INSIDE FOOTBALL WITH: Quinton Fortune - Travelling worldwide as a footballer wasn't always a luxury

Quinton Fortune reveals some of the journeys he made as a Manchester United and South Africa player - and just how different travelling with club and country was.

I’m on my way to Moscow with Manchester United. I’ve never been before, but even if I had travelled as a player I wouldn’t have seen the city. Top-level footballers travel the world without seeing it. I’ve been to some of the greatest cities in the world without seeing them.

With United, you’d arrive on a charter flight at an airport and be whisked straight to the team hotel under escort. You’d spent most of your time in the room, reading, watching films, playing football against the other players or going to a group meal.

It was a little different from when I started out with Atletico Madrid’s B team. At one hotel in Sevilla, we had a wedding party taking place under our rooms the night before a game.

With United, the hotel would often be out of the centre, somewhere with five stars which was convenient for the airport and the stadium – but not too close to the stadium because the club didn’t want it to be invaded by local supporters.

There would be a training session the night before the match, a chance to get used to the venue where you’d play the game, to see and get a feel for the pitch. There were some surprises. I’d long looked forward to playing in Milan’s San Siro, the great arena where I’d watched Roger Milla score for Cameroon in the opening game of the 1990 World Cup finals. The stadium is superb and a fitting venue for the next Champions League final, but the pitch when I visited a decade ago was very poor.

And there would be a quiz after training, with the players against the staff led by the very competitive Mr Ferguson. The questions would be set by the club photographer John and he’d be hammered if they were seen to be favouring older people. If there was a question about Africa then I was expected to know the answer. The best players to have onside were Giggsy, Roy Keane, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Travel is a huge part of life as a footballer and with United I experienced very few problems. The club took their own chef; they checked the hotels out thoroughly. That’s how you want it, so that you can prepare for the game and be in the zone with no distractions. I wouldn’t look at any media, I didn’t want anything to affect my state of mind.

We wouldn’t see any fans, though staff would discreetly ask the most famous players for autographs. And not every hotel was a fan free zone. On a United pre-season tour of South East Asia, the clamour to see David Beckham was such that we had police officers on our hotel floor, needed an escort wherever we went in the hotel and were watched by 30,000 in training. Because it was so well organised, it wasn’t a problem.

At the other extreme, we’d go virtually unnoticed when we walked the streets of American cities on pre-season tours there, with only the odd American recognising our most famous players. They loved it.

Problems for me came when I travelled alone. There were times when immigration officers simply didn’t believe that I was a Manchester United footballer. I once had to fly to Norway for a day because of a visa issue. United gave me all the papers but immigration simply didn’t believe me and I was strip-searched.

Travelling through Milan airport to join up with my South Africa team for one Africa Cup of Nations, I was pulled into a side room by two plain clothes police officers. There, an African lady was asked if she knew me. She didn’t. I was let go. How utterly bizarre.

The travel with South Africa could also be eye opening. Host nations may have only completed everything weeks before, so you could be staying in a brand new hotel which looked like it had been finished in a rush. But that was better than the ones where the toilet was a hole in the ground. I’ve seen a few of those and often wished that I’d been able to show my Man United team-mates. They would have had a shock.

For the Cup of Nations in Burkina Faso, we took an internal flight from the capital Ouagadougou to Bubo. The plane was not a new one; the pilot came to start it by spinning the propellers. The luggage was held in a net at the front of the cabin and we players were distributed around the cabin according to size. A bumpy, scary, ride followed. I would have preferred a ten hour ride in a bus instead.

Everybody was frightened and I wasn’t alone in thinking that we wouldn’t make it as the desert passed below. But we did. As we landed, one player shouted: ‘We’re alive!’ And knowing that, we felt we had nothing to lose in the game which followed. We won and reached the final, our best performance for years.