football cult for 16 minutes

Swansea would go on to win promotion to the Championship that

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season, and while all was not entirely well behind the scenes, Andrea admits he still enjoyed the new and exciting possession-based style City were starting to implement. A style that would later become known as “the Swansea Way”.

“I loved it,” he says. “I mean, it’s what I learned since I was a kid in Spain. Obviously, at Barcelona, I kind of mastered it. At Barcelona, every training session is detailed to play like this. Then when Roberto left, everybody thought, maybe we're getting lost here.

“Paulo Sousa came and I think we finished seventh. And then Brendan (Rodgers) came and we got promoted. So it was our evolution every season and I could see that we were destined to do something special.

“Roberto told me when I signed that in four years we would reach the Premier League, and I thought maybe it was a bit too ambitious. But in four years we got to the Premier League.”

That win over Reading in the playoff final at Wembley in 2011 would understandably go down in Swans folklore, but for Andrea, the experience was bittersweet.

“That season I was playing up until January, but I got injured, and then I came back, got injured again, and then Joe Allen was playing and there was no space for me,” he remembers.

“But with two or three games to go, I was back in the team, and I was always involved. I was on the bench for the semifinals, and before the final, Brendan called me into his room. He was crying and he said, ‘listen, I can’t have you on the bench because Garry Monk is struggling, so I need another defender’.

“I was that type of player that I said, ‘no worries, gaffer: I'll be a fan and I'll do what I can to support my teammates. But inside I was dead.”

However, despite his disappointment, the euphoria of watching his teammates seal a return to the top flight after a 28-year exile was enough to put those feelings to one side.