GET ready for the Special Two. Watford’s annual wage bill of £3.5 million may only be half what Chelsea will pay Michael Ballack next season, but perhaps the respective managers of the Barclays Premiership champions and its newest members are not so different.

Only one has infinite cash to spend, but both have limitless self-confidence. José Mourinho has his Armani overcoat, while Adrian Boothroyd wears self- assurance like a second skin. After the Coca-Cola Championship play-offs final on Sunday, the Watford manager refused to entertain the notion that his team would be relegated and, in the same breath, declined to rule out the possibility of winning the Champions League in the near future.

The 35-year-old Yorkshireman is eight years younger than the Portuguese. He is also thorough, direct, and a motivator driven by a playing career that fell short of the perfectionism that he seeks in management. As Mourinho has done, he courted headline-grabbing controversy — his gamesmanship in the semi-final with Crystal Palace contributed to the start of a mass brawl.

“In every aspect, he is a man who is ahead of his time,” Graham Simpson, the Watford chairman, said. Had Simpson appointed Betty Boothroyd 14 months ago, it might have been met with less scepticism. The supporters were so angry at his choice that Simpson needed bodyguards on match days.

“I think most of the football world laughed at us,” he said. “They all said, ‘Who is Adrian Boothroyd?’ We knew when we met him that we had found somebody very, very special.”

Instant success has taken Boothroyd nine years. Since injury ended his playing days aged 26, he has coached youth teams at Peterborough United and Norwich City, then West Bromwich Albion, where he was named technical director. He then joined Leeds United as first-team coach before wowing Watford’s board at interview.

“Our vice-chairman Jimmy Russo is famous for not sitting still very long,” Simpson said. “We sat for about four hours with Adrian and I thought Jimmy would be up about ten or 20 times. He never moved. He was transfixed.

“What Adrian convinced us was that, in my terminology, he would be a holistic manager — a manager who had a vision for the club in the 21st century. His ideas on training, diet, how he would develop the academy, how he would work with the scouting network — and not the archaic network you tend to have in football but a new one — were very exciting.”

With its guaranteed booty of about £40 million, the Premiership is not so much a cash cow as a cash herd for Watford. Still, big-money signings are out of the question. Vicarage Road holds fewer than 20,000, and the club are frugal, having learned some costly lessons from their relegation in 2000.

Watford’s success is about the system, not stars. The manager wants athletes, not aesthetes: young players with pace and power who will work for each other and faithfully enact his precise, direct, tactics.

“He wants to show what you can do with a team ethos. Not necessarily with players who have earned a huge amount of money and already been successful,” Simpson said.

“Watford is a great club to learn with. If he is going to move on — and he is going to move on some day — he will have learned a tremendous amount.”

For now, Boothroyd would happily be the new Graham Taylor. Simpson accepts the comparison: “Where Adrian has probably moved further forward — no disrespect to Graham at all — is that he is now embracing the 21st century.”