“At the end of these hard training runs on sand dunes, there were baths for the first eight that got back,” says Nevin. “You could run a bath, lie in it and recover; everyone else had these dribbling showers. So there was always a race to get back. One day Paul Canoville gets back among the first eight and so starts to run the bath, then goes back to his room to get all his oils and unctions. He comes back and there’s Kerry Dixon standing in his bath.

“I’ve just joined this club as a student – and hopefully a semi-intelligent person – and there’s a 6ft 2in white guy and a 6ft 1in black guy stark naked, standing in a little bath punching the living daylights out of each other. We had another player called Micky Droy who was much taller than them at 6ft 4in and built like a monster; he went over and just grabbed them both like two kittens and said, ‘Away.’”

It is a tale typical of The Accidental Footballer, Nevin’s enlightening and entertaining memoir about his life playing the game in the 1980s and 90s – first as a part-timer at Clyde in his native Scotland, combining football with his studies, and then down in England with Chelsea, Everton and Tranmere Rovers. A beret-wearing lover of indie music, the jinking little winger with the elfin looks was viewed as being different; he saw it otherwise, given the cast of characters around him. “Mr Bennet said it to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice about loving to study the unusual characters: they’re the ones worth looking at,” he reflects. “There’s a strange dichotomy in my book where I’m such an outsider but I constantly think I’m the normal one.” To him, two Chelsea footballers fighting over a bath was certainly different. “I was looking at this and thinking, ‘I’ve left a perfectly normal life as a student doing a degree for this madness.’”

That Nevin, now 57 and a successful broadcaster, has published a memoir will surprise few people familiar with his career. At the time he won the first of his two Chelsea Player of the Year prizes – in the club’s 1983/84 promotion season – he was sharing a one-bedroom flat with Adrian Thrills, a journalist from NME, the music magazine for which he wrote record reviews. “I have written for so many newspapers and magazines; I’ve always written for fun. This is pure fun,” he says. And his is almost certainly the first football memoir to have drawn on PG Wodehouse, his favourite author these days. “It’s like bands: you have favourite bands at different times,” he explains. “Very early on I was heavily into serious stuff – the French philosophers, the German philosophers and the heavy Russian reading – but then as the years go by you find other things and I just kept on coming back to Wodehouse.”

“The interesting thing about that story was the effect it had on Paul Canoville, and it led to something that has been a massive passion in my life: the anti-racism campaign,” explains Nevin who, in the mid-90s, became chairman of the English Professional Footballers’ Association. “I’ve heard people tell stories about nobody saying anything in the 80s and I’m thinking, ‘Steady on, mate – some of us were.’”

Nevin once sat down with two Chelsea-supporting National Front members in a west London café to discuss the problem. “I try to understand every other person. You hear me in the book trying to understand racists. I’ll listen, I’ll watch and then I’ll give – hopefully – a balanced view at the end of it, and the balanced view is there’s good and bad in everybody. The world gets into a lot of trouble when people don’t try to understand each other.” This leads to a reflection on today’s cancel culture, which is anathema to Nevin. “Considering the people who are doing the no-platforming are supposed to be the people at the front of our society who are the leaders in ideas, you think, ‘Where are we going now that we will not listen to people?’”

It is a question befitting a man who never hid away. In another tale in the book, he recounts an encounter with a knife-carrying Tottenham Hotspur fan on the Tube, after he had played there with Chelsea. “I thumped him with a right hook, and gave him an over the top, definite red card, straight-leg, bone-crunching ‘tackle’ to his knee,” he writes. It draws a fresh thought now. “I wanted to be in the real world so now and again that sort of thing happened to me, and it kept happening. I have a bit of sympathy for the modern players because the vast majority of them are so cossetted, are so bubbled, that it’s a very skewed view of life. Lives are now lived in a bubble of social media.

“But there are players out there, like Juan Mata, normal guys out there who see it and go, ‘This is a very mad and gilded world I’m in here, I’m going to take part in the real world as well.’ I felt like that when I played. People say it’s harder now but you can still do it, you absolutely can. It’d be a bit harder for Marcus Rashford to jump on the Tube without being mobbed but, to be fair, you can.”