An exceptional man-manager, tactical innovator, forward-thinking, straight-shooting, gaffer who exudes passion, maximises strengths, switches styles and creates winning cultures. A man of the people with an honour-drenched CV who has worked and continues to work wonders, which in turn has transformed him into the most coveted English manager in the game today.

Yes, we are talking about Chris Wilder, who has been crowned The Sack Race’s: Manager of the Decade, for the period 2010 to 2019.

From a purely management point of view, his story is stunning. Wilder began the decade as a non-league manager with Oxford, in fact he ended 2009 by facing Salisbury in the then titled Blue Square Premier. He then embarked upon a meteoric managerial rise up the league ladder, orchestrating four promotions - including two league titles - at three different clubs across a 10-year period. He ended 2019 with a clash against Pep Guardiola’s defending Premier League champions Man City, and heads into 2020 with his Sheffield United in touching distance of the top-four.

Click here for the full list of The Sack Race's 'Managers of the Decade'

"I have always given 100% for every club I've been involved in," Wilder told BBC Sport in 2017 - never has a truer sentence been said.

The decade wasn’t even six months old when Wilder led Oxford United back into the Football League via the National League play-offs. This was followed by three consecutive top-half finishes in League Two, where he flirted with the play-offs, before he surprisingly switched to Northampton mid-way through the 2013/14 season.

It’s worth remembering that at the time Oxford were 5th in League Two, 23 points ahead of Wilder’s new employers who were rock-bottom of the Football League. Come the end of the season Wilder had saved Northampton from the dreaded drop, and then proceeded to inspire a top-half finish in his first full season (12th).

Wilder miraculously won the League Two title in his second full season in charge of Northampton, with former club Oxford a distant 13 points adrift in 2nd. It was a colossal achievement made more miraculous considering that the club were plagued by a raft of distracting off-field issues - the most notable of which was a winding-up order over an unpaid tax bill which meant that the club had come within 24 hours of going out of business. Wilder himself went unpaid for three months.