A few days shy of a landmark birthday and Gordon Strachan cuts a relaxed and reflective figure. He is sat at a large boardroom table upstairs in the clubhouse of Spartans, the Lowland League club where he is a patron, nursing one of the many cups of tea he gets through on any given day. His communications chief hovers nearby knowing a refill could be required at any moment.

No more than a Jim Leighton punt from the Muirhouse estate in north Edinburgh where he grew up, the Scotland manager has returned to his roots ahead of his 60th birthday on Thursday. On this occasion, however, Strachan is the one delivering rather than receiving the gifts.

His decision to give away what many would consider cherished pieces of memorabilia with barely a second thought says a lot about the Strachan mindset. He is clearly not one who measures fame and success by materialistic items. While many former players deck out entire rooms of their various homes with jerseys, medals and other trinkets, Strachan’s haul from a venerated playing career with Dundee, Aberdeen, Manchester United, Leeds United and Coventry City – as well as 20 years as a manager – has been kept mainly hidden from public view. His mum has kept a few bits and bobs, mainly Scotland caps earned over the years, but the rest of his collection has been retained in more modest surrounds.

“Someone asked me last week where I keep my medals and I didn’t have a clue,” he admits. “But I found them and the guys from here [Spartans] will show them. They were in the garage and the medals were in an Asda bag. I’m so proud of them but I don’t really need to show them. I come from a footballing family and it’s the last thing my kids and my grandson wants to see, my stuff dotted about the house.”

Spartans have inherited quite the haul and it will all go up once suitable display cabinets – and the requisite insurance policies – have been sorted out. The medals themselves are a reminder of the success Strachan enjoyed as a player, most notably with Aberdeen; Premier League, Scottish Cup, Cup-Winners' Cup, Super Cup, FA Cup, Charity Shield, as well as the old English second and first division medals won with Leeds in the autumn of his career.

The shirts lay strewn across the table, history dripping from every stitch. There is the famous red and white pinstripe strip that Aberdeen wore in Gothenburg, the material having shrunk so much in the subsequent 34 years that it is hard to imagine a grown adult ever fitting into it. There is the Scotland strip Strachan wore for his 50th and final cap against Finland in 1992, the one he wore to captain Leeds to the title that same year, as well as the top he was given for his part in a Rest of the World versus The Americas select match in 1986. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Strachan remembers the anecdotes associated with each one more than the matches themselves.

“There is always a story behind most of these things, a bit of a laugh and a joke,” he said. “The one behind the Aberdeen strip is me cutting my hair before the final because I couldn’t see, so I just chopped it off with the scissors. And I gave my wife a piggyback to bed at the end of the night after the celebrations and watching Mark McGhee fall in the swimming pool. There’s the 1991/92 Leeds Championship one and the Scotland one was for the 50th cap. They are the four main strips that I still had. I think I had them framed a long time ago because they have still got the tape on them, but I never put them up.”

His appearance for a Rest of the World select on the back of his goalscoring heroics for Scotland at the 1986 World Cup is the source of more abiding memories.

“I got stopped by [Diego] Maradona’s minders on my way to my room. There were guys with guns and they wanted to know what I was doing. I said 'I play' and the boy just laughed at me. Terry Butcher was there and Pat Jennings so we had fun the three of us. [Franz] Beckenbauer was the manager of that team.

“I also didn’t realise I had been speaking to Danny Kaye [the American entertainer] for five minutes while I was in the stand. I thought the guy was a groundsman. He came out and shook our hands and wished us all the best and I was like, 'Jesus Christ, it’s Danny Kaye'.”

So how would anyone visiting chez Strachan know he was involved in football? “I walk with a limp now and then, and I look like this,” he deadpans. “I have a lithograph of Tommy Burns flying through the air when we beat Shakhtar Donetsk [with Celtic] and the boys went to celebrate. I have got that, that’s about it.”

Instead it is the memories rather than the mementoes that sustain Strachan as he eases into his 45th year in the game. He jokes that he is “a failure in life” having never realised his childhood ambition of scoring for Hibs (although he did pull on the shirt for a testimonial game) but the collection on the table – as well as his various managerial achievements – suggest he has done more than alright.

“There was only one moment in football - when I was at Leeds - when someone asked me to do something specific,” he recalled. “We needed to get promoted or we were knackered as a club. I scored a goal that kind of got us promoted against Leicester. Every bit of practice, every run down the beach and all the rest of it, it seemed to be for that moment. It all came together then.

“The rest of the things just unfolded, they were never planned. When you were a kid you never thought: 'European cups, manager of Scotland, leagues'. There was never any great plan.”

If playing was forever a pleasure, then Strachan admits that management has been a comparable hard shift, during good times and bad. There have been a myriad different experiences extracted from stints in charge of Coventry, Southampton, Celtic, Middlesbrough and the Scottish national team, and Strachan believes he has learned something from them all.

“You know more [the older you get], definitely,” he concedes. “I was never a real bully but we’re in the era now where you can lose them [players] in a dressing room. Mind you, I heard [Antonio] Conte at half time going into the Italy dressing room when we played them in Malta back in May - whoa, I've never heard anything like it in my life. It was Alex Ferguson stuff, seriously. He cleared the dressing room and got right into it. And [Juergen] Klopp’s the same.

“So it's gone from your Arsenes and Svens where you had to be the professor, back to the screaming and shouting and leaping around the dugout. There’s no one way of managing.

“Listen, there are so many great things about the game, so much has changed and the game is better now in a lot of ways; the pitches, the stadiums, the technique of the players, and their speed. But I’m just not so sure about the character, loyalty, respect or whatever you want to call it.”

Strachan’s wife Lesley has a special trip planned to celebrate this landmark birthday. “She was going to take me to see Graceland but it’s not conducive to this time of year. So it might have to wait for a few months. I’m a huge Elvis fan. So that’s the plan.”

It is football, though, that is always on his mind.