Mourinho has burnt bridges at every major club
The mercurial Manchester United manager has burnt bridges at every major club and is now unlikely to be touched by anyone in Europe
At the fine line between fraud, genius and madman you’ll find a certain Jose Mourinho — the Manchester United manager who yelled at journalists last week to show him more respect for winning three league titles, despite having just suffered his heaviest home defeat, 3-0, to Tottenham Hotspur.
The result leaves his side with just three points from the first three games of the season, and condemns him to his worst-ever league start. That’s after the Red Devils had earlier followed up a 2-1 home win over Leicester City with a 3-2 away loss to Brighton and Hove Albion.
The drama continues tomorrow with United’s away trip to fellow Greater Manchester side Burnley, in another potential banana skin of a clash for the embattled and beleaguered Portuguese coach.
I say fraud, because as a translator who never played football at any notable level, he only wins by spending vast quantities of cash on buying experienced players while ignoring youth, and deploying negative tactics when facing top four opponents. He’s also a genius though, because he’s managed to keep up this whole facade for so long, persuading others to literally buy into his whole self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ persona to win 25 trophies across five clubs in four countries over 15 years. That’s quite a run.
The madman element comes into it, however, because he continually shatters this illusion of actually knowing what he’s doing with his crazed outbursts. A case in point came after that Spurs defeat, when he likened those three goals scored against United to the three league titles he’s won — more championships than any of the other 19 managers in the Premier League, he’ll have you know. What a way to twist and deflect the conversation!
In the same week, as Aretha Franklin’s passing, with her cover of Otis Redding’s Respect already resonating over the airwaves, we were left with nothing but parodies of Mourinho completing this caricature of himself by storming out of a press conference while screaming “Respect, Respect, Respect, man,” as if somewhat possessed by the late American soul singer.
Not once has he brought through a young player at any of his clubs, but more than once he has publicly lambasted his own players, slated rival coaches and even criticised his own team doctor for running on to the pitch to attend to an injured player — and this is a man who demands respect from us?
Lines blur
Where was the respect in 2014 when he labelled former Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger a “specialist in failure”? Wenger at that point had won three league titles as well, also more than all the other 19 league managers in the league at that time, and he was by then 18 years into an eventual 22 year stay at the club, which he had built up himself, by the way — sustainably. Mourinho hasn’t even managed three years at one club, let alone 22. And that’s because he’s renowned for being found out after his board refused to continue bankrolling him. This is where the lines between madman and genius blur even deeper, as after realising he’s been found out, he knowingly turns on the irrational behaviour in order to fast-track his sacking, because to stick around any longer would really jeopardise his whole charade.
Without a care for the club, the master turns mercenary in order to ensure his severance payoff.
It’s happening again, regular as clockwork. No sooner than he clicked into his third season with United did the board put its foot down on excessive spending and told him to use what’s already at his disposal. Now bored and unable to compete through actual man-management, without just being able to buy in more players, he uses the club’s unwillingness as the perfect excuse for the team’s dwindling form, which in reality is a result of his destructive personality. The Portuguese then takes royal umbrage at the situation and embarks on his exit plan by deploying a special kind of crazy. Quit and he won’t be due a payoff, remember; get sacked and the board will have to pay him what’s due. What a remarkable way to make money and what dishonest intent for someone who always joins clubs to such promise, fanfare and hope among the fans who pay his wages.
It likely won’t happen for him again, though, as with clubs having seen through his theatrics, his options over where to turn next are limited. He’s burnt bridges at every major club and now likely won’t be touched by anyone in Europe.
It’s been a fine ride though, and what this whole Jose phenomena does teach us though is that if you believe in your own hype and can make others believe in it too, you can achieve the unthinkable (within three seasons or less).
Mourinho has done brilliantly to have come from such modest beginnings as an interpreter to where he is now. That couldn’t have been achieved by luck alone, and perhaps the reason for these outbursts comes from that underlying inferiority he has when put up alongside his peers in football management, who all had far more notable playing careers.
That he’s managed to circumvent that traditional path to the dugout to hold his own, and achieve what every man on the street dreams of is the stuff of fairytales.
It may be hard to pull him apart from being the genius, fraud or madman, that he so often appears to be, and I hasten to add that my final evaluation of him is still very much undecided. That I can’t pick between the three is only complimentary of him. But one thing I am sure of though is that he deserves our respect.