Amid all the euphoria that accompanied those wild celebrations at the King Power Stadium on the evening that Leicester City were crowned champions of England, it escaped unnoticed that one player was struggling to hold everything together. “I felt I didn’t deserve to be there, to be pictured,” Matty James says. “If you ask Danny Drinkwater, when I lifted the Premier League trophy I went to him, he had me in his arms and I was in tears. I was crying my eyes out, purely because I had no part to play in it whatsoever.”

James spent that entire season – the most famous in Leicester’s history – on the sidelines, physically unable to contribute after rupturing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in the penultimate home game of the previous campaign and mentally tormented by the once-in-a-lifetime experience that was unfolding on the pitch while he was fighting to save his career. “I was going home thinking: ‘What is going on here? The club is going to win the Premier League and I’m nowhere near it,’” James says. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want it to happen. But it was hard because I felt like I was on a rollercoaster going all the way down and the club was going in the opposite direction.”

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By the time James did return to Leicester’s lineup, against Arsenal at the beginning of this season, it was 865 days since his previous start for the club – a remarkable statistic that reflects what an ordeal it had been for the midfielder to get back to where he was before the injury happened. That journey has taken in three knee operations, regular visits to a psychologist, emotional conversations with his family about finding another job, desperate attempts to win over Claudio Ranieri, and a kidney infection that left the 26-year-old in so much pain that he says he will “remember it for the rest of my life”.

James has never had any desire to speak publicly about all of this before, yet it is a measure of his positive frame of mind on and off the field now – he has started all three league games this season, recently signed a new four-year deal and is the proud father of a four-month-old boy – that he is happy to talk candidly for more than an hour and a half about everything he has been through.

“I am in a really good place now,” James says. “I’ll be 30 years old when that contract runs out – I didn’t think I was going to get past 25. I thought I was going to be doing something else. But it doesn’t stop here for me. I want to do more things for this club, only without setting big goals, because it’s been a devastating thing for me when I have done that, in terms of the unrealistic ones that I set with the injury. But that’s not to say I don’t have dreams and aspirations.”

Some of those ambitions are fuelled by seeing what Drinkwater, who is one of his closest friends and could line up against him at the King Power Stadium for Chelsea on Saturday, has gone on to achieve. The pair enjoyed the best part of a decade together at Manchester United, lived across the road from one another in Cheshire and spent the past five years sharing car journeys to Leicester after joining the club in 2012. “We’re kind of joined at the hip,” says James, smiling. “I rang him the other day and said: ‘You need to get Chelsea on the phone because it’s round about six months we have apart, it can’t be any longer.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matty James runs with the ball during last month’s match against Manchester United, the club where he began his career. Photograph: Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images

James is laughing, yet there is a serious point to make about him and Drinkwater, given that before his injury he was keeping out of the Leicester team the man who will be an usher at his wedding next year. Indeed, James could be forgiven for looking at Drinkwater and thinking that it could easily have been him playing for his country, winning a title medal and at the centre of a multimillion-pound transfer.

“I can’t fault what Drinky has done,” he says. “To play for England, win the Premier League and get the move to Chelsea is phenomenal. And for me to be such a good friend, I couldn’t be happier for him. At the same time, you do think: ‘Would I have had that opportunity?’ But it’s only now that I’m getting myself back to the level that I need to be at. Obviously I want to give more. And I think things like Drinky’s story drive me on. There’s no reason why I can’t play for England and achieve things at this football club. And I think Drinky would be the first person to say I can do it. But I’d never say I’m jealous because that’s not the case at all.”

Envy is not something that anyone would associate with James, who is a hugely popular figure among the staff and players at Leicester. Listening to him talk, there is no trace of resentment towards those who were creating history, more a sense of despair and disbelief that he was on the outside looking in, not just injured but enduring setback after setback.

Every member of staff wanted me to get some minutes but I just don’t think Ranieri understood

It all started when he ruptured his cruciate ligament in May 2015 in what seemed like a fairly innocuous incident as he chased Ryan Bertrand. The prognosis after surgery was that he could be out for a year, but James refused to accept that timeline. Initially he made good progress and there was a suggestion he could be involved in an FA Cup replay against Tottenham Hotspur, eight months after he had left the field on a stretcher against Southampton. But then James suffered his first slice of bad luck.

“I played in a reserve game at Blackburn a few days before and the pitch was boggy. I went to have a shot, my foot sank and I felt something straight away. I was in denial and ran off but I felt physically sick. Within five minutes I was like a three-legged dog, all over the shop. I walked straight into the dressing room, rang Dave Rennie, the physio, and we went to see Andy Williams, the surgeon. They put a camera in and it showed that I’d torn a bit of the meniscus. So I had operation number two.”

James was back in training by March and still had his heart set on playing before the end of the season, but then came another blow after he woke up one morning with severe pain in his left knee. An MRI scan showed nothing was wrong, prompting James to question himself, even though he was sure there was a problem. “I didn’t think I was a hypochondriac but at that point I started asking myself: ‘Am I making things up? Is it me?’ I said to Andy, the surgeon: ‘Listen, I’m begging you, put a camera inside it.’ So they did and I remember when I came around from the arthroscopy, Dave was sat there and told me that the little anchors they use when you have cruciate surgery had snapped. I think the surgeon had only seen it once before.”

That third knee operation proved to be a “breaking point” for James. Leah, his fiancee, and his parents, Maxine and Lynton, were always hugely supportive but they had also been taking the brunt of his frustration. Feeling low and worried to the point that he was having discussions with his family about the fact he had nothing to fall back on outside of football, James decided to look for help in another direction. “That’s when I sought psychological advice,” he says. “I started seeing Martin Littlewood [a sport psychologist]. When I first went to see Martin, I think I spoke for an hour and a half without him saying a word. I had tears in my eyes. It was just a release.

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“The big thing that came out of our conversations was that he said to me: ‘You need to find your identity again.’ I said: ‘I don’t even know what that is any more.’ He talked about everything away from football, like my family, and he said: ‘That’s your identity. You’re not the footballer; the footballer is inside you.’ It was eye-opening and I stopped thinking about things that I couldn’t control – because I’d been trying to control everything.”

Through sheer determination – he even converted his garage into a gym to do extra rehabilitation work – James managed to get himself into a position where he was travelling with the first-team squad by the end of the season, despite undergoing three operations in 10 months. Leicester won the title with two matches to spare and James saw a window of opportunity to achieve his goal.

“We played Everton at home and Chelsea away, and I think every member of staff wanted me to get some minutes. I think all the players did, too – even if it was just five minutes. But I just don’t think Ranieri understood it. Chelsea, especially – I travelled, I was in the squad, but the shirt wasn’t there. And that was tough because I wanted to try to prove I could get back – just a couple of minutes going into the summer would have been a massive boost.”

The one positive for James was that he was fit again. He headed to the US for three weeks with his brother, Reece, who plays for Wigan and was also recovering from a serious injury at the time, and trained twice a day to be ready for pre-season. What followed when he returned was a freakish chain of events that left James feeling as though he was cursed.

“I woke up on the first day of pre-season and thought: ‘What the hell is that?’ I had a sharp pain in my lower back. I went to do the test run that we do and I had to grit my teeth to get through it because I felt horrendous. I came back in and urinated blood. They did some tests and it turned out that I had a kidney stone. I went for the operation but the urethra was too narrow for the kidney stone to pass, so I had to have a stent in for three weeks to stretch it. I carried on training with the stent, taking all kinds of medication to get through it, because I felt I had to do that with Ranieri because I didn’t have anything to fall back on to prove to him what I could do.

“When I had the stent removed and the kidney stone obliterated, they told me there was a 1% chance of infection. I went home and woke up at 4am, white, wet through and in absolute agony. Leah rang Dave and he told her to take me straight to A&E. It turned out I had a big kidney infection. So the only thing that had been going through my head was impressing Ranieri and staying within touching distance, and now it was gone. They were flying to Los Angeles and I was in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester for six days. I remember coming back in afterwards and everyone saying: ‘You’ve got to be the unluckiest player around.’”

Convinced by now that he would always struggle to impress Ranieri, James got himself fit and pushed for a loan move, only to be told that he was still part of Leicester’s plans. “Then, on 31 August, Ranieri pulled me into his office and said: ‘It’s deadline day, we’re not going to name you in the Champions League squad.’ I was gobsmacked. I was thinking: ‘If I’m not in the Champions League squad, I’m 100% not going to play in the Premier League, it’s the 31 August, I’ve not started a game for over a year, what the hell am I going to do?’”

Resigned to not playing competitively until the new year, James ended up coming on as an injury-time substitute in the 4-2 victory over Manchester City in December to a standing ovation from the Leicester supporters, but that was his only appearance under Ranieri and by then he knew that he “had no choice but to get out”.

Barnsley took him on loan in January and James will always be grateful to Paul Heckingbottom, their manager, for the faith he showed in him when others were sceptical.

With confidence restored after making 18 appearances for Barnsley and parenthood bringing him so much enjoyment outside football, James returned to Leicester this summer feeling reinvigorated. The club’s decision to give the manager’s job to Craig Shakespeare, who had always been supportive of James through his injury problems, was another encouraging sign for a player who deserved a few things to fall into place for him.

Back in the team and enjoying his football, he is thankful to so many people at Leicester for their help, yet is also not thinking too far ahead. Lessons have been learned in that respect and it is interesting to hear him talk about “always being in rehab” from now on to make sure that he is doing everything in his power to remain fit.

In his mind, though, it sounds as if the battle has already been won. “That’s the biggest thing – I am 100% stronger mentally,” James says. “And that will help me now as a player, as a dad and after football.”