After a couple of seasons with Groningen in Holland Dusan Tadić thought he was about to join Ajax the club he had wanted to join while growing up in Serbia. That move did not materialise and so he ended up at Southampton, via FC Twente, for a fee in the region of £10m. His father had been against the move, hoping that the rumours that Manchester United were weighing up a bid, but Dusan had already decided he wanted to play for Ronald Koeman making him the new Southampton manager’s first signing. His four years on the south coast were generally regarded as a success as he became part of a triumvirate, with two other newcomers Graziano Pellè and Sadio Mané, that on its day carved its way through Premier League defences almost at will as Saints finished 7^th and then 6^th.

But then Koeman departed, as did Mané and Pellè and the team started its decline under Puel and Pellegrino and Tadić’s influence waned. He could still lay on the most incisive of passes, and he had a shrewd footballing brain but when the tough got going he could also expostulate and go missing.

He finally got his dream move to Ajax in the summer of 2018, with Saints recouping most of their original outlay and it was assumed, wrongly, that approaching 30 his career had peaked. He was, however, a revelation in Holland helping Ajax win the domestic double and reach the last four of the Champions League playing delightful football along the way. Having only scored 24 goals in 134 games for Saints he suddenly started finding the net with regularity scoring 28 in 34 Eredivisie games. The Guardian newspaper named him the 27^th best player in World football in December 2019, some feat considering the previous year he hadn’t been in the top 100.