It did, however, help cost Speroni his place in the team. Hungarian Gabor Kiraly was installed instead as then manager Iain Dowie pondered whether Speroni had what it takes to make it at the highest level. Of course, Speroni became friends with Kiraly, who is still playing in a pair of baggy tracksuit bottoms today (at TSV 1860 Munich, in Germany’s second tier).
“I am still in touch with him, he is a good friend,” says Speroni, who took another two years to re-claim his first-team place, but then won three player of the year awards in succession.
“Goalkeepers always tend to get on very well with each other, apart from the obvious exceptions. They call it the goalkeepers’ union, we all get on very well with each other, even back in Dundee.
“Jamie Langfield, Derek Soutar. They used to make fun of me, because my English was so bad,” he adds. “Good lads. I was so pleased to see Jamie playing in the Aberdeen v Celtic match in the Scottish Cup and to see him doing well.” Speroni is genuinely shocked to hear of the obstacles overcome by Langfield in the form of a life-threatening brain seizure: “I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that at all.”
While some details have escaped him he is well briefed on events at Dens Park. While he has not returned for a game since he left, he does make visits to the city to see friends that he made in his three-year spell in Scotland, and is confident that such trips will coincide with a game before long. He describes Dundee as “where it really all began” for him.
In 2001, he became the latest addition in Ivano Bonetti’s foreign revolution at Dundee, although Speroni’s arrival was held up because he had to wait to collect an Italian passport, one he qualified for because his parents were both born in Italy, and which circumnavigated the need for a work permit. He had played just two first-team games for CA Platense, a club based in the Florida district of Buenos Aires, when he found himself on a plane, bound, eventually, for Dundee.
“Normally what happens with footballers is you tend to play first in your country and then after a while, say a year or two, and then you have a chance to move on to Europe, which is what most South American players want to do,” he says. “But in my case it was completely different – I only played two games.”