It’s not often journalists are invited into football players’ promotion parties but Sol Bamba made a beeline for me.

It was May 2018 and Cardiff City had just made history, promoted to the Premier League in Bamba’s first full season at the club. He had just helped the Bluebirds grind out a draw at home with Reading, which was enough to seal second place in the Championship and spark wild celebrations across the city. There was an outpouring of joy and Bamba, in unison with his old mentor Neil Warnock, had made it all possible.

Related: Former Leeds and Cardiff defender Sol Bamba dies aged 39

Later that night, after the club’s end-of-season awards bash, the players were booked into a private bar in Tiger Tiger in the city centre. It could (and maybe should) have been an exclusive affair, but Bamba made a special effort to extend the invitations a little wider. It was a moment of bliss in his life, arguably the peak of his playing career, and he was eager for others to bask in it with him. He shunted the bouncer out of the way and lifted up the rope: all were welcome. I brought my Cardiff-supporting friend along and Bamba introduced us to the squad and poured out the drinks.

You could not help but warm to Bamba and his “beaming smile”, as Warnock put it on X. He made time for fans and the media in a way that is so rare for modern footballers, speaking with ebullience on or off the record about the game, but also about life. After an hour-long podcast recording during that 2017-18 campaign, he stayed for an extra coffee and chatted about his favourite Italian restaurant in Cardiff, Stefano’s, where he regularly took his wife, Chloe, and his children. He would ask how work was, how your family were doing.

Bamba was a gentle giant, but he also had a steely determination that made him a colossus on the pitch, an old-school centre-half who Warnock once surmised was a better pure defender than Virgil van Dijk. He became a leader in every dressing room he entered.

It was the strength of his personality, and Warnock’s, that drove a workmanlike Cardiff side to the promised land. The pair could have blazing rows in the changing rooms after a defeat – once at half-time at Norwich, Warnock even feigned anger at Bamba only to then fall about laughing – but every time they would make up by Monday morning and reconnect to drive training standards higher. Had it not been for the anterior cruciate ligament injury Bamba sustained in March 2019 Cardiff, unfancied and tipped to finish rock bottom, could well have stayed up.

Even once Bamba had achieved his lifelong dream of playing in the Premier League, he remained grounded, never losing his sense of humour. Who can forget that interview after he scored the winner against Brighton, when a reporter reminded him he should have been booked for removing his shirt? His cheeky response, in that distinctive half-Parisian, half-Scottish accent – stemming from his time with Dunfermline and Hibernian – was classic Bamba: “I know, I know – don’t tell anyone! We’ll keep it to ourselves.”

Bamba approached his non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in January 2021 in the only way he knew how. He greeted it like it was an opposing striker: with a courageous challenge, still sporting that trademark smile. He was deservedly praised for raising awareness of the disease, campaigning for clubs’ medical departments to implement more cancer checks. He even returned to the pitch to play for Middlesbrough, cementing cult hero status when scoring the fifth penalty in an FA Cup shootout win at Manchester United. He had been desperate to play at Old Trafford having missed Cardiff’s league game there through injury.

The tributes that have followed his tragic death this week have spoken for themselves, a mark of the man as much as the player. Bamba played only 52 league games for Leicester, 51 for Leeds, yet left an indelible mark on the two big clubs; he played even fewer games for Boro but is beloved on Teesside.

For Warnock, his “perfect manager” and a father figure to Bamba, his death has hit particularly hard. “Sol was a ray of sunshine and I’ll miss him so much,” the veteran coach said. “I’m so happy that Sol was part of my life and we had such brilliant memories together.”

Some footballers are immortalised for what they did on the pitch, creating magic memories that will last a lifetime. But Bamba was different. He will be remembered, not only for his buccaneering displays from centre-back and the rabble-rousing fist pumps to the crowd but for his humanity, greeting all with a warm grin and a hearty laugh.

Those qualities will live long in the memory for everyone lucky enough to have known Sol Bamba. He was a gentleman.