José Mourinho, the anti-Barça, may have gone out of style but he still matters
Perhaps it’s different if you live in Italy or if Serie A is the league you follow most closely. Perhaps, then, José Mourinho is still a cussed ball of fury, bearing ancient grudges, determined never to relinquish a slight, real or imagined, the Keyser Söze of the dugout, the Karla of the press conference, manipulating and plotting, radiating paranoia as he insists his club is the victim of a conspiracy by the referees, the media and the football authorities.
But if not, there was something almost heartwarming about Roma’s 0-0 draw at Bayer Leverkusen in the second leg of their Europa League semi-final. He’s still doing it! He hasn’t changed! 28% possession. One shot on target to Leverkusen’s 23. The ball in play for just 54 minutes, despite 14 minutes of injury time. An xG of 0.03. This was a celebration of mourinhismo, a Camp Nou 2010 for the modern age. He had a lead from the first leg, so why should he attack?
For 15 years the game at elite level has been about possession and the high press, about playing on the front foot, but when Barcelona preferred Pep Guardiola over Mourinho in 2008, it confirmed what he had always suspected: that the club had never fully accepted him when he had been a coach there in the late 90s; that they would always side with their own; that he would become the anti-Barça; that if they wanted to play with the ball, he would play without it.
His Porto and his Chelsea both pressed to an extent – it was only after that rejection that he retreated fully into the shadows, became the Sauron of anti-football, preaching, in direct contradistinction to Guardiola, his doctrine that he who has the ball has fear. In that sense his entire post-Chelsea career can be seen as an extended passive-aggressive sulk. And after this long, there is something rather magnificent about that.
The past 15 years have had their moments. Having been jilted, Mourinho has not withdrawn, Miss Havishamlike, to a mouldering mansion, plotting to break the heart of an idealistic protege – although André VillasBoas’s heart ended up broken by football anyway. He has been in the arena. His achievements with Internazionale were remarkable, and that semi-final second leg in 2010, victory through defeat with 10 men and 19% possession, represented his great revenge over Barcelona, greater than finally ending Guardiola’s run of success by winning La Liga with Real Madrid in 2011-12.
Guardiola seemed exhausted by the end of their two-year tussle in Spain, but hindsight suggests the struggle took more out of Mourinho. Even that final league title at Chelsea was followed by dismissal in the December of the next season. Since when there have been anti-climactic stints at Manchester United and Tottenham – although subsequent history perhaps calls for reassessment.
Mourinho did, after all, lead United to second in the Premier League, as well as claiming the League Cup and the Europa League. United have not matched the 81 points they won under Mourinho in 2017-18 since, nor had they won another trophy until the League Cup this season.
Mourinho took Spurs to sixth then had them seventh when he was sacked a week before the 2021 League Cup final: that may not seem a huge achievement, and Tottenham did qualify for the Champions League under Antonio Conte the following season, but nobody could realistically claim that the club’s situation now is better than when Mourinho left.
It is not as simple, though, as suggesting that a club dwindling exculpates Mourinho, that he bravely fought the impulse to failure. Nor, though, does it seem likely that the toxicity he tends to leave behind can extend so long, that he has been the cause of the problems. Rather it is probably that clubs over the past decade have turned to Mourinho only when they are already on a downswing, that he is their Hail Mary to arrest decline: far easier, after all, to hope a charismatic brooder can shake things up than actually implement a proper process of reform.
Mourinho could have faded away. He is 60, and surely doesn’t need the money. But football has a hold on him yet. He is not now that which once he was but how dull it is to rust unburnished, not to shine in use.
His achievements in winning the Champions League with Porto in 2004 and Inter in 2010 have come to seem only more remarkable as the very wealthiest clubs have come increasingly to dominate. But he is no longer in the vanguard of tactical development and the decision to be the anti-Barça, indeed, means he is consciously archaic, like a Lancashire weaver making a virtue of the fact his cloth was produced not with a spinning jenny but on a handloom.
He is like Neil Warnock or Steve Davis or John Major, a figure from the past whose irritating idiosyncrasies have become somehow consoling in their familiarity, who offers a nostalgic bridge to the past, a past that wasn’t perfect but in which the implacable agents of unpleasant foreign regimes at least had the decency to pretend they were just everyday oligarchs. (And almost all people in sport are inherently nostalgic, happy enough in the end just to sit with their litany of half-forgotten names).
Mourinho hasn’t changed. In the past few weeks he has worn a wire because of a referee he doesn’t trust, seen an assistant sent off for grabbing an opponent and administered a textbook drive-by to the Tottenham chairman, “President Levy”. But these are the hits people want to hear him play (at least for now; it might be different if he does return to the mainstream at Paris Saint-Germain).
Twenty years after his first Uefa Cup final, when his Porto, time-wasting and feigning injury in what would become recognised as the grand Mourinho style, beat Celtic in Seville, he is in another one, this time against Sevilla and this time with Roma. It is not the elite level any more. Roma’s net spend last summer was minus €58m. Mourinho is no longer striving with gods. But he won the inaugural Conference League last year and he is still annoying people. Some work of noble note may yet be done.