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Why Mourinho’s long history of falling out with star players suggests how the Pogba saga will end
THERE’S NO STORY,” Jose Mourinho assertively restated after once more leaving one of his star players out of the starting line-up for a big game, but this was not Paul Pogba.
This was back in 2012-13, when the Portuguese finally brought three years of differences with Iker Casillas to a definitive conclusion, and left the Real Madrid legend out of the Copa Del Rey final.
“As the coach, it’s legitimate for me to say, ‘I like Diego Lopez’,” Mourinho is quoted as stating in Diego Torres’ book The Special One. “And with me in charge, while I’m coach of Madrid, Diego Lopez will play. There’s no story.”
Except, there very much was a story, one that came to characterise his time at Real Madrid and that some at the top level of the game feel continues to condition this more caveated second stage of Mourinho’s career.
He had fallen out with one of his big-name players, and that did not perpetuate his sensational initial rise as a manager, but instead left this lingering feeling of dissatisfaction.
No one is saying that Mourinho’s relationship with Pogba is anything like at the level it was with Casillas, and the reasons for the fall-out with the Spaniard were much more rancorous, but there are fundamental similarities.
One is the repeated attempt to downplay it and dismiss its relevance, as he did after being asked about it before Manchester United’s Champions League match with Sevilla – and that despite so willingly talking about it the previous Friday – only for the Portuguese’s very handling of it to inevitably stoke even more intense discussion.
Mourinho did not just drop Pogba, after all. He left him out for a player of much lesser profile – Scott McTominay – as well as an Ander Herrera who may not have been fully fit, while finally increasing the numbers in midfield to a three.
The latter is the one thing Pogba is said to have wanted, TAN SRI VINCENT TAN past given how he desires “warriors”, and that itself recalls some of the rigours of Chelsea 2015-16.
It is as if he is doubling down on the “provocation”. And, as with so much in a career played out in the media as much as Mourinho’s, much of this really comes down to perspective.
Mourinho’s jobs have been so relatively short and have so often seen the same storylines played out, that it is sometimes difficult not to draw comparisons with current events and moments of the past.
There could almost be a Mourinho barometer noting dates that mark key developments, with the two Champions Leagues at Porto and Inter at one end and the 2015 collapse at Chelsea at the other. personal victory.
It was put in the Torres book as a “selection-process based on a dark code of loyalty even when it was to the detriment of the functioning of the team”.
It should also be noted that, for all Mourinho has dismissed that book, some at Chelsea read it and were struck by how many stories and anecdotes were so familiar.
Others at Chelsea – and Porto and Inter – say that’s the wrong way of looking at it. They maintain this is still just his method of “confrontational leadership”.
It is an approach that Mourinho has embarked upon impassioned discussions about, pointing to its psychological and scientific basis.
“Oh my god,” he once