It is testament to football's flawed habit of measuring achievement by silverware alone that Jim Bentley — whose AFC Fylde side travel to Sheffield United on Sunday as the lowest-ranked team left in the FA Cup — is not a household name.
When Bentley resigned from Morecambe in October, the 43-year-old had become the longest-serving manager in England's top four divisions, having spent eight seasons keeping the side in the Football League despite every conceivable obstacle: bizarre owners, absent owners, unpaid wages, transfer embargoes and the lowest budget in the division.
The manner of Bentley's exit was little less than a scandal after 17 years and 763 games of service to that club, including nine as a player.
Morecambe's start to the season had brought another of the habitual struggles when a social media poll was published questioning whether he should be sacked.
Colin Goldring, the club's co-owner, appeared to have voted for 'if we lose a few more, out' which Bentley did not consider to be classy behaviour.
'He said he couldn't have voted because he didn't have his phone,' says Bentley. 'Ah, right. I never paid out one transfer fee in eight and a half years I was there. We always dealt with people who had lost their way, young lads coming out of the Championship or Premier League clubs, players who'd had an injury.
'We had a knack of rebuilding careers there. When you do what you do for a club like that over the years you just want a little bit back. I did feel let down.'
The poll came at a time Morecambe were refusing to extend Bentley's contract and coincided with the approach from Fylde, 30 miles down the north west coast, where veterinary sciences entrepreneur David Haythornthwaite and his associate Dai Davies have invested heavily to create a club they want to see in the League by 2022.
It has not been straightforward. Since losing to Salford in last year's National League play-off final, the club have struggled and are in the relegation zone.
Haythornthwaite, who has even had '2022' stitched into the team's jerseys, did not anticipate this at a club where the investment — a brand new stadium, education centre with six five-a-side pitches, restaurants and classrooms — is testament to big ambition.
Money alone will not bring success, of course, and Bentley's qualities include a commodity which transcends hard cash: an understanding of what it takes to overcome the toughest challenges the game can throw at you.
They have been coming at him since his improbable recruitment — and ultimate rejection — by Manchester City, 22 years ago, having captained the club's reserve side but never made the first team. He had caught their eye as a striker for the Coronation pub team at Netherley, in Liverpool.
One of his team-mates was Ben Hatton, son of the firebrand politician Derek Hatton, who through mutual Everton connections knew City's assistant, Terry Darracott.
When City's youth team were short of a game one Christmas, Darracott asked Hatton about the Coronation. Bentley, a stand-in centre-half, played well in a 1-0 win at City's Platt Lane.
'City liked the idea of playing a rough-house team from Liverpool and they let it be known, through Derek Hatton, that they liked me,' says Bentley, as the rain hammers down on the roof of the cafe set within Fylde's impressive stadium.
'On my first day at Man City, there were lads there from the England school of excellence, a Scottish international, a Northern Ireland captain. And me from the Coronation in Netherley. There was only me from a pub.'
When moves to Burnley, Rotherham and Bradford did not materialise, he found himself playing at Telford — making the 60-mile trip to training on Tuesdays and Thursdays after a full day of working in furniture removals with his father, Jack, who briefly played for Everton before Telford.
'It was a van-and-man sort of thing my dad had really,' says Bentley. 'The van was a local landmark when he'd parked it up on Brodie Avenue in Liverpool. Cream and brown. Top half cream. Lower half brown. A Ford A-series.
'It was no flat pack in those days. It was all pianos and ready-made wardrobes and couches where you had to take windows out to get them in. Getting stuck in lifts with them. Getting attacked by dogs! Dad would plan the day knowing I had training. If I finished at five, I had time to get to Telford for seven. It was the fittest I've ever been.
'I didn't realise at the time these experiences would help me in management. I can draw on all of it because I've been there, on the margins of making it and not making it.
'Getting released. Being stuck on the bench at the end of my career. I see lads brought up through the academies, and the food's not right or the kit's not right and I'm saying, 'Hang on a minute'.'
In this sense, Bentley feels a kinship with Chris Wilder, who came close to signing him when manager at Halifax Town during a managerial career in which he, too, has learned how it is to make ends meet. 'I always enjoyed facing him when we (Morecambe) played his Northampton teams,' says Bentley.
'He's come from the Conference to the Premier League and shown us all that it can be done in this day and age.'
A Sheffield United side with a likely 11 changes from the one which lost at Anfield on Thursday, are Bentley's first opponents as a manager in the competition's third round, though he did score at this stage for Morecambe, 17 years ago. 'I'd scored two in the second round against Chester that year,' he says.
'One was an overhead kick, believe it or not. It's my only goal on YouTube! Then we got Ipswich away. I was sent off after 19 minutes. A professional foul and we lost 4-0. Hero to zero! We're looking for something different this time.'