Bridge with a signed John Terry shirt – “I was a Chelsea fan growing up and he was my hero” – a low point came at Watford in April, when Mawson was caught in possession on the edge of his own penalty area and Étienne Capoue scored the only goal of the game, inflicting a fifth defeat in six matches that deepened relegation fears. Mawson held his hands up afterwards, apologising to the fans via social media, and he accepted Clement’s warning that the same thing could not happen again, yet he also knew he had to keep being brave on the ball, making passes that count.

“It would have been easy to go into my shell and every time I got the ball go back to the keeper, especially where we were in the table, but it wouldn’t have been me to shy away,” Mawson says. “That’s a cop out, goes completely against the way I play and would have given the gaffer a reason to think: ‘He’s gone under here.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfie Mawson celebrates after scoring for Swansea against Leicester in February. Photograph: Ashley Crowden/CameraSport via Getty Images

Instead Mawson kicked on, helping Swansea to win four of their last five matches to stay up and finishing the season as the club’s young player of the year and a fans’ favourite. “The supporters have taken to me and I’ve taken to them,” he says. “It’s a great club. When I signed I knew Swansea’s philosophy and I think from the back end of the season we got back to that style. But what I didn’t know when I joined was what the area would be like. But I love it there. I really do. And I don’t see myself being anywhere else for a long time.”

Listening to Mawson talk with such maturity, it is easy to see why he has the potential to be an important player for England over the next couple of weeks. He has racked up more than 150 career appearances – Southampton’s Nathan Redmond is the only outfield player in Boothroyd’s squad to have started more Premier League games than the Swansea defender last season – and that sort of experience could be invaluable as England try to navigate their way out of a group that includes the holders, Sweden, whom they play on Friday, Poland and Slovakia.

“This tournament is massive,” says Mawson, who is 23 but eligible to play for the Under-21s because he was born after 1 January 1994, the cut-off date when qualifying began in 2015. “It’s about doing it for the badge, not for the name on the back of your shirt. And I know there’s going to be pressure on us – this image of England is that everyone builds us up to knock us down. But pressure can be good because that means people know you’ve got it in you to do it.”

For Mawson, it is also a chance to add another chapter to his story as he continues to go quietly about his business, whether playing for his country or working at a car-boot stall. “I don’t want to be in the headlines for certain things,” Mawson says. “I just want to be known for being a good footballer and a nice fella. That’s enough for me.”