The Leicester City captain has just completed a remarkable Premier League season, defying the odds to win the title, and now takes his Reggae Boys stateside to repeat the trick
When Wes Morgan first moved into professional football, from non-league Dunkirk FC to Nottingham Forest, staff at his former club managed to get some Forest kits thrown their way as part of the transfer. No fee was exchanged, of course, at that level of the game and there began Morgan's long journey from part-time player to Premier League winning captain of Leicester City.
Morgan first must have thought that he'd made it last summer when he tweeted a picture following Jamaica's Copa America elimination of a shirt collection he had built up during the three matches he played in Chile. He had just played his part in managing to help Leicester avoid relegation and competing against the world's best was clearly an honour.
There was the Paraguay shirt of Roque Santa Cruz, Edinson Cavani's Uruguay jersey: and there, with pride of place, was Lionel Messi's Argentina shirt. It was indeed a heavy road from non-league to the Premier League but marking Messi in an international tournament and having the shirt to prove it - to that point - trumped it all.
It has been an exhaustive couple of years for Morgan who has played two full Premier League seasons, competed in two full international tournaments last summer, and is now gearing up for another.
"I don't know how I do it," Morgan told the Leicester Mercury last year. "I had no rest in the summer, constant football. I try to get my rest in when I can."
Morgan has just conducted a whistle stop tour to Thailand, where Leicester visited their owners, but has had the chance to take stock on his club's historic achievements over the past few weeks. Reduced to tears on the field at the King Power as he hoisted the Premier League trophy over his head, Morgan has since watched as a rum bearing his name launched with 11,000 bottles being sold in Leicester. It has been a surreal quest to the summit for the Jamaica captain, who now has his sights set on repeating the trick in international colours.
An international only since 2013, Morgan missed Jamaica's historic CFU Caribbean Cup win at the end of 2014 with a foot injury. That tournament title permitted the Reggae Boyz to qualify for Chile 2015. He didn't miss a minute of play in South America as Jamaica, under Winfried Schafer, learned plenty about the rigours of elite-level tournament football.
Two weeks later he was there again as Jamaica geared up for a Concacaf Gold Cup campaign in the USA. The twin giants of Mexico and the United States loomed large but Morgan and Jamaica pulled off an upset for the ages against the Americans in the semi-finals before being outclassed by Mexico in a largely one-sided final.
Leader of an outsider team, defying the odds... but not yet the fairytale ending. That would come. Morgan took that hard luck story, though, and improved on it during the Premier League season just passed. Captain of Leicester City, the 32-year-old made history as the first-ever Jamaican winner of the Premier League title.
The Foxes defied odds of 5,000/1 to win the league ahead of Arsenal with Morgan - like he did all summer for his country - playing every minute. And now he's back in the colours of his nation. Jamaica kick off their 2016 Copa America Centenario campaign against Venezuela in Chicago on Saturday with Morgan at the heart of the defence. Uruguay and Mexico lie in wait.  No one gave Jamaica a prayer last summer - at the Copa or the Gold Cup - with Cavani even stating that he expected the Reggae Boyz to play like any "African team". Now with the presence of a Premier League-winning centre back with a taste for upsetting the form book - and a fearsome defensive resolve to boot - nobody will be taking the Jamaican threat lightly.