It is a small but growing band of footballers signed up to Juan Mata’s Common Goal project, from Mats Hummels to the American women’s star Alex Morgan, and Duncan Watmore, the first Championship player on board, is adamant that doing so will change the way he regards his career.

The Sunderland striker, recently back from 10 months out with a ruptured cruciate ligament, is already something of a man apart in football, signed as a teenager from non-league Altrincham in the summer after his first year as an undergraduate at Manchester University. He moved to the north-east, switched his degree course to Newcastle University and graduated with first-class honours in economics and business management two years ago.

He never really set out to be a footballer, not after Manchester United’s academy rejected him aged 12, and he decided to take the opportunity to be a conventional teenager, playing cricket and rugby and doing A-levels in maths, physics and economics. Yet here he is now, a former England Under-21, the player of the Under-20s 2016 Toulon Tournament and, by his own admission, something of an accidental footballer.

He is giving one per cent of his salary to the charities supported by Mata’s Common Goal project for a simple reason: it feels to him like the game he plays, already very important in his life, will mean more. “As a footballer, I didn’t come down the conventional route,” he says. “It’s not something I expected to do my whole life. It was kind of thrown on me when I was 19. The main reason for me [signing up to Common Goal] is just giving back. It’s a cliché but it is true.