Colombia's Juan Fernando Quintero almost gave up on football for a music career

Juan Fernando Quintero rejects the idea he was ready to give up on football but blames himself that the question even needed asking.

Now he is the mercurial playmaker who is best equipped to down England, should James Rodriguez miss Tuesday’s last-16 tie as expected.

Yet just a few months ago, Quintero wondered whether a Colombia call would ever come again. Jose Pekerman only ended his two-and-a-half year international exile in March.

His attitude and commitment were heavily scrutinised, with Porto – who signed him from Italian side Pescara in 2013 – farming the midfielder out on loan for the last three seasons.

A move to Rennes didn’t work out in 2015. Severe criticism was levelled at Quintero for choices made in his personal life. The arguments were that he was too invested in appearing in reggaeton videos, seemingly chasing a career in music as football shunned his laid-back style.

YouTube is your place to view hackneyed shoots alongside Element Black. Quintero has admitted that he was pulled elsewhere – away from the game - is his fault and his fault only.

It cannot be overlooked, however, that Quintero’s early years were devastating. His father, Jamie, disappeared in 1995 after beginning military service as a drug war raged in Colombia. He has not been seen since. The family claim to have never been given any answers by the state as to what happened.

It goes a long way to contextualising Quintero’s chaos. Some disapproval of the way he lives appears to have been harsh. His friendship with Colombian artist Maluma, who is signed by Sony, has been used as a freely available stick to beat him. That reproval is hardly unexpected given Quintero’s nosedive. That the two are close is equally unsurprising given their professions.

Quintero is adamant he wanted to continue after Rennes, who cut short his stay, and a backward step was required. A significant one, too, with a return to Colombia at Independiente Medellin on loan. The 25 league games he played there remains the most the 25-year-old has ever registered in a season.

Therein lies a large proportion of the problem. While Quintero was not starting consistently, certainly not finishing 90 minutes and struggling to re-find his form, the music videos and the rest were seen as a distraction, a sideshow that was evidently diminishing his chances of scaling the heights his undoubted ability can reach.

That runs parallel with how football has changed. Quintero was born in the wrong era, nowhere near the athletic powerhouses we see in midfields across the world now. He relies on technique, tricks and ingenuity – evidenced by that free-kick against Japan earlier in this World Cup.

Those moments, which have been fleeting, are not enough in a way they might have been two decades ago.

His weight has also been criticised as recently as last January after sealing a third loan switch away from Porto to River Plate in Argentina. Quintero argued that was merely down to his body shape and River want him to remain beyond this deal.

They will not have to pay much to make it permanent either, which goes a long way to detailing quite how low Quintero’s stock is at Porto. River have a clause in place to sign him for under £5million and they fully intend to take that up.

‘It’s already been decided what will happen - it’s all arranged,’ River president Rodolfo D’Onofrio told supporters. ‘It’s stipulated how we will pay the money that we have to pay. It’s not even a financial problem because we can give the OK for the deal now and pay what we have to pay in a few months.’

So if he is to make a return to Europe, negotiations with D’Onofrio are likely to be fraught. Maybe Quintero is settled in South America anyway, where players of his ilk remain revered.