Maurizio Sarri’s story ought to be an inspiration to any failed professional footballer who toils away in the non-League game, juggling a full-time job, a family and an impossible dream that they just cannot shake. It was not until his late 30s, when he started to win promotions into the higher reaches of Italian non-League football, that he was seen as something other than a chain-smoking eccentric banker with deep rings under his eyes from lack of sleep.

He is not the first Premier League manager to have had a “real job” and he is not the first to have done it without having played professionally. But he may be the first to have done both while ascending to this level from the very lowest