THE BROKEN ONE...
Heavy eyes, a haunted look and fired – AGAIN. Mourinho, the charismatic serial winner, is a man in decline. So would you take a risk on football’s Dark Lord at your club?
LOOKING at stills of Jose Mourinho sitting in his car at the exit gates of Roma’s Trigoria training ground this week, it is startlingly possible to view the baggage of a life spent in football for perhaps the very first time.
Suddenly and out of nowhere, Mourinho looks every one of his 60 years. His eyes are heavy, his skin pale, his hair more white than grey and starting to thin at the brow.
This is not the Jose Mourinho we think we know.
The Mourinho we think we know is eternally youthful, charismatic and energetic. A raw life force dressed in the best Italian clothes.
He is perhaps not the man of 41 who hurtled down the touchline as Porto manager at Old Trafford on his way to prising the Champions League trophy from the hands of the established elite almost 20 years ago. But, at least to us, he is a version of that and always will be. Won’t he?
Mourinho was sacked by Roma on Tuesday. It is not a new experience. Indeed, he has now been sacked from his last three postings at Roma, Tottenham and Manchester United.
His compensation numbers read like figures on a trading board on Wall Street. This one, however, would appear to have cut deeply.
Mourinho cried as he left Trigoria to the sound of best wishes and thanks from the supporters who had gathered at the gates. Soon images appeared on his Instagram page of the 100,000 Roma fans who gathered at the Colosseum to celebrate their team’s Europa Conference League triumph in 2022.
To the soundtrack of Andrea Bocelli’s Nelle tue mani (Now We
Are Free), Mourinho posted these words in Italian: sweat, blood, tears, joy, sadness, love, brothers, history, heart, eternity.
So, yes, this one appears to have cut Mourinho deeply and that may be, at least in part, because it is increasingly hard to foresee where he may be invited to go next.
ON his right upper arm, Mourinho wears three tattoos proudly. Three tattoos depicting three trophies. Europa League. Champions League. Europa Conference League.
The Portuguese is the only coach to have won all three. Hardly a surprise given the latter is only two and a half years old. But the message is clear and is an old one from the Mourinho lexicon.
He wins, does Mourinho. He always has. It’s 21 major trophies now and he is always keen for everybody to know about it. This is why, during his difficult time at Manchester United in 2018, he once walked out of a press conference following a defeat holding up three fingers.
‘Three Premierships,’ he said. ‘I won more Premierships alone than the other 19 managers together. Three for me, and two for them. Respect, man. Respect. Respect.’
If Mourinho was seen to be trading rather too desperately on past glories five years ago then that is very much the case now. Mourinho does know how to win — Roma only lost last season’s Europa League final to Sevilla on penalties and his Conference League triumph was the club’s first trophy since 2008 — but at the same time his world is shrinking. He hasn’t won a league title since his Chelsea triumph of 2015.
Nine years is a long time in football and it’s a stretch that hasn’t been particularly kind to Mourinho. Once seen as an innovator, an over-achiever and a coach of almost magical and unquantifiable magnetism, he has become a boom-and-bust manager, a hawker of shock and awe.
Mourinho’s reputation now is that of a man for quick wins at the very best, for progress that is not likely to last and may well come with heavy collateral damage.
At United they know this well. Mourinho was hired in 2016 in a bid to end a three-year title drought that felt long at the time even if it does not now.
‘There was a compromise about hiring him and that was to win the Premier League,’ a United source tells Mail Sport now.
‘Look at what he does. He tightens the group and breeds that paranoia against the world. Some players get broken and kicked out. Staff members get broken and kicked out.
‘His record at Chelsea and Real Madrid is that he won the league in his second season and then it fell apart and that’s because that tightened paranoid environment that works for a while cannot survive. Some staff were shocked by the way he behaved here but most of us weren’t. We knew what was coming. The only shock to us was that we didn’t win.
‘The idea with Jose was we would swallow the pill, not get everything we wanted, put up with the chaos but at the same time get this monkey off our back and win the league. But it didn’t work.’
It was a similar story at Tottenham, where one reliable source this week described some of his behaviour at the club as ‘deplorable’. Perturbed by the regression that had followed a Premier League title challenge in 2016 and an appearance in the 2019 Champions League final, chairman Daniel Levy gambled on an appointment completely at odds with the holistic, long-term approach taken by the outgoing Mauricio Pochettino.
Mourinho declared himself a new person on his arrival in north London. ‘I have had time to look deep within myself,’ he declared. Less than 18 months later, he was sacked six days before a Carabao Cup final against Manchester City.
Asked this week whether that had shocked people at Tottenham,
Mail Sport’s source replied: ‘Not one bit. Jose had taken it beyond the point of no return. His behaviour was unacceptable, his relationships were broken and the way he spoke to some people was so far across the line. He had been a gamble for us and it failed.
‘I think he was just frustrated. He saw what Pep (Guardiola) was doing at Manchester City and what (Jurgen) Klopp had built at Liverpool. He was suddenly the next level down and what we suffered here was the fallout from that frustration and resentment.’
It is partly this that makes a return for Mourinho to English football feel so unlikely. He has already worked at three of the biggest clubs. At Chelsea, he has been employed twice.
There has been talk of a third hiring at Stamford Bridge and of joining Newcastle but it’s fanciful. There is nothing in Newcastle’s model under their Saudi owners that suggests Mourinho’s style would be for them. Chelsea? He is not an upgrade on Pochettino, just as he proved not to be across London at Spurs.
The truth is that Mourinho is not cut out to be part of the supporting cast. Not in England. Not anywhere. It is not in his nature. He needs real relevance to the extent that it consumes him. If he is not front and centre, he may as well not exist.
At Roma they will remember him fondly. He shoved a forgotten football club back into the centre of Italy’s consciousness once again and for many of the Giallorossi faithful that was enough. At the Stadio Olimpico, Mourinho filled the personality vacuum left when Francesco Totti finally kicked his last football in 2017.
Mourinho ticked other boxes, too. He gave debuts to 13 academy graduates during his two and a half seasons in the Italian capital. Having won the Champions League with Inter Milan in 2010, no manager in Italy had lifted a European trophy until he came back and did so in 2022.
The club’s American owners the Friedkin family gave him a red-and-yellow vintage Vespa and on the Curva Sud of the stadium a banner said: ‘Mourinho for Life’.
So, yes, Mourinho played his audience pretty well. He has always been good at that. On the pitch, though, he did not advance Roma domestically and over time the irritation that caused him started to manifest itself in
depressingly familiar fashion. Public criticism of players (he called striker Tammy Abraham ‘privileged’) and abuse of match officials. And so the Mourinho wheel turns.
Mourinho inherited a team in 2021 that had finished seventh in Serie A the previous season. He was the highest-paid coach in the land and by the time he left his squad’s wage bill was the third-highest in the league behind Juventus and Inter.
For all of the club’s European adventures, this investment yielded consecutive sixth-place finishes in the league at an estimated cost of £3million per point. Champions League football evaded Mourinho’s Roma.
The team he leaves behind are ninth, their tally of 29 points from 20 games representing the club’s worst run for two decades. Mourinho’s record against Italy’s top six was also lamentable. Just four wins from 28 games, and a grim record of four defeats in six meetings with city rivals Lazio.
And so we get to the unpleasant stuff. Did reaching two European finals wipe away the stain of losing to promoted teams in the league and falling out of the Italian Cup last season after defeat by basement club Cremonese? Does it excuse a pattern of behaviour towards referees and their assistants that led to more than 20 red cards for him and his staff and the paying of endlessly expensive fines?
At one stage Mourinho took to wearing a secret recording device when talking to referees, and on another occasion he gave a full post-match TV interview in Portuguese, the insinuation being that his less-than-perfect Italian was being deliberately misinterpreted by authorities in order to hand him punishments.
This is the side of Mourinho that is not shown by the glossy Instagram posts of which he has become so fond. This is the side of Mourinho that Italian football has grown tired of for the second time.
The Roma fans may have welcomed the prominence it gave them in an era when the Milan clubs and Juventus continue to set the media agenda. But the Mourinho show was one the Friedkin family had grown tired of by the time they pulled the trigger in the wake of their team’s 3-1 defeat at AC Milan last Sunday. There always comes a time when Mourinho’s results no longer provide sufficient counter-balance to the bad stuff. As it stands today, the Friedkins have not asked for their Vespa back.
MOURINHO’S countenance at United was often so miserable that one staffer from the club’s in-house TV station said privately that his interviews often felt like hostage videos. At Tottenham, it was much the same.
There are some who speak of his worth. At Old Trafford, even Alex Ferguson grew tired and disappointed of Mourinho but this week midfielder Scott McTominay thanked him for giving him his start at first-team level and revealed they are still in touch.
‘I owe him a great deal and my family love him,’ said McTominay. ‘This guy meant so much to me and gave me all my dreams. The power of self-belief. He instilled that in me.’
At Tottenham much was made of a scene in the club’s Amazon TV documentary where Mourinho warns Dele Alli he is wasting his talent. Less well known is that Mourinho also visited Alli’s house to offer more private support.
This is the thing about Mourinho. He can be like that. There is always light to set against all that shade. But where does he go now? Who can provide the opportunity to quench that relentless desire for supremacy? To simply be happy?
Mourinho does not wish to exist, to take small steps or to build and lay platforms. This is not in his nature. He spoke last summer of an offer from Saudi Arabia that would have made him the ‘best-paid coach in the world’ and also hinted at an opportunity to lead his country. As always, he just wanted everybody to know.
There will be opportunities. He hasn’t managed Paris Saint-Germain yet, for example, but the French basket-case club would appear to be the last posting of real eminence available to him.
Mourinho is undoubtedly a coach past his best. His last work of real note was the construction of that Chelsea title team in 2015. He makes much of his second-place finish at United in 2018, but those who watched that team play will say different. United finished 19 points behind Manchester City.
Whether he is a coach out of step with the modern game is more contentious. His football does not carry the cache of Guardiola or Klopp, but a desire to prove that assertion false will be part of what drives him in to yet another job.
The chances are he will not be idle for long. Someone will take an expensive chance. Someone will throw all they have at an attempt to uncover the old Mourinho, the one we all fell for so helplessly and willingly 20 years ago.
When he wept on the field in Tirana after Roma’s Europa Conference League win over Feyenoord in 2022 it was widely assumed to be because he felt he had proved to the football world he was still around, that he wasn’t washed-up, wasn’t finished.
Now the man with the white hair and puffy eyes sitting in the passenger seat of that Lexus this week finds he has to prove it all over again. Mourinho wanted to extend his contract in Rome and instead they gave him the sack.
Right now, though, Jose Mourinho — one of the true greats of our time — looks as though he needs a rest. From himself as much anything else.