“This feels like coming home, back to where it all started,” Iain Hume says of his return to Tranmere Rovers. “I had other offers, some of them from League One clubs, but they all involved a lot of travelling. I only live round the corner from this place so there’s no need to uproot the family or spend hours on the road.”

Having just returned from the Indian Super League, where he was voted player of the tournament, no less, after reaching the final with David James’s Kerala Blasters, Hume is done with travelling for a while. Though the inaugural ISL season was only three months long – four if you count pre-season work – he left his family in England and took up his new challenge alone. He enjoyed it so much he might be back again later this year, having signed only a six-month contract with Tranmere, but if the forward does return he intends to make sure his wife and daughters can at least visit.

“Last year everything happened in a rush,” he says. “I found myself out of contract for the first time in 15 years and I wasn’t sure what to do. Friends suggested registering for the ISL because they were interested in players with international backgrounds, so I called them up and I was drafted. Like everyone else in this country I didn’t know a thing about football in India, but I did know I wanted to play for someone.

“I’m only 31, the game hasn’t seen the last of me yet. I’d had offers before from places like Taiwan, but they were for pennies, basically, and I was reluctant to go so far for so little. The ISL made more sense, particularly as there were other British lads in the team like Jamo and Michael Chopra. Leaving my family behind was the hardest part. I hadn’t made any arrangements for visiting, not even when we reached the final. [Kerala were beaten by a late Atlético de Kolkata goal in front of a 36,000 crowd in Mumbai.]

“The games are only three or four days apart so it doesn’t allow a lot of time for fixing up visas and that sort of thing. It just wasn’t feasible. If I do go again, and I wouldn’t mind doing, negotiations are going on at present, we’ll get the travel arrangements all sorted out in advance. That’s the difference between knowing what to expect and taking a leap in the dark.”

No one knew quite what might happen in the first ISL season. Hume and his team-mates were initially worried about India’s reputation as a cricket-mad country and afraid people might not turn up to watch football.

“We were trying to reassure ourselves at first,” he explains. “Telling each other that with a population of 1.25 billion surely a few would come out to watch us. We needn’t have worried. The average attendance was mid-30s, some games drew 60-70,000, the final was watched by a TV audience of millions. We went to one place early on and we were moaning a bit because there were only around 12,000 spectators. Only! It would be great to see Tranmere getting gates like that again.”

Not that much seems to have changed in the nine and a half years since Hume left Prenton Park for Leicester City, except that a club once pushing for promotion to the Premier League and capable of claiming sizeable scalps in cup competitions is now fighting for league survival at the wrong end of League Two. “I hope I can help,” Hume says. “That’s why I’m here. I hope we can get the crowds back up to around nine or ten thousand too.

Iain Hume pictured in 2001, during his first spell at Tranmere Rovers. Photograph: Mike Mayhew/Sportsphoto Ltd

“I love being back here. Even six months is a big thing to me. Football is the only thing I’ve ever wanted and been able to do, and Tranmere gave me my chance. Through my own fault I’ve not got any education, no qualifications outside of playing football. I took a risk at 15 to come over here before finishing school in Canada. These guys gave me a start, and over 500 professional games later, 115 goals and 41 international caps [for Canada], I’m grateful.”

Football has not always been good to Hume. The still livid cranial scar he makes no attempt to hide attests to the most notorious episode of his career, when he came off second best to Chris Morgan’s elbow, Andy D’Urso’s ineffective refereeing and the FA’s lamentably inadequate disciplinary procedure, and received scant compensation for a fractured skull suffered while playing for Barnsley against Sheffield United in 2008. It seems too trite to ask a player whose whole life was altered by a brutal foul whether he is over the incident yet – not everything fades with time – though there must have been some doubt over whether he could summon the confidence to play football again.

“There were worries, but it was mostly my wife and parents who were concerned,” Hume says. “I knew I wanted to get back, not least because Barnsley had paid £1.2m for me. I was out for nine months, then in my first game back, pre-season for Barnsley against Gainsborough, my first touch of the ball was a header. It had to be, didn’t it? After that I was fine. Anyone who knows me will tell you I am not the type to shirk out of a challenge.

Sky Sports reporting that Chris Morgan will not face any further action for the elbow on Iain Hume.

“Sky tried to organise the next season’s fixture [against Sheffield United] to be a literally a year after the event, almost on the anniversary, but they didn’t quite get what they wanted. I was injured, he was suspended. I try not to hold grudges, you have to get on with your life, I don’t have any feelings towards the player either way now.”

Hume’s career took him to Preston North End, Doncaster Rovers and Fleetwood Town after Barnsley, then to the Kerala Blasters, but he still remains Tranmere’s youngest ever debutant, at 16 years and 167 days against Swindon Town in 2000. So how did someone born in Edinburgh and raised in Canada manage that?

“I came over on tour with Canada Under-18s,” he says. “I was only 15. The last game we played was against Tranmere Under-18s. They asked about me, but didn’t think they would be able to get a work permit. Then when they were told I was from Edinburgh and already had a passport they took my number. I wasn’t expecting anything much because I had already been for trials in Scotland with St Mirren and Hearts.

“They promised me the world and delivered nothing, which was disappointing because I felt I had done quite well at St Mirren, and Hearts was my boyhood team. But Tranmere took me on a trip with the Under-16s. We went all the way to France for some sort of mini-competition and ended up beating Port Vale in the final. I scored a goal, and that was it really. I knew I wouldn’t be going back to Canada. My parents accepted it was what I wanted, they knew what my decision would be if I ever got the chance.”

Hume probably ought to consider himself blessed, or lucky, or fulfilled at having carved out a career in football, though in fact he is much harder on himself than that. “I’ve done all right, but it could have been better,” he says. “I’ve not played at the pinnacle. Everyone dreams of playing in the Premier League or the World Cup. I’ve missed out on both and I’m devastated.

‘I’ve done all right, but it could have been better’, is Iain Hume’s honest assessment of his career. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

“I’m not naive, the truth might be that I may never have been good enough for the Premier League, not even when I was young at Tranmere or Leicester, but that was the dream. I don’t want to complain, I know what I’ve done isn’t bad for a boy from Canada. I’ve had a good career and with a bit of luck it might last a few more years yet, but I have to be honest and admit I didn’t get everything I wanted. Not all of my dreams came true, but I suppose that’s my fault for having big dreams.”