Signing who played partied with Jagger

“They told the kit man to put my name over whichever shirt he could. The only shirt he could find had Cruyff on the back!

“We lost 1-0 but still hit Studio 54 with Mick Jagger. “Those were the days.” While he has no regrets over the path his career took, Ingram admits he would have liked more chance to shine in front of a British audience. But the financial muscle of the Earthquakes made it increasingly difficult to come back from the other side of the Atlantic.

“I really did want to come back. But as I kept scoring goals my wages kept increasing and that just made it much more difficult.

“One year I trained with West Ham and they made me an offer and it was just short of what I was spending in a month out in California.

“Because I’d been away for so long, people didn’t realise that I had worldclass stars as my colleagues out there and here I was getting offered a couple of hundred a week.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that Ingram would spend the rest of his playing days in the States, although a sizeable proportion of his career was actually spent playing in the Major Indoor Soccer League, where he appeared for Minnesota Strikers, Dallas Sidekicks and St Louis Storm, among others.

But even after all these years Ingram has managed to maintain a connection to Welsh football through a certain family member – long-serving Swansea City winger Nathan Dyer.

“He’s my cousin’s kid and I try to keep an eye on his progress,” he says with a chuckle.

“Nathan’s a talented kid, who unfortunately has had more than his fair share of injuries!

“I’m more or less retired now myself, spending most of my time between the States, the Bahamas and also Jamaica.”

Footballing talent clearly runs in the family, and watching his younger relative lift the Premier League trophy during a loan spell with Leicester City is a reminder of how brightly that talent once shone, albeit far away from British shores.

But there’s little time to waste thinking about the past, as Ingram now has a new passion – flying helicopters.

“Somebody came to me one day with the idea of creating a helicopter company and I thought it was a great idea and I ended up getting really into it,” he explains.

So, was he daunted by the prospect of taking to the skies?

He laughs, before replying: “When you’ve played in front of 28,000 in front of Ninian Park, flying a helicopter is no problem!”

It’s clear that even after all these years, those nine weeks spent at Cardiff City have still managed to leave a mark.