Fate often dictates the path you end up taking in football, as in life. So it proved for Robert Sanchez.

When he was 14 years old, Rob entered a competition to play at a Chelsea training camp in Malaga in his native Spain. His father filmed the young goalkeeper showcasing his abilities and submitted the video. Rob won the prize. He was invited to the Chelsea camp.

‘It was two weeks long, and I went for a week,’ says Rob.

‘The second week is when the scouts were supposed to come, but I had to leave to go to a trial at Levante. I never got the chance for the scouts to see me.

‘Who knows, maybe I would have been a Chelsea player earlier. It was about 15 years ago now. So it’s funny that I have ended up playing for Chelsea!’

As it happened, Rob’s trial at Levante – a club that have bounced between La Liga and the Segunda Division this century – was a roaring success. He was signed immediately. Shortly afterwards, Brighton came calling, and Rob’s path to Chelsea narrowed. But Stamford Bridge seemed a long way away when he began learning his craft on the sandy dustbowls of Cartagena in southeastern Spain.

--------

Rob’s earliest football memory is joining his local club Escuela de Futbol Santa Ana – a short drive from central Cartegena – aged four.

‘It was the football team literally behind my house, and there were just sandy and rocky pitches, not grass,’ he says.

‘We played with five-a-side goals, and from the first day I was a goalkeeper. I didn’t even put myself in goal, they put me there, but I stayed ever since.

‘I’d wear long trousers, padded elbows, pads on my hips and my knees, but it made no difference. They would just rip apart and you'd get burns every day.

‘And the worst thing about burns is they would start oozing when they were healing, but then the next day you would dive on it and then it would rip again and open up. I would get one on my knee and it would stay there for three months. It was horrible, but I loved it really!’

The extreme heat in southern Spain added to the testing conditions in which Rob trained as a youngster. The school pitch he and his friends would jump the fence and sneak onto to play more football did offer some respite. The quality of the surface was better, and its smaller size aided technical progression.

All the while, Rob was encouraged by his football-mad family on his mother’s side. His grandfather was a coach of children’s teams, and both of his uncles played to a good level. One, a former goalkeeper, even had a trial at Real Madrid. He would kick a ball around with the young Rob outside his grandmother’s house, where they both lived. As he grew older, it became apparent Rob’s talents were at a higher level than those of his team-mates.

‘When I was about nine, I realised I really wanted to go for it,’ he says.

‘It was my last year at Santa Ana. Everything in my mind changed, and then I started taking it all more seriously.

‘The biggest team in the area, Ramosia, signed me. I went there, and that was my first time on artificial grass. It was very poor quality, but it was artificial grass, so still a lot better than sand!’

Rob’s development was accelerated because of what he says are the ‘massive opportunities’ Spain offers its young goalkeepers.

‘It’s a really good country for goalkeeping. There are a lot of campuses, a lot of dedicated sessions and coaches. You can go pay and you train as a goalkeeper. My parents always tried to spend extra money for me to go to do this to get better.

‘There were a lot of campuses in the area, which was great, but for the competitions and goalkeeping awards that I did, I used to travel all across the country.

‘There is a nice goalkeeping culture. There is a lot of help for young keepers to grow and improve. That’s why now we probably have the most high-level goalkeepers in Europe.’

Spanish football has long been associated with a style of play focused on passing and moving. Interestingly, Rob says when it came to coaching young goalkeepers in Spain, distribution was never high on the agenda. Instead, pure goalkeeping skills were prioritised: ‘being fast, being reactive, being agile’. It is why Spanish keepers are renowned for their footwork and agility.

Rob was playing for Ciudad Jardin, solely a youth academy rather than a club with a senior set-up, when he went on trial at Elche. They said no. Then came the Chelsea campus, and the offer to join Levante. He was 14.

Rob may have only been in Valencia for a year before signing for Brighton, but it was a formative period in his development as a young man making his way in the game.

‘I lived in a residential house with about 30 kids, who were 13 to 17 years old. We were in dorms of six. I was one of the youngest there, and they mixed the rooms. It was absolute chaos every day. Crazy. I hated every moment of it.

‘My family were still in Cartagena, about three hours away. It was hard, but at the same time it wasn’t because my parents always encouraged me to get better. In summer they would put me in a campus and I would stay away from home for a week.

‘I had that experience behind me, which made it easier to move away from home, and then easier to come to England by myself.’

Rob trained every day at Levante. He would have school in the morning, which he would sometimes be allowed to skip so he could train with the first team. Their goalkeeper ranks included the great Keylor Navas. ‘He used to fly,’ Rob smiles.

As Navas departed to Real Madrid, the young Sanchez signed for Brighton. He lived in digs for two years, which he greatly preferred to his dorm at Levante. A lovely British couple called Pete and Nat looked after him and his compatriot Luis Garcia, a midfielder who became and remains a good friend.

Understandably, the move to Brighton posed Rob huge challenges, on and off the pitch. He lists some that stand out.

‘A new language, understanding new football, professionalism. The biggest task was having consistency in doing everything right to get to the highest level you could.

‘When I joined Brighton at 15, I couldn’t kick the ball. I couldn’t catch the ball. I couldn’t claim any crosses. I was just a big powerful goalkeeper that used to save balls. That was it.

‘Even at Levante, I think I touched the gym three times in a year. So I needed to do the gym, grow my body. I grew into myself and goalkeeping and the quality needed quite fast. I matured quite early. After my first year in Brighton, I was consistently training with the first team.

‘Brighton helped me grow up fast as a goalkeeper. I learned a lot. They were very good, enjoyable years.’

Loan spells at Forest Green Rovers and Rochdale gave Sanchez a first taste of senior football, and he then established himself in the Seagulls side shortly before his 23rd birthday. It had been quite some ascent for the goalkeeper who just a decade earlier had been playing for a local academy. Now he is Chelsea’s number one and has three senior Spain international caps to his name.

As Rob reflects on his footballing journey, he singles out a piece of advice he was offered growing up that he would now pass on to any budding young footballers.

‘Listen. Just listen a lot. I tried to listen to the people that wanted to help me because they trust in you to become something. I was just listening and trying to do the right thing.

‘And as a kid, I always wanted to do the best I could, so I used to train hard, very hard, and that’s why I improved and improved to get to where I am.’

Fate may have denied Rob the chance to join Chelsea when he was a teenager, but he made sure the footballing gods aligned when the opportunity came calling later in life.