By David Jones
Living away from his wife and family, the rumours swirled... but ego was his undoing
NO-ONE who witnessed his audacious egotism will ever forget the day José Mourinho swaggered into a packed press conference and introduced himself to the British sporting public.
‘Please don’t call me arrogant, but I am a European champion and I am a special one,’ he declared, with a messianic glint in his eyes, on being unveiled as the manager of Chelsea, in 2004.
For many years, Mourinho lived up to such absurd self-generated hype, winning trophy after trophy, while also winning admiration for his wit and charm – and melting the hearts of female fans with his suave looks and stylish clothes.
During recent years, however, as his mercurial coaching ability has deserted him and he has taken to blaming everyone but himself for his failings, from his own players to referees, the football world has grown heartily sick of the churlish, ranting Mourinho.
So when this, now very ordinary, manager was fired by Manchester United yesterday, after just two and half years in charge, there were no mournful violins.
For many fans, his sacking was a cause for celebration.
How typical of the often amoral, moneybags world of top-flight football that in recompense for failure, Mourinho will pocket a reported £15million (€16.7million) redundancy cheque.
How, then, did it come to this? Why did Mourinho, who had swaggered into the hot seat at this football institution sink so low that he might have been frogmarched out of town by disillusioned supporters had he not been fired?
No doubt his managerial shortcomings will be dissected ad infinitum on sports pages worldwide.
Apart from his own inability to handle failure, there were the cataclysmic clashes of ego with his star players, such as French World Cup winner Paul Pogba, who cost United an obscene £89million (€99million).
Moribund, outdated and unimaginative tactics have also seen Mourinho left behind, at the age of 55, by more forward-looking managers. The surliness contrasted embarrassingly with the exuberance of managers such as Liverpool’s perpetually smiling German, Jürgen Klopp.
Yet according to seasoned Mourinho-watchers, there was another reason for his detached, and frequently tortured-looking demeanour.
Like most traditionally great footballing cities, Manchester has always prided itself on the links between the players and the club. The legendary Matt Busby lived in a red-brick house in the suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy; Alex Fergu-
son played in his local pub’s quiz in Wilmslow, and dined in neighbourhood restaurants.
Yet Mourinho remained aloof, refusing to live among the workaday Mancunians who paid his eye-watering £15million salary.
Throughout his time in Manchester, he opted to stay isolated in a penthouse suite, in the fivestar Lowry Hotel. He rarely ventured out and became ever more reclusive, dining on room service and takeaways.
After matches on Saturdays, he would leave Manchester as quickly as he could to catch the train to London, where his wife Matilde, and their two children (his 22-year-old daughter is a fashion graduate, and his 18year-old son was recently rejected by Fulham, where he had hoped to become a goalie) still reside in a Belgravia home.
A devout Catholic family man, it was said that he did not wish to uproot them yet again – his quest for soccer immortality having taken him from Portugal to London (twice), Milan and Madrid.
Alternatively, it may be that Mourinho, a restless man, forever looking for a new challenge never envisaged staying more than a few years in Manchester.
Perhaps, deep down, for all his outward bravado, he recognised the impossibility of building an all-conquering dynasty to compare with that of Ferguson’s 26year spell as manager.
Then there is his domestic life. Inevitably, given that he has been living 320km away from Matilde since the summer of 2016 and his status as a sex symbol, there have been numerous, although unfounded whispers about the state of his marriage.
Mourinho and Matilde, or Tami as he calls her, have been married for almost 30 years, and he never tires of expressing his adoration for her. They recently had one another’s names, and those of their children, tattooed on their wrists.
‘My wife trusts me, my wife knows me, she has been with me since I was 17 and she was 15,’ he said recently, harking back to their days as college sweethearts in the Lisbon suburb of Setúbal.
There is no doubting his familial pride and devotion. Indeed, when his 53-year-old wife was seriously ill and underwent surgery in a hospital, in Portugal, two years ago, he hired a private jet to be at her side.
When he stepped up to collect a prestigious GQ Men of the Year award, his daughter (though he looked askance at her skimpy dress) was on his arm.
All that said, there is one past episode Mourinho never mentions. In 2007, a boutique owner named Elsa Sousa told the Mail on Sunday of the lengthy affair they allegedly conducted when he was managing his first club, in the small Portuguese town of Leiria, and living away from his family. She claimed they lived together so openly that she was mistaken for his wife, and that he promised to leave Matilde for her, but reneged on his promise for fear of losing his children.
For his part, Mourinho has never sought to deny her story.
Gossips went into overdrive again in February, when a redtop tabloid reported that he had ‘struck up a friendship’ with a 36year-old ‘bubbly, attractive, super-fit’ policewoman. She responded by saying it was all a smear invented by someone with a vendetta against her.
In a typically forthright TV interview, Mourinho had already described his goldfish-bowl existence at the Lowry Hotel ‘a disaster’ because he was followed whenever he left his sixth-floor suite, and stories such as this can hardly have helped matters.
It might explain why, in recent months, he has barely left the hotel except on work-related business. In recent weeks, the word among Manchester’s football fraternity was that he had come to loathe his life in the city, and longed to escape.
So is this the last we shall see of Mourinho?
Certainly it is difficult to see him managing another British club again. For despite winning three Premier League titles (an achievement he petulantly signalled in October by brandishing three fingers at the fans), there appears no place for his dictatorial managerial style in the modern game. Nor does he any longer seem capable of commanding the loyalty and respect required to build a group of talented individuals into a team who will sweat blood for him.
Perhaps that owes something to his inherent arrogance and sense of entitlement.
But whatever truth, the irresistibly charming and handsome young man who arrived here, 14 years ago, has not only lost his job, he has succeeded in turning almost everyone who follows football against him.
Back then, it must be admitted, he really was quite special.
Today, as he prepares to bank his colossal redundancy check for leaving the once-mighty United as a team of also-rans, he seems decidedly average.