Essien is not the only face familiar to Premier League fans who has worked under the Right to Dream umbrella.

Djimi Traore, a Champions League winner with Liverpool in 2005, trained at the academy’s base in Ghana before taking over AS Monaco’s youth team this year. Developing coaches comes a close second in the hierarchy of priorities within the academy’s multi-club setup.

“We are happy when coaches leave us,” says Flemming Pedersen, Right to Dream’s technical director, who was previously Brentford’s B team manager.

“It’s the same with our players. Then we hope that one day our best coaches will come home again.

“I was away for a year and a half at Brentford. You always learn something new when you meet a new culture. It’s important for us.

“We will be stronger if some of our coaches leave for big clubs in other countries. Our philosophy is: when we help each other, we will get back many good things.

“Success for us is the integration of players from our academies. If we don’t get that, we will never get results.

“Wwe is measuring the evolution of our style of play. It will give us better results. We are also measuring our coaches and how we train our coaches.”

So far, however, Essien has no plans to flee the Nordsjällandsboet in search of management opportunities.

“I’m not thinking about being a head coach. Not yet,” he says.

“But when I get there I will develop my style of play around the FCN model of what we do here. I have a few years left. Let’s see. Maybe I will get there.

“When I was playing, I never thought I would jump into this journey. But when I got to the end of my career, I thought one day: ‘I’ve been doing football all my life and I think that’s what I do best. I should start doing something just to keep my routine going.’

“I also wanted to get ideas and strategies on how to be a coach, to learn how to be a coach. That’s how it all came about.

“And also because I love the game. I will always be in and around the game.

“I try and do my best to help the young lads come up so they can do something with their careers.

“This generation, sometimes they can be quite difficult. Sometimes they think they know the world, but actually they don’t know anything.

“To have me around, it’s easy for them to come and ask me some questions and I give them some guidelines and some advice.”

However much he protests, it seems Essien is preparing for a shot at management. Just as he once mastered the art of playing midfield, he now loads up with ideas on how to crack coaching.

“I’ve just finished a football management course,” he says. “It has given me some ideas about how football clubs are run, the organization and everything.

“I’m just gathering some knowledge of the game because football goes off the field.”