Too often, though, the character lacked depth: as thin as the page of the comic he seemed to spring from.

“He was this kind of Roy of the Rovers figure and as I got older I got frustrated and almost embarrassed by people having a better knowledge of my dad than I did,” Rob says.

“Part of the joy of having a father is finding our own identity – there is a little blueprint there and if we are lucky we follow the good bits and jettison the bad bits – but I didn’t have that.

“There is still a kid in me that wants to know the simple stuff: what he smelt like and sounded like, a bit more about him, rather than this persona. That is the eternal frustration.”

Rob channelled that frustration into a book – The Ghost of White Hart Lane – interviewing family members, former team-mates, friends and acquaintances, to try and discover the man behind the myth.

And gradually he found him.

Rob heard about the sadness and homesickness that would grip John each winter in London. He heard about the time he drove home dangerously drunk, clipping the White Hart Lane gates in his car. Most revealingly, an uncle told Rob about the child that John had fathered in Scotland and left behind before he travelled south, played for Spurs and met Sandra.

“Part of me has always been trying to live up to this person who was absolutely perfect, who was idolised not just by the family, but by hundreds of thousands of people,” says Rob.

“To find out he had defects and weaknesses, that he struggled with confidence, mental health and seasonal affective disorder, that he had made mistakes – if I had found all that out earlier, it would have made more sense to my life.

“If we know our parents are fallible, it really makes us understand that we can make mistakes. We don’t have to know all the answers.”

John’s absence shaped Rob as surely as his presence would have.

Rob is a still-life photographer – “I have always been looking for those details and clues” – and is also training as a counsellor.

Later this month, Rob will be in the audience at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for the first performance of a play, called The Ghost of White Hart Lane, that he commissioned about his father’s life.

The staging is intended to share his father’s story to several generations of fans who remember neither John’s life or death.

“It is something I talk about with my own therapist,” he says. “Having seen life breathed into the story at the play’s read-throughs, it reinforced the reasons I wanted to get involved with the project.

“I think there is something of trying to bring my dad back to life.”

After two nights in Tottenham, the play will then transfer north, taking the opposite journey to the one John took in life, for a stint at the Edinburgh Festival., external

There are some things that remain lost. Rob is still searching for a recording of John’s voice. One of his match-worn Tottenham shirts remains elusive.

But over the decades, he has found much more: an understanding and an empathy for the father he never knew.

Playing against Bondy’s best was no mean feat given the tally of professional footballers among their alumni – which includes Arsenal defender William Saliba – is in double figures.

Project Mbappe didn’t stop there.

While a teenage Mbappe pinned up pictures of Ronaldo and watched old footage of Zinedine Zidane, another Real Madrid superstar, there was a third role model far closer to home – Jires Kembo Ekoko, his adopted brother.

Ekoko was taken in by Mbappe’s parents when he was nine and was selected for the French Federation’s national academy at Clairefontaine before playing professionally for Rennes in Ligue 1.

Ekoko was more than a decade older than Mbappe but had a big impact.

At the age of six, Mbappe had learned the French national anthem, explaining to his teacher that “one day, I’ll play in the World Cup for France”.

It wasn’t only Wilfried and Fayza who believed Mbappe was destined for big things.

Nike came calling with free shoes when he was just 10. A little over six years later, he made his first-team debut for Monaco. But the progress between those two points was not smooth.

Allan Momege was a classmate of Mbappe at Clairefontaine.

“At the time I met him, he wasn’t the player who impressed me the most,” Momege says of Mbappe in the BBC Sport documentary.

“He didn’t stand out for me as a player during the trials. The first time I saw him play, I didn’t think, ‘Wow!’

“There were regional selections and Kylian wasn’t in the best team.”

Matt Spiro, an author and French football expert, echoes Momege.

“Kylian initially found it a bit difficult at Clairefontaine,” he says. “He was there for two years and during the first year, he certainly wasn’t the best in his group. I think even Kylian would admit that.

“Mbappe would play out on the wing and would quite frequently be in a sulky mood. He had a growth spurt, I think towards the end of his first year in Clairefontaine, and by the second year, he was really starting to look the business.

“Then people were thinking, we’ve got a very, very special talent on our hands.”

That talent was picked up by Monaco scouts in July 2013, when he was aged 14.

Moving from the Parisian suburbs to the wealthy, sunny Cote d’Azur at such a young age could have made others go inside themselves.

Not the boy from Bondy.

Bayern Munich maintained their flawless start in the Bundesliga with an emphatic 5-0 victory over Werder Bremen.

Harry Kane scored just the one goal, but it was a significant one. Kane’s strike made him the top scoring English player in the history of the Bundesliga.

The England captain’s goal moved him above Jadon Sancho, who scored 40 Bundesliga goals for Borussia Dortmund.

However, it was the performance of Michael Olise – who scored twice against Bremen – which got the juices flowing for Bayern boss Vincent Kompany.

Olise, who joined Bayern in a £50m deal from Crystal Palace, has been in scintillating form with five goals in his past three games in all competitions.

“Michael did very well. He’s a special talent. It’s a luxury at Bayern to have so many good players,” Kompany said after the game.

“His start at Bayern couldn’t be much better. He has to keep going this way. I haven’t got the feeling that he’s a player who feels much pressure. He just enjoys football.”

Bayern have scored 29 goals under Kompany – a new club record for the first six competitive matches of a coach since the Bundesliga was founded.

No wonder Kompany allowed Bayern’s players – including Kane, Olise and Jamal Musiala – to don their lederhosen and enjoy the first Sunday of the Oktoberfest festival.

Champions Bayer Leverkusen remain a point behind Bayern after a dramatic 4-3 victory over Wolfsburg.

Victor Boniface scored in the third minute of injury time for Leverkusen, with midfielder Granit Xhaka calling the match a “a giant wake-up call” before next Saturday’s showdown with Bayern.

“We can’t keep going with performances like that. We can’t defend so naively. Sure, we scored four but we can’t do that every weekend,” Xhaka said.

Elsewhere, Borussia Dortmund were thrashed 5-1 by Stuttgart, while newly promoted Holstein Kiel got their first-ever Bundesliga point after a 2-2 draw at Bochum.

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