With the spotlight set to be firmly fixed on the Portuguese manager he would do well to learn from some of the mistakes he made at Chelsea.
1. Don’t impose a tactical philosophy that your team aren’t comfortable with. As soon as the season started, it was clear AVB wanted to keep the high pressing game that won his Porto side the Portuguese league title and Europa League in the same season. With an ageing and relatively slow back four, this tactic was doomed to failure and Chelsea found themselves hopelessly exposed at the back, none more so when Arsenal put five past Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in October.
2. Get the old guard on your side. Much was made before his arrival of the fact Villas Boas, at the tender age of 33, was younger than some of Chelsea’s most illustrious players. It was clear that if he was to win over the dressing room, he had to get these older, extremely influential players on board. Like Brian Clough at champions Leeds, this simply never happened, and was exacerbated by the Portuguese manager continuing to drop Frank Lampard in favour of fellow countryman Raul Meireles, who has yet to fully prove himself in a Chelsea shirt.
3. Don’t take your anger out on the press. A press room with Andre Villas Boas was often a frosty place. As results started to deteriorate, he started a battle with the press, culminating in the famous line ‘Here we have given everyone a slap in the face’, after a Champions League victory over Valencia. Bad relationship with the press means bad headlines means, and that can mean unhappy fans.
4. Invest wisely in transfers. When he took over at Chelsea, the squad needed a number of new additions. Apart from the outstanding Juan Mata, AVB recruited poorly, bringing in Raul Meireles and Oriol Romeu into a squad that was overflowing with central midfielders but desperately lacking out-and-out wingers.
To charm Levy, he talked him through his remarkable successs with Porto and the treble-winning team he built at Estadio do Dragao.
They won the league title hands down, unbeaten in 30 games and went on to win the Portuguese Super Cup and the Europa League.
What he is rarely reminded of is that he inherited two strikers who are among the most feared forwards in European football.
Porto were blessed with not one, but two goal machines in 2010-11, relying on the expertise of Radamel Falcao and Hulk in the penalty area.
Falcao scored 38 times in 42 matches and Hulk wasn’t far behind with 36 in 53. That’s 74 goals between two players, something of a phenomenon in modern football.
Quite how much of their success is down to Villas-Boas is arguable, but Falcao scored 24 times in 34 matches for his new club Atletico Madrid and Hulk, still at Porto, scored 21 in 38 games after AVB left for Chelsea.
Marching on: Chelsea’s stars flourished after AVB’s exit
Villas-Boas did not have that kind of firepower at Chelsea and he certainly will not start the season with that in the bank at T*ttenham.
His record at Chelsea suggests it will be beyond him, with his failure to mould the dressing room one of his biggest downfalls.
He alienated players with pedigree and experience, falling out with Ashley Cole, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba during his brief spell at Chelsea.
His substitutions were often fathomless and destructive and the young players given no opportunity.
Some cruelly nicknamed him ‘Bambi’ because he was so naive, failing to impress them with his detailed knowledge of the opposition and their pattern of play.
From his office at the training ground, he watched the players drive into training each day and fined them £1,000 a time if they were late.
Some took to leaving it until the very last seconds before they arrived at their Cobham training centre, nodding at him as he watched them arrive just in the nick of time.
At time his behaviour bordered on the bizarre, sleeping overnight in a pod at the training ground after they were beaten 5-3 by Arsenal in a lunchtime kick-off at Stamford Bridge.
Despite a family home in Chelsea Harbour, he elected to spend the night at the training ground again when they were beaten in his final match, a 1-0 defeat at West Bromwich on March 3.
The following day he emerged weary eyed as the players began to arrive for a warm down session and when one of them asked why he was there so early, he admitted he had slept there overnight.
No-one could fault Villas-Boas’ desire to make it work at Chelsea, but his body language and his behaviour transmitted itself to the players.
They became irritated by his touchline antics, staring in disbelief when he was on his haunches with his fists-clenched as the game progressed.
He lost the total respect of the dressing room when he took away first team privileges for Nicolas Anelka and Alex.
Both were established members of the dressing room, title winners at Chelsea and with distinguished careers at various clubs.
They were allocated new places in the academy car park and told to train alone, away from a group of players who still had strong emotional ties with their team-mates.
It became even more petty when Villas-Boas excluded them both from the club’s annual silver service Christmas dinner at the training ground.
After that Villas-Boas was on borrowed time, a broken man by the time Abramovich got round to sacking him in March.
He insists he has learned from his mistakes, but some were so big that he will struggle to convince a top four team that he has the credentials.