A very public meltdown
He’s the sexiest man in football — as charismatic as he’s volatile. So what’s the REAL reason Chelsea’s boss is suffering . . .
Such are the demands of fulfilling the dreams of his team’s fans and the ambitions of his oligarch paymaster, chelsea Fc manager Jose Mourinho rarely takes a midweek break. Yesterday though, having arrived home in London in the early hours after an away game, he afforded himself that rare luxury.
It promised to be a wonderful day, he had assured reporters after the match, his tone heavy with Iberian insouciance.
This was despite the fact that his megabucks team had just been knocked out of a cup competition by unglamorous Stoke city — their seventh defeat in a season that has started more disastrously than any since Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich began pumping roubles into the club 12 years ago.
In case we hadn’t grasped his message, Mourinho summoned his most gloweringly defiant stare and spelt it out. ‘My general situation is fantastic. I have a day off. Fantastic family. I can sleep well at night. I’m going to enjoy my day. Then, Thursday: one more day, like the last 15 years of my life.’
It was a performance worthy of George clooney, the actor he is said to resemble.
Yet watching the self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ face yet another barrage of questions about his future was excruciating.
For the more 52- year- old Mourinho protests his relaxed state of mind, the more he appears to be psychologically unravelling — and very publicly, at that.
When the last football season ended in May with chelsea as champions, their Portuguese coach was a study in laconic control as he prowled the touchline, unshaven, collar studiously undone, in his Armani mac.
Today he cuts a very different figure. he looks older, fidgets, affects oddly sardonic expressions when seeking to justify chelsea’s latest failure, and has a haunted look in his puffy eyes.
Then there are the near-hysterical outbursts against all those he blames for chelsea’s decline. The incompetent referees; the hostile media; the ‘biased’ Sky TV pundits; his own players. And, tacitly, also his billionaire owner, who has failed to buy him the new players he believes he needs.
A few weeks ago, when Mourinho stepped epped out with his student daughter Tita, 18, at GQ magazine’s Man of the Year Awards, we got an insight into the inner Mourinho as, scowling, he was photographed alongside her. clearly, he disapproved of her revealing outfit — a £2,145 micromini by Balmain. he is still said to be simmering at its unsuitability for a teenager.
But that episode can hardly account for his apparent decline.
AccORdInG to one leading football writer, the arch-manipulator seems to have lost control and to be on the brink of some sort of breakdown. Meanwhile, his troubles mount. Yesterday, the bookmakers installed him as 11/10 favourite to be the next Premier League manager to be sacked. Should the team lose to Liverpool on Saturday, it is widely agreed, Abramovich — who has already played Russian Roulette with ten previous managers — will give him the bullet.
To make matters worse, he faces yet another Football Association disciplinary hearing, which could lead to him being banned from stadia on match days.
So how has this film-star football manager, who speaks five languages, won a stack of trophies and has heard his name sung from Madrid to Milan to the brash King’s Road, fallen so low?
Every soccer expert has a different answer. According to the former England player chris Waddle, the fault lies with his exorbitantly paid players, who are ‘sulking’ because results aren’t going their way.
Others suggest Mourinho has ‘lost the dressing room’ — a football cliche meaning his squad have given up on him and his methods.
having welcomed him like the prodigal son two years ago, when he returned to manage the club he had left acrimoniously in 2007, some of the chelsea backroom staff are also said to despise him now.
This stems, in large part, from what may come to be seen as the catalyst for his meltdown — his bullying attack on the club’s popular female doctor, Eva carneiro.
This saga, which dates back to the opening game of the season, began when dr carneiro ran on to the pitch with a fellow member of the medical staff after a chelsea player went down injured.
Mourinho was apoplectic because he felt the player was not hurt and should not be treated. Plus if he was treated, chelsea would then have just nine outfield players, one having been sent off earlier in the match.
he vented his rage in full view of the supporters and allegedly called dr carneiro a filha da puta (‘son of a bitch) — which he later denied. In a fit of pique after the game, he banned the doctor from attending matches. She has since left the club and is claiming constructive dismissal.
Many more outbursts followed, the latest last weekend, when chelsea were beaten by West ham.
having seen one of his players sent off, he stalked the referee into his dressing-room at half-time, unleashing a volley of insults and allegedly refusing to leave. he was duly banished to the stands.
delving beyond the world of football, however, one learns of circumstances which might go some way towards explaining his behaviour.
Mourinho is a man with a complex and occasionally tragic family background, and his coaching genius owes much to its influences, particularly those of his father, Jose Manuel Mourinho Felix.
now 77, Felix, a former Portuguese international goalkeeper, is the mentor who has always driven him to succeed, and father and son share an inextricable bond.
But Felix is in very poor health and Mourinho takes every opportunity to fly back to the family home near Lisbon to be at his side.
Given the key role his father has played in his life and professional career, Felix’s prolonged illness might well be destabilising him.
But this latest crisis is not the first to beset Mourinho’s family. Born in 1963, he began life amid great wealth and privilege as the nephew of Mario Ledo, a sardine-canning magnate who grew rich under the Far Right regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
In the Seventies, however, Salazar lost power after a bloodless revolution. Ledo’s business and properties were confiscated, including the Mourinho clan’s house, and they had to move to a humbler home. The upheaval sparked family feuding that continues to this day.
Yesterday, Mourinho’s aunt, Maria Jose ulke, told me: ‘We haven’t spoken for years. All I know is that the Jose I remember was a beautiful, well-mannered little boy.’
Tellingly, however, she had previously told me that Mourinho was a highly sensitive child, and suggested that his perceived arrogance masked his early traumas.
At the age of five, for example, he had suffered a burst appendix leading to peritonitis and spent an anguished fortnight in hospital, separated from his doting mother. The family also lived with an uncle who was bedridden with a blood disorder. Jose, she said, would tiptoe upstairs to see him, and was inconsolable when he died in his 30s.
But the manager has described the loss of his sister Teresa as his greatest sorrow. An accomplished pianist and ballet dancer, and a great beauty, she died in 1997, aged 37. her family have said she suffered complications relating to her diabetes. But, according to a leading Portuguese journalist, she succumbed to an infection linked to drug abuse.
In seeking to analyse Mourinho’s state of mind now, a psychologist might also factor in allegations about his private life.
ThOuGh Mourinho never tires of expressing his devotion to wife Matilde, whom he began dating when she was 15 and he 17, and married in 1989 (they even have one another’s names tattooed on their wrists), it was reported eight years ago that he had a lengthy affair while living away from home at the start of his career. A woman named Elsa Sousa claimed they set up home together when he coached in Porto, and he did nothing to hide the relationship from his players and staff. her story has not been denied.
Whatever the truth, Mourinho has no shortage of female admirers — and, according to close chelsea-watchers, there are continual rumours about his private life.
Whatever the cause, though, the man who once wore a heart monitor during a big match to prove his low pulse under pressure is clearly at bursting point. And for the Special One, there is no hiding place.