Inside Football With: Quinton Fortune - Running with a baby bull and wearing Maradona’s mop

Former Manchester United winger Quinton Fortune is clocking up plenty of air miles on a Spanish adventure. Will it lead to him becoming a successful manager one day?

I’m in Barcelona watching Spanish football for a few days. I covered La Liga games for television on Saturday night, finished at 11, took a car back to Manchester, slept for 90 minutes and then flew to Spain via Amsterdam.

On Sunday I saw Barça beat Levante 4-1 at Camp Nou, a stadium I once played at for a victorious Atletico Madrid team. I’m doing my UEFA A Licence at St George’s Park and want to soak in as many different styles of football as possible.

You always see more of a game watching it live at the stadium and I was disappointed that Levante didn’t at least have a go. If we were playing badly, Sir Alex Ferguson used to say: ‘At least give them a game’. Levante played so deeply that they didn’t give Barça any sort of game at all.

I’ll watch Espanyol play against Valencia at Cornella and hopefully see my old teammate Phil Neville.

Phil is doing well coaching in Spain and learning the language. It’s something I had to do when I arrived from South Africa as a 17-year-old wondering how on earth I’d ended up flying from my home city of Cape Town to Madrid.

I’d been at Tottenham from 14 and was doing well. A contract was drawn up for me and I was happy to sign it, but something happened – and I never did find out what – and it meant I played briefly in Belgium and at Chelsea before joining Madrid. I was told that Terry Venables, who’d taken me to Spurs, had put a word in at Atletico, where he was known from his time managing Barcelona.

I couldn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know anybody, but I was put in their B team and enjoyed the football and playing against people like a young Samuel Eto’o. Atletico is a stable club now but it wasn’t then and that didn’t help my career development. Managers would change frequently and each had their own idea of what was best.

The club president was the crazy Jesus Gil, infamous throughout Spain and not always for the right reasons. One of them was because he sacked so many managers.

On a personal level, he was always great with me. One day, he invited all the players to his house. It was so big that it had its own bull ring complete with what he called ‘baby bulls’. They looked like normal bulls to me but their presence didn’t trouble me until I was told to go into the ring with one. No other player, just me. I was joined by the president’s son holding a red cape.

The other players were in hysterics, while my experience of bull fighting was limited to what I’d seen on television. I was soon about to learn when a bull started charging towards me. I wanted to jump out of the way, but the president’s son held me until the bull was close, then he lifted the red cape. I survived. And so did the bull. I think they were there for fun.

I did a lot of crazy things at Atletico. There was a good atmosphere at the club. One day, the first-team players told me to dress up in an outfit they’d provided. It was a wig like Diego Maradona’s hair and a full Argentina kit. The manager was soon asking where ‘Kinton Fortuny’ – that’s what I was known as in Spain – was. The players told him not to worry and that a new player was coming. The manager was confused, more so when I ran into his dressing room as Maradona. He saw the funny side.

I played a few times in Atletico’s first-team but I was still a kid. Then, out of the blue, I was asked to go and train with Man United in 1999. Not sign for Man United, but go and train with them. I went for a couple of weeks to Manchester and was then told that United wanted to sign me in a deal worth £1.5 million.

When I told my teammates at Atletico they didn’t believe me. They couldn’t understand why a player would go from Atletico B to Manchester United, but within days I was training with Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Roy Keane, who trained like he played.

I’d spend more time and play more games at United than any other club in my career and feel that I learned so much about football from some of the best people in the game.

I want to stay in football and want to be a manager, but first it’s better to become a coach, to keep learning and to get all my coaching badges, ideally while I’m still in my thirties. And if I do achieve my ambition, I promise that I’ll never put any of my players into a bull ring with a live bull.