Avram Grant likes to laugh down the idea that he is a schmoozer of powerful men, a charmer and a deft politician. He tells a story to illustrate the point. “Me, a politician?” he said to the Israeli journalist Shlomi Barzel in 2005. “I can be so tactless sometimes. Two weeks ago I had dinner with Roman Abramovich. We talked about many things and then turned to football. After 15 minutes he said to me, ‘Coach, which team do you want to manage? I’ll sort it out for you’. I just smiled. What else could I have done?”

Abramovich had meant it. “An hour later,” Grant continued, “we each went our own ways and one of his guys chased me down into the parking lot and told me off. ‘Mr Grant, what is wrong with you?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. Roman Abramovich offers you a team and you just smile like nothing happened? How many opportunities like that are you going to have?’ ” Grant was due to manage Hapoel Tel Aviv, then developing as an Abramovich project in the Israeli league. The deal fell through; instead, Grant started to nurture Premier League dreams that were to lead to Portsmouth and then Chelsea.

Jose Mourinho lost a battle of wills with Abramovich in July when Grant was recruited to Stamford Bridge from Portsmouth against his wishes. But after his appointment as head coach last week, he insisted: “I didn’t stab Jose in the back. I enjoyed working with him and respect what he has achieved. I didn’t plan to be manager.”

England was an obvious destination for a coach who was outgrowing Israeli football. As a boy growing up in a humble flat in Petah Tikva, a sleepy town a few miles from Tel Aviv, Grant used to love the Leeds United of Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer and Joe Jordan, and went into his teens admiring Liverpool. He used to long for the latest edition of Shoot! to reach his newsagent and watched the Thursday night highlights programme that was then Israeli television’s coverage of English football. His schoolwork took second place to his passion. “Nothing decent will come out of you,” a teacher named Tova apparently told the young Avram.

He never had a great talent as a player. At 17 he started coaching boys’ teams in his home town and from an early stage of his career set his targets higher than most Israeli coaches. He travelled to Europe and met Sir Alex Ferguson, Sven-Göran Eriksson and Arsène Wenger, and some of the leading figures in Italy’s Serie A.

Grant is a meticulous man whose team talks are long on detail. He enjoyed success with his clubs and with the Israeli national team, but his name at home is not readily associated with free-flowing football. The Israel team he took close to qualifying for the last World Cup finals specialised in draws. The 52-year-old does have a fine record of developing young players, dealing with a dressing room of large egos and motivating stars. He has courted the Israeli media and sometimes betrayed a thin skin in the face of criticism, calling individual reporters or sending furious text messages. Last year he is said to have telephoned the sports editor of an Israeli daily newspaper to complain that his journalists had not been taking Grant’s work as Portsmouth’s director of football seriously enough.

Grant has built warmer relationships with many of his players. He transformed Yossi Benayoun, now of Liverpool, from a brilliant but confused young footballer with his career at the crossroads into a key contributor at Maccabi Haifa and then with the national side.

Benayoun is generous in his praise of his mentor. “I don’t think that he can do well at Chelsea, I am sure of it,” he says. “He’s got what it takes and he has proved himself in the Israeli league and with the national team. Yes, this is a big step forward and he has huge boots to fill, but he can do the job because he is a top manager.”

The midfielder Eyal Berkovic, once of West Ham and Celtic, would not echo those sentiments. Grant ended his international career ruthlessly when he felt it was time for Israel to have a changing of the guard.

Grant has used his profile to try to advance the peace process in Israel. “I know him as a man of vision,” says Yamam Nabeel, chief executive of the charity FC Unity, who has worked closely with Grant. “If Avram is proud of one thing, it is that he created a team, an Israeli team that embraced Arabs. His dream is to build a great stadium in Palestine.”

Grant’s father, Meir, 80, was born in Poland and deported to Siberia during the second world war. “Most of my family was lost during the Holocaust,” Grant said when he visited Auschwitz with Israel’s Under21 team last year. “I can’t understand how a man can come out of this hell on earth as an optimist. When my father was 15, he had to bury his parents, sisters and brothers with his own two hands.”

While Grant can seem quiet, his wife, 43-year-old Tzofit, appears the opposite. She is an attractive actress-turned-TV star who met Grant when he was 37. With a taste for tear-jerking interviews, she has made Israeli headlines regularly and remains well known through a Ruby Wax-style television programme in which she once bathed in a tub of spaghetti and drank her own urine.

She has a profile at football matches, a vocal supporter of her husband’s teams who likes to sit among the paying spectators, on occasion joining them in cajoling the coach to alter his tactics. Tzofit has promised she will be joining ordinary Chelsea supporters at Stamford Bridge as they learn more about Avram Grant.

Additional reporting: Hyder Jawal

Rise and rise of a master schmoozer

Coaching pedigree
1986-91 Hapoel Petah Tikva
1991-95 Maccabi Tel Aviv
1995-96 Hapoel Haifa
1996-00 Maccabi Tel Aviv
2000-02 Maccabi Haifa
2002-06 Israel
2006-07 Portsmouth (technical director)
2007- Chelsea

- At first glance it’s diffi cult to see how Grant could be regarded as an adequate replacement for Jose Mourinho. Having never coached in a major European league, or gone beyond the early stages of the Champions League, it’s easy to see why so many attribute the elevation of Russian-speaking Grant to friends in high places

- Making a good impression on powerful men has become his hallmark. He met billionaire Roman Abramovich after currying favour with Uzbekistan tycoon Lev Leviev, who was to buy a Chelsea feeder club in Israel. Grant then used his connection with the billionare Alexandre Gaydamak to get the job at Portsmouth last year. Abramovich says he wants Chelsea to win with panache, but critics have derided Grant’s tactics as ‘too negative’. Didn’t they say that about Mourinho?

- In 1996 he persuaded Loni Herzikowitz, owner of Maccabi Tel Aviv, to dump title-winning manager Dror Kashtan and give him the job n Married to Israeli TV presenter Tzofi t Grant who once drank her own urine live on television as part of a health feature

- Despite never playing professionally, Grant became a youth coach at Hapoel Petah Tikva in 1986. Until last year he had spent his career in Israel. Took Maccabi Tel Aviv to a fi rst title in 13 years and won two more with Haifa. Became Israel coach in 2002. Quit after failing to qualify for 2006 World Cup

What they say about him

‘He is an illusionist, incapable of using a proper game plan and relying on luck rather than skill’ - former Israel coach Shlomo Scharf

‘Grant becoming Chelsea coach is the same as Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon’ - Ran Ben-Shimon, Hapoel Kiryat Shmona coach

‘I wasn’t pleased when he was brought in at Portsmouth without my knowledge, but he isn’t the kind to spy on you for the owner’ - Harry Redknapp, Portsmouth manager

‘Grant will be as welcome [in Chelsea’s dressing room] as Camilla at Diana’s memorial’ - former Chelsea and Scotland star Pat Nevin

‘Grant is very intelligent, sometimes too intelligent for his own good’ - Yoav Borowitz, Israeli sports journalist