For Michael Jordan read Nicolas Anelka; for Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal read El-Hadji Diouf and Kevin Davies.

For nine years, George Mumford, the legendary American sports psychologist, worked for the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers basketball teams, assisting Phil Jackson, the coach, and a cast of phenomenal talent in winning six championships. This week, the 55-year-old Bostonian has been in more down-to-earth surroundings, working with players and staff at Bolton Wanderers.

The visit came about through Mumford’s friendship with Mike Forde, the Bolton performance consultant, who has delved deep into American sports in recent years, importing a number of ideas to the Reebok Stadium.

In a nutshell, Forde said, the challenge facing Bolton and Sam Allardyce, the manager, after six years of solid Premiership performance is taking the step to the next level — regular European qualification. Keeping Bolton ahead of the pack when they do not have the transfer resources of the majority of their rivals is a tall order and tapping into the experiences of people such as Mumford, whose original speciality was working on stress reduction with chronically or terminally ill hospital patients, is central to that process.

“Principles are timeless and they don’t change,” Mumford said, explaining how American sports expertise translates to football. “It is how you apply them and whether people accept them. The problem with winning is that everyone tries to emulate you. You have got to stay one step ahead, so there has to be a way of understanding how to move beyond your current comfort zone.

“You have to have the desire, passion and commitment to do that and that has to come from the player. A lot of people don’t understand that Michael Jordan got cut from his high-school team. But what the coach offered him was the opportunity to work on his game so he could move up to the next level.

“What happens is not as important as how you respond to it. He responded by saying, ‘I’ll never get cut from another team.’

“But it wasn’t until he played college basketball at North Carolina and made the winning shot in a National Championship game that he realised he had a lot of potential. So, there were two experiences that shaped what he became, made him realise he had to expand his vision of what he could become.”

Jackson, who was years ahead of the rest of the world in how he utilised sports psychology, used a variety of techniques, from yoga to meditation, from Native American spiritualism to forming a team “book club” with players assigned different books to read. Scepticism among the players evaporated when Jackson’s teams started to win the first of the nine titles he has claimed.

But central to Jackson’s two championship clubs were superstars — Jordan, O’Neal and Bryant — all of whom had to check their egos at the door for the good of the team. The timing of Mumford’s visit, in Anelka’s first season at the Reebok Stadium, is purely coincidental.

“One of the things that intrigues me is the aspect of managing talent and getting players to let go of whims and egos,” Forde said. “It is a great case study to see Michael Jordan, the greatest athlete of all time, committing to something larger than himself — the team.

“Jordan accepted a role scoring less points, but he won more championships doing that. In the same way, the last four years, we haven’t had a player score ten league goals. But one of the main things Sam has to take credit for is bringing in talented players — Youri Djorkaeff, a World Cup winner, [Jay-Jay] Okocha, [Iván] Campo, [Fernando] Hierro, Diouf, now Anelka — and getting them to commit to his system. That is why we are only one of five teams to have finished in the top eight in each of the last three seasons.”

Of course, the modern sports team is only one superstar tantrum away from imploding, a fate that befell Jackson’s Lakers when O’Neal’s and Bryant’s egos clashed spectacularly. Again, that is an area of Mumford’s experience that is hugely relevant to modern Premiership clubs.

“What happens is that, if you believe the hype, all of a sudden, it changes things,” Mumford said of the break-up of that Lakers team. “That’s the challenge — how do you guard yourself against the hype? You can see that difficulty in sustaining things. Once you win a championship, maybe players are more interested in personal goals, so there is that tension between the personal and the group.”

Whatever the long-term benefits of Mumford’s visit, the short-term one was impressive — Bolton winning away to Aston Villa on Saturday — while Allardyce claims to have gained a lot from the American’s visit.

“It’s thoroughly refreshing to have experts in their field coming to give us some ideas on how we might improve,” Allardyce said. “At this level, it is all about exchanging ideas and information. In America, George has worked with some of the best-known organisations and best-known players in not only his sport, but all of sport — the Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. The names don’t get any bigger than that.”