It’s said you learn more from the tough times than the good, and Riccardo Calafiori experienced this very, very early in his career.

He was just 16 – playing in the UEFA Youth League for the very first time – when he suffered a potentially career-ending knee injury.

The next few weeks and months tested his body, but also his mind, as he resolved to prove the doctors wrong. He was told, before even undergoing surgery, that his promising career - he was already a regular Italy youth international - could be over before it had started in earnest.

But Riccardo says he barely even listened to those prophecies of doom, and instead used that period to his advantage, being surrounded by first-team players during his rehab, and is now reaping the reward of the advice he picked up at the time.

The defender spent his entire footballing upbringing at AS Roma, joining the academy as an eight-year-old, and one of the silver linings to his lengthy injury layoff was that he was soon in the company of the senior players at the club.

“As young players we never really spent much time around the squad, not until you approach playing for the first team,” he begins. “When you start training with them then it happens. But in fact, I was one of the few that spent much time around them, because of my injury.

"I was 16 when I got injured, so I wasn’t a part of the first-team squad yet, but I did my rehab with them. It was amazing for me to spend time with them, and they gave me some advice, it was the first moment that I felt a little bit part of the first team. It gave me that taste of what life would be like there.”

He admits though, that at that age, he was not the kind of character to constantly question and be in the ear of his more illustrious teammates.

“No, I was so quiet, so shy!” he laughs. “But they would come over to me and speak to me, and I’m so grateful for that and all the help they gave me. Some big players were there at the time too, players like Daniele de Rossi, and we became really close friends because of that. Also in the team at the time were Alex Kolarov, Edin Dzeko – all top players for me, and so that was good to be around them.”

He says that was one of the motivating factors during his rehab, helping him get over the huge shock of the injury.

It came in a UEFA Youth League group stage game, at home to Viktoria Plzen in October 2018. With the score at 3-3, with 10 minutes remaining, a bad tackle resulted in him rupturing every ligament in his knee, as well as his meniscus and articular capsule.

“It was late in the game," he reflects, "and when these kinds of things happen, you always think back over it to see if there is anything you could have done differently.

“10 minutes before the injury, I had cramp, so I could have come off. But I wanted to stay on because I was young, it was my debut – of course you want to play. But it happened. It happened to be that way, you cannot change these things.”

"the doctors said to me maybe I can’t come back to play football again. It was hard to hear, but it gave me the motivation to come back"

Talking of coaching, what would Riccardo’s football philosophy be if he went into coaching? While he was injured, was he encouraged to use that time to study the game for example?

“At that time, not really. Now that happens more, it’s true, so I wish I had done that more in the past. But it was different, I was only 16, it was not the right time. I was still at school, doing my exams. “But I don’t know what my football approach would be as a coach, because I’m still pretty young. So I’ve worked with a few coaches already, but not enough to get my ideas yet. I don’t want to say much on that now, because maybe in three years it will all change.

“I have to say I don’t think I will stay in football after I finish playing, but what I have learnt so far in life is what I am thinking now could be completely different to what I will think in three years.

"So never say never, but at the moment I don’t know what I would do. I hopefully have 10 or 15 years to think about it!

“Actually, when I was injured I got interested in the medical side of it, and in fact my dream is to be a chiropractor or an osteopath, but I know that’s very difficult. It’s a lot of study, but maybe one day!”