Through life, Ighalo has been anything but egocentric. “When I first saw him as a teenager, I could tell that he had a chance,” Okeleji explains. “Where we grew up, if you take the wrong path you could end up doing drugs, attacking people, selling fake Armani bags in the middle of the road. But he came from a strong family, with older brothers to protect him from these dangers. He and his twin sister were the last born, and he left the ghetto very early.

“He had trials in Portugal and eventually ended up at Lyn Oslo. The moment he arrived in Norway, he told his mum he was cold. Still, his attitude was that he couldn’t go home empty-handed, that he couldn’t go back to the life he was living before he left for Europe.”

The Norwegian connection proved another propitious circumstance in steering him towards United. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer remembered him from his two seasons in Oslo, while Ighalo’s agents had also dealt with the manager’s long-standing representative, Jim Solbakken. For all that Ighalo has scarcely concealed his euphoria at securing such a move, his off-field activities suggest an unbreakable attachment to his native land.

At Udinese, he spoke of his resolve to build a place in Nigeria in which the destitute still had a chance to thrive, and he has made good on that promise by creating an orphanage in his name in Lagos. The project, on which he has spent £1 million so far, can accommodate up to 40 children, taking orphaned babies and pledging to look after them until they turn 18.

When Ighalo, who, despite his fortune has no permanent base outside Lagos, turned up last Christmas to inspect the premises, he was venerated, followed through the front door by a brass band.

The happiness of his improbable United switch is tempered, however, by the loss of his sister Mary, who died in December aged just 43 after collapsing at her home. It is her name that will be stitched on his red boots against Chelsea tonight, alongside the Nigerian flag. For it is not merely one man’s destiny at stake in this tale, but the fate of a crazed football nation that at last has a United idol to call its own.