Houghton was one of the youngest coaches ever to manage in English senior football, being appointed player-manager of Hastings United in the Southern League at only 23.

He also won the Swedish championship and Svenska Cupen several times and was runner-up in the Intercontinental Cup in 1979 as Nottingham Forest declined to participate, losing against Olimpia from Paraguay.

His spell at Ashton Gate Stadium was unsuccessful as the financially stricken club were relegated and Houghton resigned after a defeat to Wimbledon.

After another spell with Al-Ittihad in 1993, he joined Swiss side FC Zürich in April 1994 and remained in charge for just over a year before leaving in March 1995.

Within weeks, Houghton was able to memorise the names of all his players, a rare feat in foreign coaches, and helped build the team's confidence and self-belief.

China were placed second in the Dynasty Cup very shortly after Houghton took over, and he developed a reputation for being able to implement an effective technical football program for struggling teams.

[12] Houghton's last assignment as Indian coach was the AFC Challenge Cup 2012 qualifiers in Malaysia, where India topped Group B which included Pakistan, Chinese Taipei and Turkmenistan.

[13] In a 2012 article for The Guardian, Jonathan Wilson noted that Houghton, like his compatriot Roy Hodgson, employed a zonal defence while coaching in the Allsvenskan, and that his teams pressed hard and maintained a high back-line, making use of the offside trap.

[7] Swedish academic Tomas Peterson believed that the managers "threaded together a number of principles, which could be used in a series of combinations and compositions, and moulded them into an organic totality — an indivisible project about how to play football.

"[7] In an article with The Blizzard, Hodgson noted that he and Houghton were attempting to introduce a different style of defending in Swedish football, rather than elements of English football, such as the long-ball game, stating: "Instead of playing with a team that was very spread out from one end of the field to the other, with a libero who stays in his penalty area and a centre-forward who never tracks back, we set up a system of zonal defence, a back four, people pushing up and, of course, getting the ball forward into the final area much more quickly."