It was football in the 1980s, a bygone era that predates the Premier League and teenage footballing multi-millionaires.

He would go on to play for Derby in the Premier League, a competition where he spent a majority of his career as a midfielder for Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City, Everton and Birmingham City.

Carsley also went on to play for the Republic of Ireland 39 times and featured for them at the 2002 World Cup.

From each of those teams and the managers he played under – be it Jim Smith at the Rams or David Moyes at Everton – Carsley said he learnt career-shaping lessons.

But it was those early years as a youth player at Derby, a grounding in the "old school" – which included knowing how to deal with the notoriously bad pitch at its former Baseball Ground home – which stuck with Carsley the person as much as anything.

"It's a different game when you consider part of our job was cleaning the Baseball Ground, the boardroom and the terraces and helping out with the pitch and painting the sides and the stands and all those kinds of things," he...