‘The only thing I remember is the ballbag, in which every ball was the same except one. It had a slightly different pattern. That was the most important ball. You wanted that one. I started here.’

Lucas Bergstrom was four-and-a-half years old and taking his first steps in the world of football playing at a summer camp in the central park of his hometown of Pargas. The camp was run by Pargas Idrottsförening, or PIF for short, the town’s sport club which also focused on skiing and orienteering. It was they who Lucas would represent for almost a decade.

‘They had one astroturf main pitch,’ he recalls.

‘Then there was another grass pitch where the first team would play their games, and then two other grass pitches in that town I would play sometimes. Everyone used it.

‘The astroturf pitch was where everything started, though. I spent a lot of time there. Sometimes I would train with one age group, and when the session stopped, I would just stay on training. I would spend hours there. Even now, I still go there in the summer to train.’

Lucas says Pargas is a quiet and beautiful town of around 15,000 people where ‘everyone knows everyone’. Roughly six per cent of Finnish people speak Swedish as their first language, mostly along the west coast. Bergstrom is one of those who grew up doing so, having attended the local Swedish school in Pargas. He is fluent in Finnish, too, and is proud to represent the national team.

Several of Bergstrom’s teammates at PIF – a small club where the quality varied significantly – were his classmates. When PIF participated in nationwide tournaments, they struggled, but Lucas’s quality stood out.

Aged 11, he joined another club, Turun Palloseura, or TPS. They played in nearby Turku, Finland’s third-biggest city. For three years, Bergstrom represented both PIF and TPS, turning out for them at the weekend on alternate days. When he moved to secondary school in Turku, he would train four or five times a week, and then play at the weekend. His ‘gift’ for maths and gymnastics enabled him to skip those classes and train extra in the middle of the day, too.

Lucas moved to TPS permanently by 14. Two years later, in October 2018, he left for Chelsea.

‘When you look back, I just did it. But I don’t know how!’ he laughs.

Lucas had barely told anyone that Chelsea - and indeed other clubs – had been interested in him. He didn’t want to brag, he says, despite having a ‘stupid sense of security it would work out’.

‘I just left school and never came back. Afterwards you think about how crazy it was. At the time, it didn’t feel like that, but when you think about it later, there are not a lot of people who get this opportunity. It could have gone another way.’

By now, Lucas stood 2.05 metres tall (6ft 7). It didn’t take him long to make an impression, and he was soon training with our Under-18 side.

‘When I got here, it felt easy,’ he recalls.

‘I had to adapt and all that stuff, but it felt very simple. I was so excited to be here. It had been a long process to actually get here.

‘They would almost have to tell me to go home to Finland on my days off because I just wanted to stay and train, but when you get older the opportunities to go home are more rare so you appreciate it a lot more.’

Besides joining such a big club, one of the key factors behind Lucas’s decision to leave his homeland so young was the opportunity to regularly play on grass pitches. In Finland, that was a luxury the weather rarely afforded you.

It is now six years since he arrived at Chelsea. ‘It feels forever, and it’s gone fast!’ he assesses with a glint in his eye. Having featured prominently for our Academy teams, Lucas has since embarked on a couple of loan spells, and often been an unused substitute for our first team.

The 22-year-old acknowledges the ups and downs along the way, and recognises he is still very far from making it at the top of the game. But reaching this point still takes a serious amount of effort, and time.

‘I’ve always enjoyed work,’ Lucas gives as the main reason behind his upward trajectory since he was a little boy.

‘I’ve always enjoyed football. I enjoyed challenging myself and getting better. There is small stuff on the way that has stuck with me. I wanted to succeed. That time before I came here, all of my decisions were about what would help my football better. It was my way of thinking. I just wanted to become better.

‘The next period is about working up the levels. There is a big pyramid. When you get near the top, there are so many good players. The differences are small, but they’re huge. It’s also about having a bit of luck and taking your opportunities.

‘So far, football has been my life. It’s been the main focus, with the time I’ve spent on it. It’s not been a huge sacrifice in that way because I’ve wanted to play, but I’ve left other things behind.’

And what about back home in Pargas? Is he a celebrity there now?

‘I have to become the best footballer from the town first, and then maybe. That’s [former Charlton striker] Jonatan Johansson. I’m still a small fish!’