The house he grew up in is No 71 on a street in the quiet village of Wintam, between Brussels and Antwerp, and behind the few roads of tidy social housing, if you know where to look, you can find a patch of grass enclosed by trees where Romelu Lukaku played football every day of his young life.

This is the story of the goalscorer who will wear United’s No 9 shirt next season, the Belgian star who made his professional debut at 16 and whose career had been on a startling upwards trajectory ever since he was discovered as a 12-year-old footballer of uncommon size and pace.

Wintam is a comfortable, forgettable place – not the gritty urban setting of football prodigy folklore – and our guide is Vinnie Frans, 23, who has been Romelu’s best friend ever since the two boys were six. Frans remembers the Lukaku family’s first visit to their putative new home and standing in the street as they pulled away in their car, waving back to Romelu’s mother Adolphine.

“I knocked on his door the first day of school, and said, ‘Let’s play some football’ and we did that every day from then on, just me, him and his brother Jordan [now at Lazio]. Rom was already big then, but no muscle, just tall and really fast. I would say to him ‘Rom, you are big but you will slow down as you grow, you’ve got to keep working on your sprinting’”.