The first public appearance of André Villas-Boas at Chelsea this week was a fascinating occasion. In the course of it I learned several things, including the correct pronunciation of Villas-Boas, which is "Bee-yash-Bow-yash". This is quite difficult if you're a native Anglophone and it is perhaps best to imagine the phrase "bish-bosh" pronounced in the lingering accents of a villainous James Bond-era Russian spy turned slapdash painter and decorator.

Like everybody else, I learned that here was another doe-eyed dugout dreamboat, a manager reminiscent in appearance of the well-groomed, handsome divorced man from a male hair dye advert who finds himself ushered shriekingly to the threshold of a whole new life of post-marital sexual conquest by his own adolescent daughter. But mainly I learned that Villas‑Boas is intelligent.

When he had finally stopped being intelligent and left the room (effortlessly selecting the correct door) we sat around basking in his intelligence, absorbing the brainwave aftershocks. For a while it seemed that this might even be something new. Perhaps the Intelligent Football Manager might be a fresh evolutionary stage, a step beyond the Scheming Snake Manager and the Manager Who has Been On A Course And Owns a Laptop. But intelligent managers are already out there. David Moyes could pass himself off as an eminent Victorian headmaster. Kenny Dalglish speaks in Yoda-like epigrams. Fabio Capello has glasses.

Instead, what makes Villas-Boas stand out is the fact that he is middle class. Not the first of his kind, but perhaps the first unapologetically "out" middle-class manager – not flaunting it, not rubbing your nose in it, but prepared to live openly among us. Just look at those credentials: son of a university professor, great grandfather the viscount of Guilhomil, endlessly bookish and coaching badged. Say it clear, say it loud; he's middle class – and he's not yet particularly embarrassed about it.

He may be soon, because in this country revulsion at the middle classes is the last great ringfenced footballing prejudice. There are those who will even say that our football is already middle class, that an influx of braying student types has destroyed one of the great cathedrals of working-class communion. This is a little unfair on middle-class people, who also like to commune and can often be seen gathering together in Wi-Fi-friendly coffee bars and butcher's shops where they sell hand-reared pheasant tongue slaughtered with an antique Edwardian shooting stick.

The gentrification of football is instead a monification, enacted by rich people – rich people of any class or, often, no class at all. The middle classes have still made no mark. If they had football would probably look quite different. Middle-class football would take place in painstakingly restored Victorian stadiums. It might not even be called football anymore, having been rebranded as Free Range Kick Fun or Organic Family Leg Play. And people wouldn't shout all the way through but would instead clap politely at the end and then slope off to write an acerbic online review.

As it is the middle classes have no voice in football. This is true in the most literal sense as all middle-class people are cursed with an inability to shout convincingly in public and only feel comfortable speaking in a moderate voice and saying things like "one senses a dearth of textural variation". The more typical middle‑class noises (the clearing of the throat, the phrase "Would you mind taking your feet off the seats please?") just sound whiny or nasal or a little out of control at a raised volume.

This bogus emotional restraint is one of the reasons why football on the internet is such a furiously unhappy business: empowered by anonymity, here the middle classes enter a world beyond their comfort zone, where there are no signposts for decorum and where they instantly become incontinent with bile – like middle-class people who suddenly snap and begin shouting at people in shops or airline staff, going in an instant from a rictus of ingratiating reserve to basically calling the woman in Argos a bloody servant.

This is all no doubt irrelevant to the fate of the brilliantly composed Villas‑Boas. But there are no correspondingly middle-class English managers. Roy Hodgson may be middle class, what with his foreign travel and his book reading, but this suspicion may be based solely in the fact that he sounds like a sonorous Shakespearean actor of the 1960s pretending to be the type of East End gangster who says things like "Play by the rules sonny Jim". Graham Taylor also seemed a bit middle class, with his politeness and his quivering emotional explosions, and this is why he had to be destroyed.

Perhaps English football could even be missing something. Middle‑class people may be, among other things, racked by self‑analysis and in thrall to foreign influence, and have a disproportionate faith in academic qualifications. But some of these qualities, distilled to homoeopathic proportions, may be quite useful in a game that retains its bullish certainties to a fault. At this point it is tempting to hail Villas‑Boas as a class warrior, to announce that I'm all set to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, marching together in the teeth of prejudice. But I'll probably just sit here and write something arch about it instead.

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