Jürgen Klinsmann is ready for his next challenge in football but he is not so desperate that he will take any job going. He does not want to work for a club where the chairman chooses the players. He does not want a director of football looking over his shoulder and interfering with the senior squad.

Over lunch near his home south of Los Angeles, it becomes abundantly clear why Chelsea sought Klinsmann as a daring alternative to José Mourinho, but it is equally evident why he found it easy to resist Roman Abramovich’s offer, however many noughts were on the pay-cheque.

He tiptoes around the C-word but the message is unmistakable. “It is very simple,” he said. “You want to work with the right people at the right place for the right purpose. It is not hard to turn things down if people don’t share the same perspective, ambition, philosophy.”

Working with Abramovich’s team of advisers was never likely to appeal to a man with a singular vision of how to recruit and develop players and who, in his previous position as coach of the Germany team, had made it plain that it was his way or no way.

“As manager, you will get fired sooner or later so you should be in charge of everyone involved with football: the players, coaches, staff,” he said. “You are on a lost track already if the president chooses the players or you don’t have that power. If you are not given all the tools, then don’t do it.”

The unique conditions that would come with managing Chelsea must have been all too apparent when Avram Grant travelled to California in April as part of the delegation intent on wooing Klinsmann (a mission, incredibly, that the Israeli undertook even though he was then working as director of football at Portsmouth). Grant’s involvement went almost unremarked at the time, yet it reveals just how influential he had already become.

Klinsmann has the wealth and the self-confidence to be able to wait for the right job and the right working environment. He is not short of offers, even though his managerial career encompasses only the two years with Germany. He led his home nation to an unexpected third place at the 2006 World Cup finals and, with their positive approach in vivid contrast to the caution of so many international sides, Klinsmann put himself on the map as a coach of rare adventure.

Just as he moved out to California immediately after his retirement as a player to find peace with his family, he needed a break after the frenzy of the tournament. “In this job, you need to get your distance or people start thinking they own you,” he said.

He feels better for the time away and reports that he spurned the chance to move to Chelsea because he did not want to uproot his wife and two children are misguided. He is fiercely protective of his family’s privacy but has ruled out nothing in terms of his next destination or the timing of his return.

He insists that he is in no rush but, even in the soothing environs of exclusive Huntington Beach, the ambition bubbles just below the surface. It was there throughout his playing days when he would move clubs regularly in single-minded pursuit of honours.

“You carry a high amount of ambition inside of you,” he said. “In my case, it is nature given. I was overambitious as a player and I am not sitting in the sun all day now. I work, prepare and educate myself.”

Education is a word that comes up frequently in conversation with Klinsmann, who is almost evangelical in his belief that football needs to revolutionise its training of players and managers. He talks of a sport set in its ways and run by the old school. During his time with the Germany team, he offered language training, leadership courses and even brought in computer experts so that he could communicate with all the players by e-mail.

There is something of Sir Clive Woodward about Klinsmann in his desire to surround himself with specialist coaches and particularly in his belief that expertise can be transferred across different sports. While working for the German federation, he wanted to recruit the technical director from the national hockey team. To his dismay, his employers found that a dangerously radical approach.

Klinsmann is no recent convert to hiring in expertise. He employed his own sprint coach as a 17-year-old with Stuttgart. The result was that famously prancing running style but also a head start over his rivals and opponents.

“Luckily I had people on the outside telling me what I could do, how I could get quicker. But for some players and managers, the education process stops,” he said. “The sad thing about professional football is that, in many ways, it needs to be more professional.”

You can imagine Klinsmann with self-help manuals around the home and he has learnt Spanish in the past 12 months to add to his German, Italian, French and English. That gives him plenty of scope for his next job and, wherever it is, he expects to produce the “active, not reactive” football that carried Germany to the semi-finals in 2006.

Klinsmann acknowledges a debt to Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan with their high defensive line and powerful pressing but, while he has leaned towards 4-4-2, more important than the formation is establishing a purposeful vision. “You can only hire a coach if he fits the philosophy you want,” he said.

“That is what I admire about Ajax. They only stand for a coach who appreciates 4-3-3, the football that Cruyff built. They’ll say, ‘OK, now we are struggling, but we know we’re going to be successful again if we stick to what we believe in.’ So the under10s play 4-3-3 and they won’t take a coach who plays 4-5-1. There are some these days who play 4-6-0.”

Klinsmann learnt from some of the game’s most successful coaches, including Otto Rehhagel, César Luis Menotti, Franz Beckenbauer, and Arsène Wenger at AS Monaco. He was impressed that Wenger would put the long-term development of players ahead of immediate results, although he also tells a funny story about the Frenchman’s tough pragmatism. “Arsène promised me I’d play up front with George Weah,” he said. “Six hours after I signed, Weah was sold to Paris [Saint-Germain]. I said, ‘Arsène, that’s a nice introduction’ and he replied, ‘You would never have come if I’d told you he was leaving.’ That’s the business. Even Arsène plays the game.”

World champion in 1990, European champion in 1996 and the scorer of 47 goals in 108 internationals, Klinsmann has been around long enough to know football can be a murky business. One vice that he will not tolerate is diving, which will bring a smile to all those Englishmen who used to mock him for theatrics. “As a manager, I would tell a player absolutely that we don’t want it,” he said. “I think you have a moral responsibility to stand up afterwards and apologise.”

It is not the sort of thing you heard Mourinho say too often and the more Klinsmann talks, the more he seems exactly what Chelsea were looking for; a big name to spread their message of global domination, a football purist and strong-willed without being troublesome.

A big European club will surely tempt him before long, but, as he sips cappuccino, looking as trim as the day he retired from playing nine years ago, it is also easy to understand why he does not need the internal politics of Chelsea or, for that matter, Tottenham Hotspur.

An insight into his determination to work within his own parameters comes with the revelation that he would have turned down the chance to lead his own country if the German federation had not signed up to his ideas. “I said, ‘If you don’t want to make the changes, if you don’t want to go in the same direction, that’s OK, I’ll fly home, no problem,’ ” he said. The fact that it allowed him to commute from California says everything about Klinsmann’s powers of negotiation. Along with his rejection of Chelsea, it is a lesson for the next suitor who beats a path to his door.

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