As Tyrone Mings tells his remarkable and heart-warming story, there are times when the 21-year-old Ipswich Town defender cannot help but shake his head and smile. Linked with multimillion-pound transfers to Arsenal and Chelsea, Mings is the West Country boy who was released by Southampton at the age of 16, unable to get a job at One Stop and the proud owner of a £100 Citroën Saxo until two years ago.

That green Saxo, complete with white wheels, “never reached the Suffolk border” after Ipswich paid non-league Chippenham Town £10,000 for their left-back in December 2012, but all the values and principles that Mings grew up with in Wiltshire came with him to Portman Road. This is a man who spent Christmas Day last year feeding the homeless in Ipswich and who thinks nothing of giving his complimentary tickets to “skint” fans – a gesture that made him a social media sensation before he had kicked a ball for the Championship club.

Sitting in the canteen at Sheldon school in Chippenham, where he regularly returns to talk with the pupils and former teachers who “helped me get to where I am today”, Mings speaks eloquently and with great maturity as he reflects on a transfer that has changed his life beyond all recognition, but not altered the person inside. “I struggle to see myself as Tyrone Mings the Ipswich footballer,” he says. “I’m just Tyrone from Chippenham.”

His inspirational tale starts with rejection from Southampton – with whom he had been since the age of eight – in his final year at Sheldon. Part of the same Southampton schoolboy team as Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Mings was told his “lack of physical development” was one of the reasons for his release. Five years later Mings is 6ft 5in and still growing.

He had trials with Bristol Rovers, Swindon Town, Cardiff City and Portsmouth, but no one wanted to take a chance on him and by the end of that summer in 2009 he enrolled on a two-year football scholarship at Millfield School. Mings “loved every minute of it” at Millfield, which is renowned for its sporting excellence, but was no closer to becoming a professional footballer when he left.

In 2011 he signed for Yate Town, who were playing in the Evo-Stik Southern League Division One South & West, three tiers below the Conference. After a stint washing up and pulling pints in the White Hart pub near Chippenham, Mings tried and failed to get a job in his local One Stop corner shop – “I was turned down because of a lack of experience” – before successfully applying to become a mortgage adviser with London & Country’s Bath office.

“You were meant to work one of the days on a weekend but I couldn’t ever work Saturdays because of football so I stayed later on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, when we didn’t have training, and then went in on the Sunday to try and pick up clients ready for Monday. I was doing 80-90-hour weeks. I got £15,000 a year as a mortgage adviser and I got paid £45 a week from Yate, which wasn’t covering my train fare – I couldn’t afford a car.”

In the summer of 2012 – the year Mings joined Ipswich – he gave serious consideration to quitting football. “I still couldn’t drive and I thought there is no way I can get to places where we were playing in pre-season using public transport. So that summer I didn’t want to go back to Yate, I wanted to concentrate on mortgage advising because I was doing well. I said to family members: ‘I don’t want to play anymore. I’ve done it for a season and nothing has happened. There has been no progress.’”

Mings, however, passed his driving test the day before the season started, bought the now infamous Saxo and everything started to fall into place when he signed for Chippenham, his hometown club, in September 2012. It was there that Mings, playing in the same team as Toby Osman, the son of Russell, the former Ipswich defender, got his break. Russell suggested to Ipswich that they take a look at Mings.

“My trial game was on a Monday. I travelled up to Ipswich the night before to stay in a hotel. There was me, a pro goalkeeper from Paris and a midfielder from Manchester City. So we all came down to reception together. I was thinking: ‘Wow, who are these guys?’ They’d turned up in a Mercedes and wearing designer gear. I’d turned up with my Chippenham Town kit bag. They must have been thinking: ‘Who on earth is that?’”

The trial match was against the Nike Academy and Mick McCarthy, the Ipswich manager, was more than just observing. “The manager kept on coaching me through the game in the first half. Obviously I knew who he was and it was a little bit intimidating to be trying to impress a man stood right there. I sort of jarred my knee in the second half, in the 60th minute, so I was limping a little bit and they took me off. As I was walking off, the manager came up to the halfway line. I think I must have looked a bit pissed off. He said to me: ‘I’m not taking you off because I thought you played badly; I’m taking you off because I want to sign you.’”

Mings’ head was in a spin. “I sat down in the dugout and I thought: ‘What does he mean? Will he sign me in the January transfer window? At the end of the season? Do I have to quit work now?’ There were a million thoughts in my mind. It was the longest half an hour of football I have ever watched.

“After the game I was having lunch and the manager called me into the office. He said: ‘Do you have a job?’ I said: ‘Yeah, I work as a mortgage adviser.’ He said: ‘Can you get out of work?’ I said: ‘Yeah, of course.’ He said: ‘How soon?’ I said: ‘Well, I don’t have to give any notice.’ I probably did – but I wasn’t going to tell him that!

“He told me he’d already spoken to Chippenham and they’d offered to give them £10,000 and a pre-season game. He told me to ‘go home, tell your work and come back with your Dad on Wednesday and we’ll sign the contract on Thursday’. I’d taken the Monday off sick; I didn’t tell them I was going on a football trial. So I went into work on the Tuesday in my own clothes, grinning from ear to ear. I said: ‘I’m going to sign for Ipswich.’”

Mings waited until the following May to make his first-team debut, in the final game of the season, but by then he had become national news, following the exchange of tweets in March with the Ipswich supporter who could not afford to go to the home match against Bolton Wanderers.

“I’d been sitting at the dinner table with my girlfriend, Samantha, and I said to her that some guy had tweeted about being ‘skint’ and not able to go to football. I replied and said if he could make it to Portman Road that I would leave the tickets under his Twitter name. That was the last I heard. Obviously I had to go to the game.

“Afterwards, I was sat on the sofa and my friend rang and asked if I had seen Twitter. The tweet when I asked if the guy could get to Portman Road had gone viral. It had 5,000 retweets. I went from 2,000 followers to 15,000 just from that. Ian Wright tweeted about it, it was picked up in the Huffington Post and it was the No1 read story on the BBC news website. It was incredible.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think people would worry about it. All I did was leave a couple of tickets. I don’t see how that was worthwhile news. And I still don’t see it now. Sky Sports News rang the club and asked to do a live interview to speak about it. I said: ‘No thanks.’ I didn’t want it to take away from what it was – it was a gesture, not a publicity stunt. And I didn’t want to be doing interviews when I’d never even played a game.”

Mings was playing the good Samaritan again the following December. “Me and my girlfriend don’t have any family in Ipswich, so we were thinking of what we could do to fill our time on Christmas Day. We thought about feeding the homeless and we phoned up the church that we eventually went to and asked if we could help. They didn’t know who I was and that I played football. So we turned up on the day, helped to prepare the cooking of the meals and handed them out. We loved it and we’d do it again.”

The stories go on. This summer Mings was being applauded for another selfless act. After learning that some Ipswich fans were frustrated that his squad number had changed to No3, just after they had purchased shirts with No15 on the back, Mings went into the club shop and paid for some replacements out of his own pocket and left them on reception for the supporters to collect.

It is, in short, impossible not to warm to Mings. Playing non-league and working full-time have given him a wider perspective on life but it was his upbringing that did most to shape him. Mings talks about the sacrifices that his mother, Dawn, made in the early days, when she would take him to and from football training on the bus, and how his father, Adie, who is a scout for Chelsea, always encouraged him to “carry on and not get disheartened” when he was close to calling it a day.

The most inspirational figure in his life, however, was Ercil, his nan, who died four years ago. “I used to spend almost every day with her growing up,” Mings says. “She was very much involved in the church in Chippenham, so I used to go there with her on Sunday mornings before games at Southampton. She was one of my role models in life, I’d say, because of the way she looked after everyone else before herself. I think the three gestures that you just mentioned at Ipswich are things that she would be proud of and things that she would do off her own back.

“Probably a big part of the reason I didn’t quit football when I didn’t want to go back to Yate, was that she saw me play for Southampton throughout all those years and it would have been a real shame if I had given up when things got a little bit hard. And I think now she is forever looking over me in terms of giving me opportunities. I really do feel like that. Because I don’t think there is any manager in the Football League that would be more suited to how I played in that trial game than Mick McCarthy.”

On the pitch things have gone from strength to strength for Mings and Ipswich, who are fourth in the table and host second-placed Middlesbrough on Saturday. Mings has seized his chance to make the left-back spot his own following Aaron Cresswell’s departure to West Ham United in the summer. Strong in the tackle, quick and athletic and blessed with a fine left foot, he has been a revelation.

Crystal Palace had a £3m bid rejected on deadline day in September, an England Under-21 call-up seems inevitable and this month Arsène Wenger admitted that Arsenal were following Mings, on the back of reports that bids ranging from £8m-£10m were being considered for January. “When you say those figures, bearing in mind Ipswich signed me for 10 grand, and mention people like Arsène Wenger, it’s a little bit surreal.

“It’s flattering, of course, but it’s a little bit like those trials - if it happens it happens. I’m in an unbelievable situation that I would have given my right arm to be in two years ago. If I can continue this progression, then the clubs that are linked with me, I guess, will only be natural. But we are doing so well at Ipswich and that’s where all my focus is now.”

Chelsea’s potential interest has added another layer of intrigue, although Mings is dismissive of the notion that his father’s role could give the Premier League leaders a head start on anyone else. “In terms of Chelsea having an advantage, I don’t know about that,” he says. “Dad’s just doing his job, just like every other scout up and down the country.”

It is the sort of conversation that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago, when he was filling up his Saxo. “I’ve been catapulted into another world,” Mings says. “It’s changed my life, it changed the lives of my family and my girlfriend, who left a good job in financial recruitment to come with me. But I’m still the same person. And if I can maintain that throughout my football career, where people say I haven’t changed from who I was before, then I think that’s the biggest compliment.”