Mikel Arteta and Frank Lampard are both on the verge of securing their first trophies as managers when Arsenal face Chelsea in the FA Cup final on Saturday.
The two young bosses will each hope victory at an empty Wembley Stadium will be the first of many titles.
Arteta won the trophy twice as a player with Arsenal, as the gunners seek a fourth victory in this competition in four years.
Yet the Spaniard – in his first year in sole charge of a team – could already add another FA Cup gong to his honours list.
Lampard, meanwhile, helped Chelsea to four FA Cup wins as a player and is also closing in on silverware in his maiden season in charge of the Blues.
Both men will be desperate to end this long season with a winners’ medal around their neck.
And they can certainly learn a thing or two about capitalising on that first trophy success from four of football’s biggest names.
Here, i takes a look four iconic managers talking about their first trophy wins…
Sir Alex Ferguson – St Mirren, Scottish First Division, 1977
Ferguson was managing two pubs alongside his job as St Mirren boss when he led them to the Scottish First Division title in 1977 – his career’s first trophy.
The Scot made his name bringing through the kids at Manchester United but by then it was, in fact, nothing new for him.
The average age of his title-winning St Mirren squad was 19, and the captain was a 20-year-old called Tony Fitzpatrick.
There is a glorious old photograph of a younger, thinner-faced Ferguson with a thick wedge of a tie sipping from a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
It opened doors for Ferguson that would lead, eventually, to the Manchester United manager’s job.
He was approached by Aberdeen the summer after winning promotion, but turned them down.
When he kept St Mirren in the top-flight and they sacked him anyway, however, the Aberdeen offer still stood, and Ferguson went on to win 11 trophies there, proving his credentials as a potential Manchester United manager.
Ferguson has also often discussed the importance of his first silverware at Manchester United and questioned whether he would’ve kept his job without it.
Four years passed, which he later described as “dark days”, before beating Crystal Palace in the 1990 FA Cup final replay.
“Without the FA Cup victory over Crystal Palace grave doubts would have been raised about my suitability for the job,” Ferguson wrote in his autobiography.
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“We will never know how close I was to being sacked, because the decision was never forced on the United board. But without that triumph at Wembley, the crowds would have shrivelled.
“Disaffection might have swept the club.
“Winning the 1990 FA Cup allowed us breathing space and deepened my sense that this was a wonderful club with which to win trophies.”
During the first match, fans held up banners calling for him to leave and even after the win a newspaper wrote: “OK, you’ve proved you can win the FA Cup, now go back to Scotland.
Ferguson never forgot it.
Pep Guardiola – Barcelona B, Tercera Division, 2008
Barcelona B were experiencing troubled times when Guardiola took charge, not long after retiring from playing.
They had been relegated from the Spanish third tier and it was their first season in the fourth since 1974.
Guardiola’s route to his first silverware, shaping a side which featured Sergio Busquets and Thiago Alcantara, was transformative.
“It was so good for me,” Guardiola recalled. “It was good because I had one game a week, I had time to analyse my process, and I did not have spotlights, I did not have media.”
Nonetheless, a former player as successful as Guardiola can never completely escape attention. In his first match, against Premia, 2,000 people turned up at the Mini Estadi, four times their usual crowd.
Onlookers included Barcelona’s then-president Joan Laporta and Txiki Begiristain, at the time Barcelona’s director of football who would later join Manchester City and convince Guardiola to follow him. The game finished goalless, but Guardiola’s football stuck in the mind.
During the season, he regularly met with and called Johan Cruyff, the Dutch master, for advice. Guardiola would share his doubts, discuss his relationships with players, how to approach different situations. Cruyff also attended some games.
They ended the season unbeaten at home, winning 19 of 21 games. Winning the Catalunyan league (the fourth tier is a collection of regionalised leagues) earned them a playoff place and they beat Castillo CF and Barbastro to earn promotion to Segunda B.
Cruyff, Laporta and Begiristain were all certain Guardiola was the next Barcelona manager but it surprised outsiders when they replaced Frank Rijkaard with the club’s inexperienced former midfielder.
Everyone knows what happened next.
Jose Mourinho – Porto, Primeira Liga, 2003
Mourinho’s unexpected Champions League triumph with Porto a year later would be his defining moment as a manger.
Yet all of the foundations were laid the season before when he won his first silverware as a manager, when three trophies followed in quick succession.
The Portuguese sees similarities between his spell at Porto and his job at Tottenham now.
When Mourinho took over at Porto they were struggling but full of potential. He blended academy players with shrewd signings of hungry players who were willing to put in the effort to play his pressing football: Ricardo Carvalho, Deco, Hélder Postiga, Paulo Ferreira and Maniche.
“Players who had come from the youth team, players I brought from Leiria, players we bought from small Portuguese clubs, players without titles, players ready to work, fight for success, for their future,” Mourinho said.
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They won the league, Portuguese Cup and the Uefa Cup.
“A team of babies won the treble,” Mourinho said.
Mourinho cites the Uefa Cup final victory against Celtic, when they won 3-2 in extra time, as hugely significant.
“That final against Celtic was not the biggest win, it was not the greatest joy, but in terms of intensity, it was my biggest ever game,” he said.
“I’ve played three European finals since, two in the Champions League.
“I’ve won a lot of titles, been involved in so many incredible games.
“But in terms of living with tension, intensity, with emotion raised to the limit, that game against Celtic beat them all.”
It enabled Mourinho to hammer home to his players that they could be invincible if only they believed, a tactic he would use throughout his career to become one of the game’s most successful coaches.
Jurgen Klopp – Borussia Dortmund, Bundesliga, 2011
Jurgen Klopp wakes up. He has a black hole in his memory where several hours are supposed to be before he passed out. He sits up and looks around. He is on the back of a large truck in a vast factory hall. He jumps down from the truck to find an exit. He sees a silhouette in the distance. He whistles loudly. The silhouette stops. Klopp reaches it. It is Hans-Joachim Watzke, the Borussia Dortmund chief executive. Neither of them has any idea how they got there.
They find a main road and flag down an old Mercedes station wagon driven by an old Turkish man. They ask for a lift back into town. The man initially declines until Watzke pulls out two hundred euros.
There is only one seat in the front cabin, so Klopp hops onto the back. He is trying to stay awake but keeps hitting his head on the side. He hears a cluck, cluck, cluck.
He realises he is surrounded by chickens. He is so worse for wear he does not even spot the three dead rams.
This is the remarkable story of Klopp waking up the day after the night before, when he had won the Bundesliga title with Borussia Dortmund, his first trophy.
It was the culmination of years trying to cultivate and perfect his own variation of attacking, pressing football that has become his trademark and was the springboard for the double Dortmund won the following season.
It is what got him noticed by European football’s leading clubs, and started conversations 600 miles away in Merseyside.
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