There is a wonderful story Rafa Benitez’s wife Montse tells about the unintended sabbatical he took a decade ago.

He was spending long mornings and afternoons watching football, analysing football, planning for his next job wherever it might be, and she found herself telling him to give himself a break and do something — anything — else.

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Instead, he ended up being roped — not too reluctantly, it seemed — into coaching the football team at their daughter’s primary school on the Wirral.

“It was hilarious,” Montse recalled. “He stood there on the touchline and shouted at them as if it was the first division, waving his arms around.”

Benitez insists his instructions from the touchline were more measured than that. His recollection is that the other school had a big goalkeeper whose long kicks were causing trouble and that “his” team had a particularly talented left-footed player who was struggling to get into the game at centre-forward.

So, at half-time, he suggested the coach make a couple of tweaks, putting one player in the area where the goalkeeper’s kicks kept landing and switching the left-footer onto the wing where he might have more joy against the opposition’s small right-back. “They did it and they won,” he explained a few years ago, with a shrug.

It is a story that says a lot about Benitez: about his obsession with football and in particular his long-held belief that there is no on-pitch problem that cannot be solved by a tactical reshuffle here or a tweak there.

Take, for example, his first Premier League game in charge of Everton, at home to Southampton last August. They were 1-0 down at half-time and, given some of the opposition to his appointment, it was briefly tempting to wonder whether his tenure might be measured in days, rather than months or years.

But Benitez made a few tweaks at half-time — “We changed a little bit the position of the centre-backs and changed the position of Richarlison” — and they ended up winning 3-1.

It was the same when Burnley visited a few weeks later, abandoning a three-man central defence in favour of an extra man in midfield, and again going from 1-0 down to 3-1 victors. It was not quite the Miracle of Istanbul, but it was another example of Benitez doing what Benitez does.

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That was as good it got for him at Everton, though. If there was anything resembling a honeymoon period, it ended abruptly with a 3-0 defeat at Aston Villa five days later.

They beat Norwich City 2-0 and drew 1-1 at Manchester United in the next two league games but, since the October international break, Everton have played 12 more Premier League matches, losing nine, drawing two and winning just one.

There can come a point when tactics and strategies are reduced to an irrelevance. When the mood behind the scenes is as strained and as toxic as it became during Benitez’s final weeks in charge at Everton, it is no longer a question of micro-managing. In that situation, when players become sick of the sight of the manager or of each other, nothing works.

And so, in the least surprising development of this Premier League season, Benitez was relieved of his duties on Sunday.

Everton owner Farhad Moshiri had ignored all the warnings that this wasn’t going to work — not least from sporting director Marcel Brands, whom he signed to a new long-term contract last April, only to reject his recommendations in last summer’s manager search and then allow the Dutchman to leave the club in early December when, inevitably, he and Benitez clashed over transfer policy and issues of control.

A brief club statement, just 40 words, reflected a desperation to consign the unhappy Benitez tenure to the past and perhaps, sooner rather than later, erase it from the record books. It was the end of an error.

It leaves Everton in a severe predicament, looking for their sixth new manager in as many years since Moshiri bought into the club. They are in the process of undertaking something they are calling a strategic review, which, after the past six years, sounds a little like sending a rocking horse for a brain scan.

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As much as it proved a bad appointment for Everton, it worked out terribly for Benitez too. People who had worked him with before had warned him he was making a mistake: that even if his obvious links to Liverpool could be overlooked, he would be going into an unstable, disunited club at a difficult time. Only he and Moshiri seemed to be blind to this.

In the rush to say “I told you so” — and let’s be honest, pretty much everybody did — since Sunday there have been the usual attempts to diminish the successes on which Benitez built his reputation. For some reason, he has always had this effect on some people.

His record with Valencia, in particular, was extraordinary, leading them to two La Liga titles in three years. Winning the Champions League and FA Cup with Liverpool, taking them to within touching distance of that long-elusive Premier League title when competition was so intense, was highly impressive too. His achievements with Newcastle United were rather more low-key, but the supporters there still sing his praises.

Everton has been a calamity, though, and it leaves him out in the cold, wondering where the next job is going to come from.

Like most managers, he has been in this situation before; he was out of work for 23 months between his dismissal by Inter Milan and his appointment in an interim role at Chelsea in November 2012.

Back then, he was left wondering whether he had been too selective in waiting for the “perfect job”. He could have gone from Inter to Atletico Madrid, but he preferred to wait in the belief that neighbours Real or Bayern Munich would come up. Diego Simeone took the Atletico job and the rest is history.

Benitez spent years believing his talents merited a tilt at one of the elite jobs. It was a pretty reasonable assumption, given his outstanding successes with Valencia and Liverpool. But that is a long time ago now. When he did finally get his chance to ride the Bernabeu carousel in the summer of 2015, he only lasted until the January.

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As with Jose Mourinho, his old adversary, it is hard not to feel Benitez has been left behind.

His peak period came in the early-to-mid 2000s, when elite-level football was increasingly dominated by teams who built around a certain orthodoxy: a compact defence, a disciplined midfield, playing in in straight lines, conforming to the coach’s instructions.

In 2007, former Real Madrid forward Jorge Valdano, who also served as the club’s sporting director and general manager, infamously described the Benitez-Mourinho style as “shit hanging from a stick”. “If football is going the way Chelsea and Liverpool are taking it,” he said after Benitez’s team beat Mourinho’s in another cagey Champions League semi-final, “we had better be ready to wave goodbye to any expression of the cleverness and talent we have enjoyed for a century.”

At the time, Valdano’s comments seemed mean-spirited and more than a little deluded, as if he were pining for a golden era of fantasy football that was not compatible with the modern game.

But then along came Pep Guardiola, preaching a far more creative, expressive brand of football which not only won the biggest prizes but seemed to usher in a new era of enlightenment, in which functional play quickly fell out of fashion.

These days every club — almost every club — wants fast, free-flowing football. There are demands to play out from the back and they want to build around young players. Even if they are not competing for trophies, supporters want to believe that their football is in some way progressive. What’s more, players tend to want to play that way. A safety-first approach, built around repetition of safety-first training sessions, doesn’t tend to enthuse the modern footballer.

Everton averaged 40.0 per cent possession in their 19 Premier League games under Benitez. That is lower than all but Watford, Burnley and Newcastle. Their pass completion rate of 73.9 per cent was also the fourth-lowest in the league. Both figures are some way down on the previous season’s performance under Carlo Ancelotti (46.4 per cent possession, 81.4 per cent pass completion). None of this would matter greatly if the results were better, but they were worse — and they had been far from great under Ancelotti.

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There might be questions about man-management too.

Even at the peak of his powers, Benitez was regarded as cold and distant by many of his players at Liverpool. He always took issue with that characterisation, but certainly his is a very different form of leadership to that favoured by Jurgen Klopp and most of today’s leading coaches. The modern player tends to crave approval and warmth. That has never really been the Benitez style.

Still, the Benitez approach worked well at Newcastle, whom he led to promotion from the Championship as title winners in 2017 and then to two consecutive mid-table finishes (10th and 13th) in the Premier League. It was far from thrilling over those two seasons, averaging 43.3 per cent possession and 1.1 goals per game in the league, but, given the financial constraints of the Mike Ashley regime, playing style was the least of the fans’ worries. Throughout that period, he seemed to be Newcastle’s greatest asset.

Benitez left Newcastle in the summer of 2019 as a hero, not just for keeping the club above water in the Premier League but for the way he stood up against Ashley, using his public platform to increase scrutiny of an extremely unpopular ownership regime.

That is all very well from a PR perspective, but, just like it had been at Liverpool under the reviled regime of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, it looked exhausting for a manager to make himself a chief protagonist in a civil war.

Then there were the constant battles to strengthen his power base at the expense of those he distrusted or simply didn’t rate in other areas of the football department. This is an era when head coaches are urged to buy into a more collegiate approach, leaving recruitment, negotiations, analysis and so much more to specialists in those fields. At Everton in particular, Benitez seemed intent on doing the opposite.

Maybe that sums up the issue. For a manager who is renowned as a great strategist, it is remarkable how often Benitez has picked the wrong battles.

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That has applied in a wider sense too. Leaving Newcastle for Dalian Professional, of the Chinese Super League, was fabulously lucrative, but his contract there was prohibitively expensive for would-be employers back in Europe to buy him out of. He was discussed at various points by Leicester City and West Ham United, among others, but the cost of hiring him was deemed excessive.

Benitez eventually resigned a year ago this week, frustrated by the uncertainty that hung over the Chinese league. He said he’d had offers from the Middle East, the United States and Brazil, but his preference was to work in Europe and specifically the Premier League again. As for his hopes and expectations, he told The Sunday Times he wanted “a competitive team that allows you to challenge for trophies, or a project that allows you to improve and grow and do better.”

On paper, Everton sounded like that. And on paper, Benitez, a coach who had delivered trophy success in multiple countries with clubs of different sizes, might have looked like the perfect fit.

But what Benitez really needed last summer was a stable, sensible club with a clear structure and a group of players who were willing to learn. And what Everton really needed was a unifying presence, someone to bring a fragmented club back together. In reality, he and Everton were the last thing each other needed.

So, what next for Benitez?

“A competitive team that allows you to challenge for trophies”? The economic landscape means there aren’t more than a handful of those in the Premier League these days; there were times in the past when Arsenal or Tottenham looked like potential gigs for him, but it is no longer easy to imagine him as Arsenal’s back-up plan if things turned sour with Mikel Arteta and you suspect that, after Mourinho and current coach Antonio Conte, Tottenham executive chairman Daniel Levy might be ready for someone a little more low-maintenance next time.

As for the rest of the Premier League, there are not too many other clubs where he might be an obvious fit.

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West Ham? Possibly, but David Moyes looks to be there for the long haul. Most of those clubs where he may have been an option have settled on a different profile.

The one Premier League club who stand out as a potential destination for Benitez are Newcastle. And again here it is hard to avoid the feeling that taking the Everton job was a mistake.

Throughout his time in China, and after he came back last January, Benitez remained in close contact with members of the Saudi consortium who were trying to buy Newcastle from Ashley. Had the takeover happened around that time, he would have been their top choice to take over from the beleaguered Steve Bruce. It was tempting to regard him like Louis Philippe I, waiting in exile for the revolution to come.

Benitez got tired of waiting, though, feeling that the takeover would never happen. By the time the consortium finally got the green light in October, he had taken another job. If it ever crossed his mind to walk out on Everton to rejoin Newcastle, it was not an urge he acted upon. One suspects he now wishes he had.

Newcastle’s new owners turned to Eddie Howe and, while results have not yet picked up enough, their commitment to him and his vision is considerable. Benitez might well prove to be the obvious candidate if things don’t work out with Howe — if, say, they end up relegated in May and then make a poor start to next season in the Championship — but these are hypotheticals and worst-case scenarios. There is not much there for Benitez to cling to.

Maybe a club outside the elite in Italy or Spain, a Lazio or even another go with Valencia, is more likely. He retains a good relationship with Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis after managing them from 2013-15.

Even if there are no immediate openings, it is possible to see where they might come in future.

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Or maybe he will fancy a crack at international management. He has been discussed for the Spain job in the past, most recently in the summer of 2018 after Julen Lopetegui was sacked just before the World Cup in Russia. He spoke previously of interest from the Middle East, the US and Brazil. A manager with his CV is always going to attract offers, even if they are not necessarily the ones he would have hoped for at this stage of his career.

One intriguing thought comes to mind.

Given his desire to demonstrate his knowledge in different areas, might Benitez have reached the stage where he is happier as a sporting director, with a broad remit, rather than the narrower scope of the modern coach?

For all the criticism he faced at Everton, the cut-price signings of Demarai Gray and Andros Townsend have worked well. He signed Kalidou Koulibaly, Jose Callejon, Jorginho, Dries Mertens and Gonzalo Higuain for Napoli.

Or maybe, three months off turning 62, he might feel ready for a break — not agitating in desperation for a job but waiting to see what comes up.

Sometimes a shot against redemption comes unexpectedly; for Claudio Ranieri at Leicester in the 2015-16 pre-season, eight months after he was sacked by Greece in the most ignominious circumstances, and for Moyes first time round at West Ham in the autumn of 2017 when, after relegation to the Championship with Sunderland the previous season, his stock was at an all-time low.

Those cases and many others remind us of the danger of dismissing a manager as a busted flush, or yesterday’s man.

Equally, though, the experiences of Benitez and Mourinho in recent years underline the need for even the best managers to keep evolving — not just in terms of tactics but in the way they relate to modern players and modern directors alike.

For both men, the biggest difficulties have come not with tactics or philosophies but with managing upwards to the boardroom and managing downwards to the dressing room. There has been a struggle to accept challenges to their authorities and constraints on their power. They always had more in common than they ever seemed to realise.

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And both men have spent far more time out of work than they would ever have wished or indeed imagined.

For Benitez, it will be back to watching, analysing, and taking long, long walks with his dog, casting his eye over the school pitches and perhaps whispering a tactical instruction to one of the coaches.

When it comes to spotting weaknesses and finding solutions, there are still not many better.

If only football were always that simple.

(Top photo: Visionhaus/Getty Images)