Chelsea's traditional approach has also been to pay managers until they next find permanent employment.
Pension funds have tried to offset the long slide in the stock market by cutting the fees they pay managers.
Without the spur of high pay, managers tend to avoid such things.Pay is also outsiders' most visible test of a board's capacity to monitor a company's executives.
We consider the design of contracts that pay managers on the basis of a project's payoff.
(Before any income-producing investments are made, you pay managers' fees for handling your cash).
Boards can pay managers to magically beat quarterly earnings estimates or pay them to build sound, sustainable organizations.
That threshold will increase in December, when new federal rules on overtime pay go into effect, mandating that employers pay managers more than $47,476 if they don't want to pay them overtime.
Bosses, however, already are having to decide whether it makes more sense to pay managers for their extra hours, raise their salaries to place them outside the rules, or cut their work day. .
"Depending on the company, there's a potential to shave millions of dollars off of their current processes," said Rene Tidwell, bill-pay manager at the J.P. Morgan Chase division that processes credit cards.
He is already the highest paid manager in the world, with Chelsea's Mourinho currently paid £12m annually after he signed a new four-year deal earlier this year.
Mr Torre may still have been the best paid manager in baseball under the new contract, but he would not have been as well paid as before.
