“When I was much younger it looked as if I was going to go down a very different path at certain points.

“That’s what happens with young boys sometimes. You get in with the wrong crowd…”

Nine games into his first season as a Scottish Premiership goal sniffer, the 24-year-old has a story to tell. It’s the classic tale of the underdog; the player who took a Rocky Balboa detour en route to becoming a contender.

When the SFA summoned clubs to St Andrews to debate the crisis in youth development and player pathways, there was no discussion on the merits of junior football, Dubai or Australia. During an unconventional journey Fowler spent time in all three before returning to Scotland as a more rounded human being. Travel, he swears, broadened the mind.

His friends would laugh when he told them he would be a player one day. There was nothing in his background to suggest that he had what it took to be the leading scorer in Scotland’s top flight.

Club academy football passed him by and, after his expulsion from Glasgow’s Shawlands Academy, he began training for a career in joinery. Playing for Johnstone Burgh, then North Ayrshire side Beith, a talent for finding the back of the net was undermined by concerns over his attitude. He had opinions and ambitions and, when he spoke them out loud, his confidence was rarely shared by the people around him. More often than not, they humoured him.

“I was never taken seriously at school when I told them I wanted to be a footballer.

“Even when I was 14 or 15 I would say to my pal, who is in Australia now, ‘one day I’m going to play football.’

“And he would say, ‘nah, can’t see it, can’t see it.’

“I was playing junior football and I would tell the guys I worked with, “I’m going to play, I’m going to play football and they would say, ‘ach, you’re talking s****’

“I can’t blame them for doubting me. There were a few times where I said, ‘I need to get my act together here.’

“I started learning a trade and working on building sites and so on. I started getting my sensible head on a bit.

“Once you get a trade and start playing football at a decent level you grow up because you have to. You learn from your mistakes.

“The people who doubted me gave me the motivation to go and do that.

“I’ve always had that feeling of, ‘I’ll show them’”

A chip on both shoulders was both his driving force and his Achilles heel. From schoolteachers to lecturers to football managers, people would make instant, unflattering judgements. Despite the efforts of his mother Susie to keep him on the straight and narrow there were times when he could have used an arm round the shoulder, a guiding hand, to steer him in the right direction. He had to learn the hard way, from his own mistakes.

“I don’t think anyone ever doubted my ability, but they would see one small thing and make up their minds.

“These days I think I have a really good attitude. I think any gaffer you spoke to now would tell you the same.

“But when I was younger I had a lot of learning to do. I had never been in an academy or stuff and I never had a coach teaching me how to handle a situation where I wasn’t being played or whatever or lashing out with a stroppy lip.”

Loose lips brought his first spell in Junior football to a premature close when he was released by Johnstone Burgh. While he showed plenty of potential and promise, he fell out with one of the coaches and paid the price. Attitude, again.

“I was pulled in the next time we trained and they said, ‘look, we can’t have this, we’re releasing you.’

“I was trying to fight my case but they were just, ‘no, we can’t have that.’

“Was he right? Well, when I moved to Beith and started scoring goals a couple of my old mates at Johnstone Burgh told me that the gaffer had said to them that they should have stuck with me. It was a daft argument.”

Enrolling in a college course in construction at Cardonald College, he did a bit of bricklaying and a bit of joinery. One of his senior lecturers was Danny Shearer, the president of Beith Juniors.

“He offered to get me in to Beith for a trial. And they signed me," he said.

“Danny was the man who helped me get a second chance and I’ll always be thankful to him for that.”

For a 19-year-old striker, football in the West of Scotland Premier League was a tough finishing school. A gritty, down-to-earth landscape, he was forced to grow up fast.

In Scottish football a debate now rages over the best way to breed young players trying to find their way in the 17-21 transition phase. While the Nandos Generation might turn their nose up at a crash course in the Ayrshire Juniors, Fowler feels it did him no harm at all.

“These guys are going to kick lumps out you. They’re not going to take pity because you’re young.

“There was self-doubt and a bit of insecurity there, but you need that, eh?

“So many people think a kid needs to go through an academy these days but I think you can become a bit of a robot in that environment at times.

“I’ve seen players lose themselves there whereas I was thrown in at the deep end and I had to grow up quickly.

“That’s why I’ve never struggled with the physical aspect of the game, because at that young age I was playing big tough men.”

St Johnstone boss Simo Valakari speaks of the ‘roughness’ in Fowler’s game. An unpolished diamond who plays off instinct, he felt ready for a step up in the summer of 2023 after 49 goals at Beith. Some were less sure.

Josh Fowler celebrates scoring with St Johnstone manager Simo Valakari (Image: Shutterstock)

His agent secured a trial at Motherwell, where Stuart Kettlewell had a track record of giving young players a chance. He went to the Netherlands for a pre-season trip and felt he did well and around the same time his agent called Derek McInnes, then manager of Kilmarnock.

McInnes liked what he saw during a week in Northern Ireland but needed players who could go straight into the first team. Speaking before Rangers look to put the shackles on St Johnstone’s main man at Ibrox this afternoon, he was a reluctant pass.

Around that same time, Fowler was in the fourth year of his apprenticeship and on the verge of sitting his trade test to become a fully qualified joiner. Pondering what came next, a call came from his old five-a-side teammate Andy Shak asking if he would fancy a crack at the United Arab Emirates.

“I don’t know if I was good enough for joinery,” he says now.

“I suppose that could have been a path for me, a great career. But once the chance to go to Dubai came about I thought, ‘nah, I’m patching this…”

In need of two under-23 foreign players, Gulf United offered Beith’s young player of the year the chance to replace former Celtic striker Gary Hooper.

In July 2024 he signed a deal with St Albans Dinamo, a semi-professional outfit in Victoria, set up by Croatian Australians before returning to the middle east to join Dubai City.

“I loved every minute of life in Dubai. So many people from the UK are going over there for the sun, the lifestyle, the luxury.

“It was everything you need and the standard of football is good as well.

“I always said I would only ever come back to Scotland if it was for a full-time move.”

The chance came when Queen’s Park coach Sean Crighton and assistant Jim Duffy remembered his form at Beith and watched clips of his goals overseas. Fowler rattled in 19 goals in 25 appearances for the Spiders, attracting interest from a promotion-chasing St Johnstone in January last year. The move has worked for both parties.

“The way I was when I was younger probably resonates on the pitch,” he says now.

“I am quite physical. I am quite up for it. So I have taken things from my previous life to make myself better.

“You can’t lose that. You need to have a wee bit of an edge to make it, don’t you?’

Growing up on the south side of Glasgow, he followed Celtic. Where other young players were wrapped up in cotton wool by club academies, Fowler hung out with his mates and was a regular spectator at Parkhead before moving to Dubai.

“The last game I went to before moving away I said to my pals, ‘I’m going to play here at Parkhead one day.’

“They said to me, ‘nah you’re not, can’t see that.’

“So when we played Celtic last month it felt like a full circle moment for me.

“Okay, that wasn’t at Celtic Park, but my pals were delighted for me and said to me, ‘you did always say you were going to do this.”

He shares a flat in the south side with former Queen’s Park team-mate Seb Drozd, now with Partick Thistle, and while he feels settled and grateful for what he has at McDiarmid Park his long-term horizons stretch a good deal further than the fair city of Perth.

“The gaffer is infectious. You feel like you want to play for him, you want to run for him, you want to score goals for him.

“But I can tell you 100 per cent I’m not done. I don’t feel this is my ceiling at all.

“I am at the top level in Scotland, scoring goals and proving I can play for one of the biggest clubs in the country. But I want to keep pushing on.

“I want to represent my country one day.

“If you had said to me when I was coming back from Dubai two years ago that I could force myself into the conversation to play for my country I would have laughed at you.

“But I’m sitting here now seeing no reason at all why that can’t happen one day.

“You get older, you mature and once you have lived in another part of the world you kind of need to grow up a bit. I can’t be messing around any longer.

“I’m nowhere near the finished article. I’m still learning every single day from so many good players and the gaffer and the experiences of playing in the Scottish Premiership

“But there is a window open now. And if you keep scoring goals you can’t be overlooked can you?”