“Talent and luck isn’t enough; it takes a lot of work and learning and belief that if you make the effort, you can make it,” Dzeko likes to tell the kids.

He knows because this is his story too. For nobody ever really took him seriously as a player, except a couple of wise heads like his last coach at Zeljeznicar, Jiri Plisek, and his first, Jusuf Sehovic.

In 1995, Sehovic was charged with taking the best football kids from the bomb sites, including Armin and Dzeko, and creating a new post-war youth team, FK Zeljeznicar’s ‘Pioneers’.

The old coach shows a picture of Dzeko standing alongside his 10-year-old team-mates against the backdrop of the blitzed stands of the Grbavica stadium which had stopped being a battleground, standing directly between the Bosnian and Serb forces, and was now a boy’s charred theatre of hope.

“He had extraordinary determination, never stopped working,” Sehovic recalls, while Armin jokes how when he and his other mates found girls, Dzeko remained so hopelessly devoted to the ball so that at 17 he was ready for Zeljeznicar’s first team.

He was nothing special, though. Some fans on Grbavica’s crumbling terraces started taunted him as ‘Cloc’. “Like a big wooden stick — a very disparaging, cruel expression,” the translator explains.

“What they didn’t understand,” says Sehovic “was he had had a growth spurt, 14cm in one year, and his co-ordination suffered. I told him not to worry, it would return.”

It did and was allied to new strength and aerial prowess. The rest? Goals, goals, goals.

Before the trip is over, Sehovic’s family gives me bottles of their mind-blowing home-made plum brandy while Konjic comes to Grabavica to present me with one of his most prized national team shirts.

Everyone’s generosity is as humbling and inspiring as the message they ask me to take back to Manchester.

“Tell them they haven’t just got a special player from Bosnia,” smiles Big Mo. “They have a special man too.”

Stopping off points for City’s £27 million striker

Zeljeznicar 2003-05
(40 games, 5 goals)
Dzeko started life as a midfielder at his home-town club, but was not a great success. His size was seen as a disadvantage; he was regarded as clumsy and technically deficient. When Czech club Teplice offered £21,000 for him, a club director confessed: “We thought we’d won the lottery.”

Teplice 2005-07
(43 games, 16 goals)
Teplice coach Jiri Plisek switched Dzeko to a target-man role, and the goals began to flow. In 2006-07, his first full season at the club, he scored 13 goals in 30 games, and was top scorer in the Czech league. Shortly after making his international debut against Turkey Wolfsburg snapped him up for £3.4 million.

Wolfsburg 2007-11
(111 games, 66 goals)
Before Dzeko’s arrival, Wolfsburg had traditionally oscillated between mid-table mediocrity and grim survival. In his first season, they finished fifth and qualified for Europe; the next, incredibly, they won the Bundesliga title, with Dzeko forming a fearsome partnership with the Brazilian striker Grafite.