To make it as a Premier League footballer is one thing. To star as a top player in one of the country’s best teams, earn comparisons to greats like Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, and do it all by the age of 21 is quite another.

So to say that Dele Alli’s meteoric rise has to do with being in the right place at the right time would be a cruel understatement. But you do need luck along the way, too.

It’s easy to forget, because of his tender age, that Alli was a regular starter for his League One side MK Dons for two full seasons before his Premier League debut, becoming the League One Young Player of the Year the season before winning the Premier League version of the same award the very next year.

He’s lucky about that, though.

As a young player in the Premier League, game time is like gold dust. It doesn’t happen very often if you’re coming through the ranks underneath the stars of the first teams. Results are so important that youth isn’t relied upon, and members of the youth teams at the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City – although incredibly decorated at youth level – are loaned and forgotten about rather than developed for first team action.

Perhaps being bought rather than made by Spurs heightened the temptation for Mauricio Pochettino to give Alli first team action so soon. Rather than rotting in the reserves, he was given his chance to shine. And he took it.

Or perhaps he was simply lucky to be bought by a team with Pochettino as the manager. It’s one of the Argentine manager’s calling cards that he gives young players starting berths in the team, preferring his own, homegrown variety to those bought in the transfer market.

Either way, Alli’s skills were displayed early on in a Spurs team that was filled with prodigious talent, under the care of a manager who knew what he was doing. At any other club, though, you get the feeling that the battle for a first team place would have been harder for a 20-year-old attacking midfielder.

His luck is showing no signs of running out, either.

An England international, on course for yet another Young Player of the Year award, there’s always a chance that Alli is the subject of a big bid from a big club this summer. The biggest of clubs.

When Spurs started to turn on the flair earlier this season, they did so playing a back three formation which could soon become modern European football’s in vogue tactical craze.

Such a formation isn’t new, of course, and it would be too Premier League-centric to suggest that it will become a craze simply because Chelsea have taken English onlookers by storm using it. In fact, Conte has been using it for years. His Italy side, as well as Chris Coleman’s Wales has success using similar formations at the Euros, whilst it has been a tactical tweak that everyone from Louis van Gaal to Pep Guardiola have used on occasion over the last decade or so. Even the now-standard 4-3-3 can involve the deepest midfielder dropping between the centre backs as the full-backs push on.

And yet, given modern football’s fetish for counter-attacks (both creating and preventing them), the back three looks like it could provide a platform with enough defenders to prevent one, and enough pacey attack-minded players to get one going.

But it’s a formation in which Dele Alli looks incredibly suited. With an extra defender behind them, the attacking midfielders are freed from some of their defensive duties, whilst the presence of wing-backs – who are freed from some of their own back-tracking themselves – can make runs to pull defenders out of position and create space in the middle. And that’s where Alli comes to the fore.

It’s been a meteoric rise, from League One to the Premier League, even the Champions League and the English football team. Alli’s talent has seen him rise to the top, and he is touted as one of the players of his generation. And yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that Alli is perfectly positioned for greatness because his game fits so well with the position in which he finds himself.

Luck doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s his talent, coupled with a perfect storm of a situation that has Alli being talked about in the same breath as some of the best midfielders in Premier League history.

But the luckiest thing of all is that he’s only 21 today. In 20 years, maybe we’ll be comparing new young stars to Dele Alli.