I give it two years...

It’s the return of football’s No1 narcissist ( and there’s stiff competition for that title! )

JOSE MOURINHO is soiled goods. He is the remainders section in the second hand store. He is a few buttons short of an expensive jacket. He is the manager who is so desperate to camouflage his decline he has started counting the Community Shield as a major trophy. He is the guy who spends hundreds of millions to win you the FA Cup.

He is the guy who will take your club and turn it into scorched earth. He arrives promising he has changed and he leaves amid acrimony and angst long after it becomes obvious he hasn’t changed at all. He’s the guy who stood still when Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp accelerated. Spurs just got themselves a man who was a great manager. A decade ago.

Before he was sacked by Manchester United last December, Mourinho had become one of the most sour, dour, joyless, bitter men in football. Eleven months on, newly installed as the boss at Tottenham, whose chairman, Daniel Levy, clearly does not know what is about to hit him, he is trying to reinvent himself as a comedian.

Earlier this year, he took a fat wad from a bookmaker to star in a clever, witty advert aimed at persuading fans to gamble. With the severance he got from United’s

Father Christmas, Ed Woodward, it was strange to see him so eager for cash already. Three years of room service at The Lowry must have mounted up.

Anyway, Mourinho was a natural in the advert. No surprise there. He has always been an actor. The only difference was that this time he was doing it on the small screen instead of the touchline. What fun he had with the idea that he might possess humility. ‘Humble never brags,’ he says into the camera before it cuts away to his gardener shaping a shrub into three fingers to signify a trophy haul.

He was still playing it for laughs at his first Tottenham press conference on Thursday. Football’s No1 Narcissist — and there’s stiff competition for that title — said: ‘I’m in a period where it is not about myself at all. It is about my club, my club’s fans, my players. It is not about me.’ He must have had them in stitches with that. He kept a straight face, too, apparently.

We all lap it up because the man has charisma but the reality is that we have been through this charade before when Mourinho starts a new job. Narcissists might say that they no longer gaze into the clear pool to stare at their reflection but they are deluding themselves. So Mourinho can call himself The Special One, The Happy One or The Humble One but the truth is he never changes.

The truth is that within a few months — sooner if things don’t start well — the same old traits will be exhibiting themselves again: heavy hints that he is working at a terrible disadvantage to his rivals, veiled criticism of recruitment policy, allegations of conspiracies against him, reminders of his glorious past, veiled criticisms of his players and demands for respect.

My guess is Mourinho and Tottenham will be over inside two years. He and Levy will have fallen out by then. Many of the players Mauricio Pochettino nurtured will have left and Spurs will have been turned into a one-man soap opera. It is what always happens. It is always, always, all about him. Why on earth does anyone think it is going to change this time? Mourinho’s management spells increasingly conform to a pattern: a honeymoon period, a spell of success, the signing of a new contract, then months of stasis and internecine warfare when it starts to appear as if Mourinho is actually inviting the sack.

The classic of its genre was his publicly dismissive treatment of Chelsea doctor Eva Carneiro, which ushered in a period of turbulence from which his second reign at Stamford Bridge never recovered. Put it this way: Levy’s decision to award his new manager a £13million-a-year three-and-a-halfyear contract is football’s new definition of optimism. The Spurs chairman just blew a chunk of his reputation for shrewd husbandry. There was a time when the Mourinho performance was entertaining, a bit like a night of vaudeville. Cheap laughs, basically. There was a time when it had novelty value. That time has gone.

Now it’s just dull and tiresome and predictable. Which brings us to the football that Mourinho’s teams play these days.

At United, it was obvious as it can be that Mourinho’s brand of football was outmoded and that he could not switch it up. His conservative style and his reliance on a big target man yielded dividends a decade or more ago but now it looks tired and stale next to the football that teams like Manchester City, Liverpool, Leicester and Bournemouth play.

This is the man who paid £52m for Fred. Let’s not forget that.

Jim Ratcliffe, the owner of Ineos, who has looked at buying a Premier League club, highlighted that Mourinho move in an interview yesterday. He had two words for it. ‘Dumb money,’ he called it.

Mourinho was once a great manager. That much is undeniable. But everything about him screams Yesterday’s Man. The Community Shield is an example. When you stop winning the big ones, you start counting the little ones. Everything about him yells that his best days are behind him. Let’s face it, if they weren’t, he wouldn’t have taken the Spurs job in the first place.

After how it ended at Chelsea, after everything that happened at United, it is hardly surprising he is moving down the food chain. He wasn’t even first choice for the Spurs job. That was Brendan Rodgers. Rodgers, Guardiola and Klopp stand for thrilling styles of football. Mourinho stands for cynicism and safety first. It is only Mourinho’s past which makes him part of the conversation.

After all his garbage about humility, he let the mask slip when he was asked how the Spurs players would be feeling about losing last season’s Champions League final. ‘I don’t know because I never lost a Champions League final,’ he said. What he didn’t mention was that he hasn’t managed to get to the final for a decade. You can’t lose one if you’re not in one.

Despite Mourinho’s attempts at comedy, the only funny thing about the appointment is that Levy, a man who has built his reputation on financial prudence, appears to have lost his mind in pursuit of Mourinho. The man who’s supposed to drive a hard bargain has bet the farm on a guy who turned United into a disaster zone.

For Tottenham’s sake, I hope it works. Pochettino built a fine side in north London and transformed the club’s fortunes. That progress is at risk now. Pochettino helped to build the new Spurs stadium.

Has Levy just put a human wrecking ball in charge of his legacy?