Man with God complex exits with £10m
ThE day Jose Mourinho returned to his precious Chelsea — nearly six years after they first sacked him as manager — he spoke of his unbridled joy at being back with the football club he loved. in that first incarnation, he memorably declared himself the special One. this time he was the happy One.
he looked relaxed, he felt at home. he was, he said, there for the long haul. Yesterday he marched away from the predictable schism midway through his third season.
this time around was even shorter than his initial spell at the club — and, as usual, smiles and contentment were in short supply.
No one was happy. Not Mourinho, not his employers, not the players, certainly not the fans, who have been on the manager’s side throughout this latest unravelling.
Yet it was classic Mourinho. Whatever brief joy the man brings to the clubs he favours, the departure is invariably rancorous and grim. Fabio Capello, a former manager of England, said Mourinho’s style takes too much from his players; it exhausts and leaves them broken. he did not mean just physically.
Mourinho’s teams work famously hard, but the true toll is mental. his tactics are confrontation as motivation, a permanent siege mentality, us against them — fuelled by wild paranoia. it wears players down.
Mourinho arrived at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground yesterday, his grey hair cropped to the scalp. it is his equivalent of war paint, the Marine cut he sports on the first day of any new season. this is Mourinho ready for battle.
Yet if he put up any fight at all yesterday it was all over very quickly. the meeting in which he was dismissed lasted ten minutes.
Maybe Capello is right. Maybe for all Mourinho’s talk of ten-year plans second time around at Chelsea — his first spell ended in acrimony after initial success, too — his methods are just too relentless to last.
it is a scorched earth policy, almost wanton in its destructive power. he sees shadows everywhere. Referees do not make mistakes, they are in league against him; the Football Association is not a bunch of out-dated old men, but a dark force out to get him.
When he feels hard done by, he positively radiates a burning sense of injustice. twice recently he’s accused ball boys of opposing teams of conspiring against Chelsea.
At his worst Mourinho is the Joker as played by heath Ledger in the Batman movies, walking away from carnage, casually pressing buttons on his detonator, until Gotham General hospital explodes behind him.
the Joker is charismatic, too, like Mourinho. it is not all darkness. Players tell stories of inspirational speeches, such as the time Frank Lampard stepped naked out of the shower to be told he was the best player in the world. ‘ there were days when we literally felt we could not lose,’ Lampard recalled.
Not since the great Brian Clough has a manager used psychology like Mourinho.
he was born in 1963 into a large middle-class family in a suburb of Lisbon. his father was a goalkeeper who played for Portugal, but young Jose did not have the talent for a professional career.
instead he studied sports science and taught PE — and entered the game as a coach.
But why the addiction to anger and confrontation? simply, it worked. Mourinho got results with phenomenal attention to detail on the pitch and motivational extremes off it. Ultimately, however, this clouds his legacy at every club.
On the first day of this season, Mourinho picked a fight with the Chelsea medical staff — in particular, Dr Eva Carneiro, a popular figure who stood out from her contemporaries by virtue of being young, attractive and female.
Carneiro and her colleague ran on the pitch to treat an injured player, Eden hazard. Mourinho didn’t think hazard was injured.
Also, the rules state that any player who receives treatment has to leave the field and re-enter only after play has restarted. As Chelsea were already down to ten men, this meant that they would briefly be reduced to nine.
Mourinho was furious that Carneiro did not wait for his approval. his anger on the touchline was plain — he screamed ‘son of a bitch’ — and became plainer in his post-match interviews.
he later demoted Carneiro from first-team duties. she did not return to work and the matter will be resolved at an employment tribunal hearing next year.
Yet the ramifications have been far wider. the fall-out seemed to set the tone for Chelsea’s season. too much energy wasted on hostility and conflict. Ultimately, it dragged the club down.
Club doctors are not just there for hamstrings and torn calf muscles. Players’ families rely on them, too. sick kids, sick mums, sick wives.
the club doctor is the reason you never meet a famous footballer and his feverish two-year- old in your GP’s surgery. Mourinho’s treatment of Carneiro will not have been popular in the dressing room or in the dining rooms of the millionaire mansions where the players reside.
it seems very little has gone right for Mourinho since. his fights have often been random, but even by his standards the disintegration of player morale this season has been startling.
A team of magnificent resilience when winning the league last season — Chelsea led the table from the first week to the last — are shaping up to be the worst champions in the history of English football and sit one point above the relegation zone.
Good defenders have seemingly forgotten their art; good attackers no longer score or create. And throughout there has been a background hum of dissent, tales of mutiny, of mockery, of dissatisfaction with tactics and style.
Mourinho is too conservative, Mourinho is always angry, Mourinho always thinks he is right. And he often is right. indeed, few managers have been as right as frequently as Mourinho. he has twice won the biggest prize in European club football — the Champions League — with two clubs that were perceived inferiors in the competition, Porto and inter Milan.
he brought the Premier League title to Chelsea for the first time in 50 years and then retained it the following season.
he came back for a second spell and won the league a third time. he has been a title-winning manager in four countries — Portugal, England, italy and spain — and between 2003 and 2012 did not go a single calendar year without winning at least one trophy.
so however arrogant he may have appeared, no matter the size of his god complex, he knew what he was doing. And right to the end that self- belief never wavered. in his last interview, he was asked about his appeal to players. ‘i think they need to understand that i am the best manager they can work with,’ he said. And Mourinho is very, very good. Even as Chelsea have lurched from calamity to crisis this season, he has remained convinced of his ability to turn this slump around. ‘if the club sacks me, they sack the best manager they have,’ he insisted in October.
Yet, after another defeat at Leicester City on Monday night, the point of no return was reached.
Mourinho has bristled in front of the cameras on several occasions this season, but in this post-match interview his anger and an acute sense of personal injustice could no longer be contained.
HE SPOKE of being ‘ betrayed’ by his players; he speculated that last season winning the league, he had elevated them to a level beyond their natural capability, one that could not be sustained.
in other words: it’s not me, it’s you. For Chelsea’s billionaire Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, that was no doubt the final straw.
Even if Mourinho is right, even if he is a genius who marshalled his team to the title against all odds, it was professional suicide to say it.
having so brazenly taken all the credit for the success last season, how could Mourinho then coax his players back onside?
Critics think he is Machiavellian, plotting every word and phrase, the consummate politician, brilliant at the art of manipulating the media. Yet the truth is that on too many occasions he seems to speak without thinking. this was one of those times.
Betrayal? Because his defenders were outsmarted by the league’s most prolific goal- scorer, Jamie Vardy? his words were simply too savage.
And that last part: the coaching genius whose players were no match for his talent? Where could he go from there? there was no way out.
One presumes, since that point, Chelsea have been lining up his replacement.
Yesterday, as December night fell, Mourinho left in a black car, with blacked out windows, head covered by a hood, the Prince of Darkness once more.
he will have been without allies, in the dressing room or the boardroom. it’s the way it always ends with Mourinho.