It is often said that nowadays, talented young footballers have never had it so good. At most top clubs, young recruits don’t even need to clean the boots of the senior pros anymore.

But for new Partick Thistle signing Mustapha Dumbuya, his road to the highest level of the Scottish game could hardly have been more tumultuous.

Hailing from Sierra Leone, Dumbuya’s life was turned upside down at the age of just 5 when his mother, surrounded by the carnage and devastation created by a civil war that left around 50,000 of Dumbuya’s countrymen, women and children dead, scooped up the young boy and his brother and fled to the sanctuary of the UK.

Even after growing up in the relative safety and comfort of these isles, Dumbuya’s progress towards a life of a professional footballer was far from smooth.

Fighting tooth and nail to progress through the English non-league scene, he was forced to juggle his football commitments with a job in a supermarket as he desperately struggled to make ends meet, a thought which would no doubt leave trainees at many of our Premiership clubs aghast.

“Obviously I left Sierra Leone when I was young, so there’s not much I can remember of the civil war,” he said.

“It’s been pretty well-documented though what went on, everybody knows about what went on in Sierra Leone with the diamonds and stuff, but the country’s on the up.

“I was in non-league for a while and then I fought my way into the league.

“I really want to go for my dreams, it’s been a real journey for me.

“I was playing in front of 100 people sometimes or maybe even less. I’ve come from pretty much nothing to making some sort of name for myself.

“That makes me appreciate it more. When I was in non-league I was working in Tesco, I was a trolley boy!

“I’ve done the working and playing football thing at the same time, so I do appreciate where I am right now.

“I was always determined to play football, it was just a matter of time.”

Despite the hardships he has endured, the 10-times capped full-back is a bubbly character with a refreshing appreciation on the station he has now arrived at in life.

That perspective has spurred him on, along with some of his international team-mates like former Celtic forward Mo Bangura, to try to give his once-troubled homeland something to be proud of.

He may hope however, that his career in Scotland goes somewhat better than Bangura's, who failed to register a goal in his ill-fated two-year spell in the East End of Glasgow.

“Mo Bangura is a good friend of mine,” he said.

“He’s on international duty at the moment, but obviously because I didn’t have a club I haven’t travelled with the team.

“He didn’t really speak about Celtic or Scotland that much though.

“There’s a few of us now who really work hard to help the country, the likes of me, Mo and Kei Kamara, especially through football.

“We’ve now got a good team that can really do something, so the team and the country are on the up.

“We’re trying to qualify for the African Nations Cup at the moment, we’re playing the Ivory Coast at the weekend.

“We lost our first game against Sudan, so we really need to win on Saturday.

“I’ll definitely be back involved, I spoke to the new manager and they wanted to take me but gave me the chance to sort myself out first and get fully fit before going back to international football.”

The versatile defender has previously had spells in full-time football at Doncaster Rovers and Portsmouth, and was most recently at Notts County.

He is now looking to lay claim to his place in the Thistle side once he is fully up to speed with the Scottish game.

“I didn’t really have a pre-season so I’m a little bit behind, but in a sense I’m naturally fit so it won’t take me long, maybe a couple of weeks,” he said.

“Left-back or right-back are my preferred positions, but I’m quite versatile and can play wing-back as well.

“My bread and butter is getting up and down the pitch.

“You can expect to see a lot of energy, you’ll see a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of positivity.

“I don’t really know that much about the Scottish Premiership, but it’s an exciting league that I’m going to relish playing in.”