An important thing to remember about Andre Villas-Boas is that he had ridiculously good hair.
You don’t spend a record-shattering €15 million (£12.9; $16.3m) fee to sign a rookie manager away from Porto unless you’re pretty sure you know what you’re getting, and one thing Chelsea knew for certain, back in the heady days of 2011, was that the man with a swirling, fox-red side-parting looked impossibly cool getting tossed in the air during trophy celebrations.
Villas-Boas at Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Hair like that had sexy new ideas — a philosophy, perhaps. It had the sort of rakish sweep that could command a press conference, smouldering volcanically above the jagged peaks of an unbuttoned collar. But when the 33-year-old prodigy conducted his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all of the glamour quickly drained away.
“Don’t expect something,” Villas-Boas warned gently, “from one man.”
True to his word, he was sacked by March.
Villas-Boas to Chelsea might have gone down as a historic blunder if not for all the other managers teams have squandered transfer fees on in the last few years alone: Marco Rose to Borussia Dortmund (€5 million up front for one lacklustre season); Adi Hutter to Borussia Monchengladbach (€7.5 million, ditto); Julian Nagelsmann to Bayern Munich (€25 million for 19 months); Graham Potter to Chelsea (let’s not talk about it). These were the cream of the crop, the head coaches clubs couldn’t afford to wait around for, yet in their new jobs they had the shelf life of a bunch of bruised bananas.