He led Blackburn into Europe, saved QPR and Southampton from relegation and he helped to clear the skies for a Blue Moon to rise above Manchester.
But for reasons he couldn't understand, the tide went out fast on Mark Hughes as a Premier League manager and the phone stopped ringing. Or, in his words, his “network ran out of leads.”
So when lowly Bradford City of League Two came calling, Hughes was neither too proud to turn them down – nor too presumptuous that he would work again nearer football's summit than the foothills. 'Sparky' had been out of the game for more than three years until the Bantams offered him a lifeline in February and they have made a promising start in the muck and nettles, currently tucked in the play-off places.
You don't get many players who once plied their trade at Manchester United, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea and Everton patrolling the technical areas at Barrow, Hartlepool and Newport. Hughes, now 59, eventually came to terms with his managerial style falling out of favour among the elite.
But he admitted: “A lot of the appointments that were made, before I landed this role, caused me to scratch my head on occasions. I was applying for jobs but the phone stopped ringing.
"Maybe my network ran out of leads – in most cases, appointments in this business are made because somebody knows somebody, and the club looking for a new manager is already closer to somebody else than people applying from the outside.
Should more managers follow Hughes into the lower leagues? Who would you like to see cut it in League Two? Have your say in the comments below.
“I know how it works, and I came to a point where I finally understood that.”
Hughes also accepts there won't be many away days in private jets, luxury hotels and the trappings of Premier League opulence at tidy Valley Parade, where a shrine to the 56 victims of the terrible fire in 1985 is a sobering reminder that some things are more important than football. But to find a baron of his profession in the fourth tier is still an anomaly.
If clubs turned their backs on him because his style of play was supposedly going out of fashion, their snobbery does not match the evidence at Bradford. Yes, 11-goal top scorer Andy Cook – who has the best minutes-per-goal ratio in Europe behind Erling Haaland and Robert Lewandowski in Europe this season – is a robust focal point up front, just like Hughes in his pomp at United, but the supporting cast is decent.
You wouldn't find Pep Guardiola putting his reputation on the line in League Two unless his employers find a spare £250 million down the back of the sofa. And in the empire Guardiola now surveys at Manchester City, it was Hughes who laid some of the most important foundations by signing the likes of Vincent Kompany and Carlos Tevez.
He grinned: “I can't take any of the credit for where Man City are at the moment, because they have done very well for themselves since I left, but I was there at a time when there was a huge amount of change going on. I enjoyed it while it lasted, but I always knew, amid all the changes going on, that I was going to get relieved of my duties at some point, but it was a really good experience and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
“I think there's a perception that managers who have only worked in the Premier League or the Championship aren't equipped to operate in the lower divisions. OK, the players and standards might be a bit different, but the game and the fundamentals are still the same.
“It's a different level to where I've operated before, and it's a level with its own challenges, but I'm really enjoying it. For the most part, the games are honest and the players on both sides are trying to present the best versions of themselves in terms of their footballing ability.
“I've got a good group here and many of the signs are positive. We've just got to make sure we learn quickly and make sure our decision-making is good – when it's poor, that's one thing that stands out at this level. We need to get out of this league, and if we can do that, hopefully we can build in the right manner, at the right speed, aim even higher and see where it takes us.
“Already we're getting crowds of 17,000 so the fanbase is there. It would be nice to give them a bit of success.”
