It was three days after the World Cup final, in the very different surroundings of a pre-season fixture between Gainsborough Trinity and Chesterfield, that Harry Maguire discovered life was probably never going to be the same again.

The queue of autograph hunters, he recalls now, kept him occupied throughout the entire half-time interval once word got out that one of England’s unlikely heroes was among the crowd at The Northolme, where his brothers, Laurence, 21, and Joe, 26, were lining up on opposing sides, both wearing the same shirt number, six, as their more famous sibling.

“There must have been a good few hundred queueing up,” Maguire says. “That was probably the busiest place I have been since the World Cup. It is part and parcel of the job but, since the World Cup, it has been on a different scale. It is nice, though. I still do normal things and I still support my brothers, which I have done throughout my life. But that game at Gainsborough was mad. I think they restricted them to one photo or a signature each to try to get through everyone.”

There was a lesson that day for the man Gareth Southgate acclaimed during the summer for “getting his bonce on everything”, namely that a baseball cap – deliberately pulled low – is not going to stop you being mobbed in the warm afterglow of a World Cup summer.

Maguire has also been pleasantly surprised, in the first few weeks of the Premier League season, to hear his name being applauded by opposition supporters. And then, of course, there has been the churn of headlines linking the Leicester centre-half with Manchester United and the possibility of becoming the most expensive defender in English football history.

Harry Maguire poses with a young fan at St George’s Park on Tuesday. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/The FA/Rex/Shutterstock

Not that it ever came to anything. “I spoke to Leicester after a bit of interest from clubs and they reiterated that I wasn’t for sale,” Maguire says. “They gave me an opportunity to play in the Premier League when I had just been relegated with Hull. They have given me the platform to play at the World Cup, so I feel like I owe them and I respect that decision.”

He can expect the loudest cheer when Leicester’s King Power stadium hosts England’s game against Switzerland next Tuesday, particularly now Jamie Vardy’s decision to step away from international football has left Maguire as the club’s only representative in Southgate’s squad.

First things first, however, as England begin the next phase of the Southgate era with Saturday’s encounter against Spain at Wembley and their first game of the newly established European Nations League – when the only problem, perhaps, is that none of the players seems to grasp the convoluted nature of the competition.

“It is quite confusing,” Maguire says. “I don’t know what you [media] guys think of it. The boss tried to explain it to us the best he could the other day. It is confusing but we are trying to get our heads round it. As players you just try to win every game – and we’ll see where that takes us.”

That philosophy served England well during the World Cup but, equally, it would be a mistake to think Maguire’s portfolio of memories, from Volgograd to Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, Moscow, Samara, Moscow again and, finally, St Petersburg is not tinged with regret.

“I still have that bit inside me which is disappointed. It does make me feel a little bit gutted at times to think how close we were. We were really close and, at half-time against Croatia, we had one foot in the final of a World Cup. So if you look back at that game, it is disappointing. I’ve watched the highlights but I find it tough, to be honest, to watch it back.

“When I look back at the first half and the chances we had to kill the game – on another day we’d go in two or three up and maybe the game is over. In the second half we didn’t perform as well and they [Croatia] had a lot of the ball without creating too many chances.

“A lot of England fans thought we were under pressure but, playing the game, I felt really comfortable. I really didn’t feel they were going to hurt us, so that’s always on my mind now when I think about the Croatia game. But it’s gone now and we have to move on.”