He’s an impeccably dressed gourmet, aesthete and art collector, a solid family man who believes in hard work and discipline, has no time for big egos and pays no attention to what the media say. Welcome to the new England football manager. And you’re surprised he isn’t English?

At 61 Fabio Capello is the oldest man ever to take on the position that even the Italian press describes as the “second most important job in England”, and it may be overrating the significance most of us currently attach to Gordon Brown.

But never before – not even in the halcyon early days of Sven-Goran Eriksson’s reign – has there been such a chorus of unbridled approval from almost everyone in the game, except for a handful of English managers who were never even considered.

Already the tabloids are gearing up to anoint him with the title Fab-1 – and what could be more splendidly English than the registration plate of Lady Penelope’s Rolls-Royce?

Friends say Capello already has basic English and a facility for languages (he speaks fluent Spanish) that will enable him to come quickly up to par. Liverpool’s Spanish manager, Rafa Benitez, has warned him to make it his priority if only not to miss the point of dressing room humour. “I used to confuse ‘win’ and ‘wine’,” he has confessed.

The question is, can Europe’s most successful club manager, who has never in his life signed an English player – and once told David Beckham, whom he inherited at Real Madrid, he would never play for him again – really end the “30 years of hurt” we sang about at Euro 96 for the 2010 World Cup, by which time it will be a 44-year-old chronic complaint.

Capello had football in his blood from birth in a part of Italy that had little fixed national identity. When he was born in the small town of San Canzian d’Isonzo in June 1946, it had recently been part of Yugoslavia. The province is called Gorizia, an Italianisation of Gorica, Slovenian for Little Hill. Local folk spoke Bisiac, a variant of the Veneto dialect, which Fabio’s teacher father courted official censure by using in school to make sure his pupils understood their lessons. Capello Sr also coached the football team in their village of Piersi, where Fabio’s 86-year-old mother still lives in a modest flat she prefers to the fine houses her son has offered to buy her.

A talented player from childhood - family friends recall him kicking a ball aged three - young Fabio started playing professionally at 18 for the Ferrara club SPAL, though he continued his studies to qualify as a surveyor. When SPAL were relegated from Serie A, Italian football’s top flight, he moved to Roma, where he won his first trophy, the Italian Cup, before moving on to Juventus and AC Milan.

He was a solid, stylish midfielder, whom former teammates recall as having “great visual play” and an ability to score “at the most opportune moments”.

One of those came at Wembley in 1973, one of his 32 international caps, when he scored a goal that helped Italy to beat England at home for the first time and end the career of the World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore. Capello ended his playing career at AC Milan at the age of 34 in 1980, when he saw a threat coming up through the ranks in the form of young Franco Baresi, whom he would later manage and help confirm as one of the greats of Italian football.

He is available now because he was dismissed from Real Madrid at the end of last season, despite overseeing a magnificent return to form - reinstating David Beckham because he showed commitment - and narrowly winning the league. Madrid claimed it wanted more exciting football, but the English Football Association would be more than happy with just winning. We have had our fill of the wrong sort of excitement.

Curiously, Capello’s initiation into the management world came after a visit to Eriksson back in 1991 to ask advice from the man who had just won the Portuguese league with Benfica and taken them to the semi-finals of the Uefa Cup. The two went on to do battle as managers of rival Italian teams.

Capello won nine league titles with four teams from two countries, including a hat-trick (in fact, four out of five) with AC Milan. Faced with Real Madrid’s underperforming galacticos - including Beckham - he saw a collection of celebrities and proceeded to turn them back into a team.

Under Capello there will be no ego trips and none of the sex and shopping circuses with the Wags who attracted more headlines than their other halves in the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

The English Premier League managers Mark Hughes (Blackburn) and Gareth Southgate (Middlesbrough) complain that having a foreign manager makes a mockery of calling it the England team, a complaint echoed by Reading’s Steve Coppell, who would probably stand more chance if he changed his name to Coppello.

There is also discomfort in football’s ruling body that Capello wants to bring in an almost entirely Italian coaching team, but all of that will evaporate if he brings in results.

He may not be as flamboyant as the former Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho, who flirted with the job, but at least Capello came straight out and said he would be honoured to accept - a decision helped by the record £6m salary, more than twice the amount paid to his predecessor, Steve McClaren. He will be anything but anonymous, however. In Italy he is the face of the expensive Zerorh+ designer spectacles and he is more likely to be seen on the touchline in Armani suits than Adidas tracksuits. His one sartorial comment on the English has been to utter distaste for ankle socks on men, saying the view of hairy shins protruding from trousers “offends my eyes”.

He is equally fastidious about the quality of what he eats, having acquired a passion in Spain for jamon iberico, raw cured ham from pigs fed on acorns. The tabloids joke that he will have to learn to love fish’n’chips and chicken tikka masala, but it would be more likely that he finds common cause with Gordon Ramsay (a former footballer) and Jamie Oliver (an enthusiast for all things Italian).

His time in Spain also saw him discover an enthusiasm for bullfighting, which he described as “one part risk, one part ballet”. In football, however, he puts both risk and ballet behind solid tactics, coordination and planning.

He likes to know everything about his players and to be able to estimate in advance how long they will last on the pitch, and is not afraid to dent egos: “You have to be a psychiatrist – a father but also a mother – but above all you have to think of the team, not the individual.”

As an individual, he will now come under the intense, often unbearable, scrutiny of the British media, but friends say it will be no worse than in Spain, where the former Arsenal star Thierry Henry says the media “want to come home to bed with you”.

Similarly in Italy he has had to cope with Europe’s most extreme fan fanaticism. In a city where Manchester United fans were stabbed in the buttocks last week, Capello became a target of hate when he walked out on Roma, to the extent that he needed a bodyguard when he went back to visit his dentist.

As for hostile criticism, even Mourinho might have blushed at his offhand dismissal: “Why should I waste my time listening to people who are clearly less intelligent than me?” But then you have to remember this is a man with a £10m art collection who rates Tolstoy as among his favourite authors. Not many footie managers can say that.

The Italian papers have defied their British counterparts to dig any dirt. The only blip was a minor scandal over ownership of property in an Italian tax-haven enclave in Switzerland. He received a €3,000(£2,150) fine. The most dodgy line yet dug up is that he has a niece with the surname Soprano.

His marriage to Laura, whom he met on a bus in Ferrara at the age of 18, is reported to be rock solid. Their son is a lawyer who also acts as his agent. He insists his proudest boast is to have “followed life in a straight line, to have a united family and the smile of a son”.

In politics he has veered from left to right and is known to be a devout conservative Roman Catholic. But in a land where the only real religion that matters is football, we will let him away with anything if only he can get God back on our side. Preferably playing up front, next to Rooney.