Sam Allardyce accepts that football could forget about him. “There's no doubt about it,” he says. But he is not panicking. “There is time to wait for the right opportunity to build another football club. I miss management and look forward to getting back to it. I have had no concrete offers, just the odd brief moment where something has been suggested.”

He strides around the bar of the hotel looking exactly how a man known as “Big Sam” should. He exudes a mix of amiability and confidence that he needed, no doubt, when he played semi-professional football for Dudley Town at the age of 14, alongside his older brother, Robert, “until me teacher found out and stopped me”. Allardyce made Bolton his second home and transformed the club's fortunes. “It was my stamp, I ran the club how I wanted to manage it in order for it to be more successful than it had been for 50 years,” he says.

It barely seems credible, therefore, that the man who modernised football management in Britain has not been snapped up. It is almost a year since he was sacked by Newcastle United and few argue that he lost his job because the club were taken over rather than because he failed to cope. “Not such good timing in the end,” he says of Mike Ashley's purchase of Newcastle. “I don't bear grudges, I just move on.”

Here Allardyce gives a fascinating insight into his management style.

American influence

When Allardyce joined the Tampa Bay Rowdies he lived in a condominium close to the players of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the American football team and an altogether more professionally run club. “They had physiotherapists, masseurs, dieticians, psychologists, psychiatrists, coaches, doctors, all looking after these highly motivated professionals,” he says. “The mind is the all-powerful thing. If you're not in the right frame of mind it's going to be very difficult for you to produce your best. Americans are stat-mad, but there was no system in the game until recent years that could give you that here.”

So he was forced to watch “regurgitated videos which could only give you a blinkered view as it just watches the ball, which is what everyone does - except managers and scouts”.

Bolton Wanderers were the first club to code a match for instant decision-making. “The opposition were mistrustful of our man with the laptop,” Allardyce says. He believed that it was important that the players were not shown only their errors, because they would reject the technology. “You must make sure there is a really positive element all the time or the players will get fearful,” he says.

The Barry Knight Effect

The worst night of Allardyce's football career was also the one that turned around the fortunes of Bolton. Knight refereed the 2000 play-offs semi-final, second leg between Bolton and Ipswich Town at Portman Road. It was a finely poised tie at 2-2, but Knight booked nine Bolton players, sent two off, did not book any home players and awarded three penalties to Ipswich. Despite scoring three goals, Bolton lost 7-5 on aggregate after the match went to extra time.

“Going through Barry Knight's hugely controversial performance is something I'll never, ever forget,” Allardyce says. “He nearly destroyed that football club and the career path of me and Bolton Wanderers as a team with his inept performance.”

The memory gave him the courage to ignore the derision of Bolton fans and the incredulity of his support staff a year later when his team looked set to be beaten at the same stage again. “I couldn't face another disappointment in the play-offs, going out in the semi-finals, going on holiday and not enjoying it, planning for a division that we didn't deserve to be in,” he says. “I would have to scrimp and save and keep the team motivated.”

Most crucial tactical decision

In his second season as manager of Bolton, the club faced West Bromwich Albion in the semi-finals of the play-offs. “We were 2-0 down and playing a 4-4-2,” Allardyce says. “We had Colin Hendry playing for us - a Braveheart who'd done a great job for us. He'd already been booked and I said to Brownie [Phil Brown, his assistant], ‘I'm going to take Hendry off and put Mike Whitlow on.' They all thought that was probably insane, but my view was it was hard enough to get anything out of this game with 11, never mind ten, and we were going to be ten very shortly, given the tackles Hendry was making.

“We also needed to challenge the West Brom system more, which was a back three with two up front. I had the wisdom of taking off my leading goalscorer, Dean Holdsworth, which everyone thought was insane and you've got the Bolton fans thinking I've gone mad.”

Allardyce sent on Per Frandsen to match their midfield and ordered his three quickest players - Michael Ricketts, Ricardo Gardner and Bo Hansen - up front. “I took a calculated risk so we could compete better in midfield and we told the three up front not to bother coming back, just to stay up there,” Allardyce says. “Two-nil, 3-0 doesn't make much difference, but if it gets to 2-1 they're going to get worried. Nobody agreed with me, the fans vented their frustration, but we scored off a corner and equalised in the dying minutes.”

His team, feeling invincible, beat Preston North End 3-0 in the 2001 play-offs final and, against the odds, made a fabulous start to the Premiership, beating Leicester City 5-2, Liverpool 2-1 and, after a few blips, went to Old Trafford and won 2-1. “That gave the lads the belief that the division was not as daunting as we had expected and a cushion to stay out of the bottom three, which is the hardest place to live in football,” he says.

Big Sam, big staff

Allardyce is not afraid to delegate. Indeed, his managerial philosophy is built around his preference to employ specialists. “The delegation to highly qualified staff in their own field is an area that's quite difficult - to relinquish responsibility,” he says. “Managers can easily get paranoid. Football is full of paranoia. I found that if you try to look after everything and try to be all things to all men, you are diluting your own strengths.

“It's not about me going to a football club and saying I need 22 backroom staff; that could be quite scary for somebody. It depends on the size of the football club and what it wants. Eventually we might get there.”

He says that he started out desperate for a chance to be a manager, not worrying about boardroom politics, but quickly learnt how flexible he needed to be to handle board members and persuade the chairman to take a gamble.

Intuition

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Allardyce talks about intuition in terms of statistics. “Your intuition comes from knowing when to discard all the information you might gather,” he says. His favourite example of this is when he took Bolton to play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge five years ago. Allardyce's team were beset by injuries, so “I decided we would forget all that information for once and we would play a snooker team, darts team and pool team and we would have a round-robin tournament before we set off for Chelsea. All the other staff who were getting ready to produce a training session for Chelsea were completely thrown and said, ‘You can't do that'. But we had a lot of players with knocks or who were under the weather and I didn't want to risk losing them. I said to the staff at the time, ‘We're never going to mention this if we lose.'” Bolton won 2-1.

Captaincy

Allardyce was captain of every team he played for bar Bolton. “If you are captain of every team, they are suggesting you have leadership qualities,” he says. “It was always clear to me what the coaches wanted. I had the capacity to remember what we had to do at set-pieces.

“The best captain I found was Jay-Jay Okocha. He was as good off the field as on it. He could handle himself in most positions, he could speak three or four languages so he could communicate with most of the team and was so, so talented on the field, a great entertainer, one of the best in the Premier League for two years.”

Okocha might seem an odd choice because the Nigeria midfield player rarely set ProZone, the match analysis tool, alight. “What might look lazy might be a lull in terms of him getting ready to produce the big moment,” Allardyce says. “The frantic never take the time to compose themselves to make the big pass or the big moment that changes the game in your favour.”

The man in the stand

Think Allardyce, think big man hunched in his seat, high in the stand, muttering into a microphone. He dislikes it when managers are criticised for not jumping up and down enough. “The calmer you are, the better judgments you'll make,” he says. “You can get emotionally really wound up in the dugout. You feel the atmosphere there much more. You only see 22 pairs of socks, but some managers like the emotional attachment. They feel they need that to be the best manager they can be. I felt up in the stand was the best way for me.”

Reputation

Bolton overachieved under Allardyce, but were rarely loved for it. Asked if he is proud of his revolutionary approach, he says “not really” because there were sneers that he was in some way not good news for football. “We had to turn that negative into a positive,” he says. “We could never compete financially with the vast majority of the teams in the Premiership, so to beat them we had to be adaptable. If we beat a team by outplaying them and outpassing them, we got no credit. When we beat a top team on a consistent basis, the manager would say it was because we kicked them off the park and were not very nice to watch, which was most disappointing.

“But I was much happier having a glass of wine with the opposing manager and him going to his press conference and criticising the way we played than I was sat in there and being told how nice it was we tried to play the right way but we had just got beat 3-1.”