It might have been a picturesque Saturday on the Cote d'Azur, with the sun taking its time to go down over the Prealpes behind the Allianz Riviera, but it probably wasn't the ideal scenario Wesley Sneijder would have picked for his OGC Nice debut.

As half-time approached in the match with Guingamp, the temperature was still 24 degrees in this impressive stadium—add a few more on to that at pitch level—with 79 per cent humidity and barely enough breeze to ruffle a crisp packet. Quite a challenge, certainly for a player with no pre-season in his 33-year-old legs to speak of, having spent his hours at home in the Netherlands working alone with a personal trainer since leaving Galatasaray.

It might have suited others rather more. Nice, for example, were already playing catchup after a fractious start to the season, with fitness and the futures of various players hanging over their preparation and—perhaps unsurprisingly in the circumstances—a trio of consecutive defeats in Ligue 1 and Champions League combined to make up for.

That first 45 minutes in red and black for Sneijder was tough, but he ended up with a useful 84 minutes’ worth of runout; "much longer than we intended," coach Lucien Favre told the media after his team's 2-0 win. It certainly helped in getting the Dutchman close to serviceable condition for the Champions League return leg with Napoli, along with Mario Balotelli, who made his own 25-minute cameo against Guingamp with similar ends in mind.

It may not have been enough to stop to Maurizio Sarri’s side, comfortable 2-0 winners on Tuesday night for the second time in a week ("It came a little too soon for Sneijder," Favre told beIN Sports after the game) but the gesture, and the show of ambition, was important.

Nice, as their right-back Arnaud Souquet told us straight after the Guingamp match, had "nothing to lose," with continental competition in the Europa League already guaranteed. In that, as in Ligue 1, Favre will look to Sneijder to fire his team and the public's imagination.

The Dutchman has already done that locally, not least with his team-mates. "It's very, very good to have him here," Alassane Plea, the scorer of the opener against Guingamp, told us. "He's only just arrived and he's not quite at his best physically yet, but he's not played for a while. With playing a lot of games at a good tempo, he'll quickly be back to his best and after that, it's going to be a treat for us because as a forward with him playing behind you, the ball arrives exactly where you want. We're going to score a lot of goals."

The experienced Christophe Jallet, a title winner with Paris Saint-Germain, has similar visions of Sneijder changing the dimension of the team. "It's nice to be able to find someone between the lines like that," he told us, "and when he drops deeper, he delivers great balls. Obviously he doesn't quite have the rhythm yet to be at his best, but you can see already that he has real class, and there's real talent there, and it's another big asset for our squad. He's going to do us good throughout the season."

Jallet is new here, but in recent years, Nice know all about giving a platform to stars who have drifted from the most intense glare of the spotlight. Hatem Ben Arfa and Balotelli are the headliners in that regard. But, if those two enfants terribles were looking at a last chance when they arrived on the Cote d’Azur, Sneijder isn't in the same bracket.

The fall from his 2010 pinnacle of Italian treble winner with Inter Milan, World Cup finalist and potential Ballon d'Or winner was an unusual one, at least partially engineered by the Serie A side's precarious financial situation.

"Sneijder unfortunately left Inter under a bit of a cloud," Paolo Bandini, the Guardian's Italian football expert told Bleacher Report. "At the time, much was made of his off-pitch behaviour, and specifically of tweets that he and his wife, Yolanthe, had made in apparent contravention of strict social media guidelines that the club was trying to impose."

Nevertheless, he retained important supporters. "The manager, Andrea Stramaccioni," Bandini said, "would later claim that Inter were anxious to engineer a sale to relieve the pressure on a stretched budget—claiming that he always got on well with the player and was sad to see him go."

Sneijder's situation is more like that of Dante, one of the headline signings from this time last year. He was stuck in a project at Wolfsburg that moved on around him, and he has found a new lease of life at the Allianz Riviera. The Brazilian's reasons for coming were similar to those of Sneijder. He spoke at his own introduction last August (via Goal) of "a club that's growing," where he could simultaneously meet his own ambitions and "help young players."

That will be expected of Sneijder, too, and the personality—as well as the name and the ability—that attracted Les Aiglons has been apparent all through his spell at Galatasaray.

"Sneijder was a cult hero for Galatasaray fans," Emre Sarigul, a writer for the Guardian and the editor of Turkish-Football.com, told us. "He joined aged 28, so it was one of the first times a genuinely big star joined a Turkish club before his 30s, or before he was past it. The fans adored him because of the love he showed the club and how he settled into life in Turkey."

"The small details were very important," Sarigul continued. "Despite being a superstar with an actress as a wife, he was able to relate to the average fan. He and his wife made efforts to learn Turkish, something star players didn't bother to before. Later, he went into fan folklore when he grabbed the mic during the 20th title celebrations to shout to a packed crowd 'Fener aglama' [Fener don't cry]."

The leadership side of Sneijder is something that weighs here. For Nice, this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment pickup, but something they had in mind for a while.

"We can't say that we've always got our eyes on the Turkish league, but we've been following Wesley for practically two years. We were waiting for a window to open," Julien Fournier, the club's general director said at the presentation of Sneijder to the media, per L'Equipe.

That window opened on Bastille Day, July 14, when Sneijder and Galatasaray came to an agreement to rescind the remaining year of his contract. Just over three weeks later, he signed on the dotted line at Nice.

On the pitch, there was a tricky overlap against Guingamp. Everything Nice did flowed through Jean Michael Seri, even if the Ivorian bursts from deeper positions than the ones Sneijder will be expected to roam. Seri, as this column noted a few weeks ago, is highly unlikely to be here come September 1, with the eyes of many of Europe's finest fixed firmly on him.

So, while he tries to pick up the prompting duties of Younes Belhanda—who is now filling Sneijder's boots at Galatasaray—it will be a fitter Sneijder who will be pulling the strings in autumn, even if a deadpan Seri tantalisingly trailed the idea of them playing together in the longer term. "His technique is totally different to mine," he told us, "and so it gives us something else."

There was already the sense of Sneijder motoring into life after the break against Guingamp after a tentative first half; he began to take the bull by the horns, and almost created a picture-book goal for himself after slaloming forward, nutmegging Etienne Didot and narrowly failing to pull off a one-two with Balotelli.

There were only glimmers, as Nice began to recover their own confidence, of the real reason that this move should work out, beyond the name and the reputation. This is a good—and good to watch—football team, and Sneijder should really enjoy playing in it. With his ability and desire to succeed, he could be the biggest of Nice's recent star signings. "I'm still hungry," he told his presentation press conference, per the club's official website.

There's little reason to disbelieve him. That unquenchable desire, which would be part of Sneijder even without an eye on the 2018 World Cup, has still been evident in recent years and is great news for Nice and Ligue 1.