Mourinho now divides more than he conquers in dressing rooms
Jose Mourinho was the supreme man-manager who could galvanise others but an amateur psychologist who long seemed to understand what made his players tick has shown an increasing lack of self-awareness.
The late period Mourinho can feel a mass of contradictions, retaining only his innate quotability. “Football nowadays is not easy,” he said after beating Aston Villa on Sunday. If that could have been a reaction to five defeats in 12 games, the sort of run he would never normally have suffered, it was not. “Selfishness is around, the individualism is around, the connection between agents and the press is around.”
Mourinho may have long looked to create sides built on teamwork, where individuals sacrifice themselves for a greater cause, but few have less right to condemn others for their egotism.
The Portuguese, meanwhile, has been defined in part by a long relationship with a super-agent, Jorge Mendes, who also represents Matt Doherty, one of Spurs’ and his worst signings of recent years.
Top in December, Tottenham have got worse the longer they have since spent with Mourinho. “You need time to develop team empathy because the psychological profile of young people now is not an easy one,” he nevertheless argued.
There are two elements of that to unpick. Mourinho is famously not a manager who needs time; the ultimate shorttermist’s longest stay remains just over three years in his first spell at Chelsea. He used to win the title in his second season, but things tend to unravel quicker now and neither Spurs nor Manchester United have reached such heights.
And, more than most, Mourinho struggles with the youth of today. His could relate to Generation X; his successes came with footballers born in the 1970s or at the start of the 1980s; yet the youngest of them, such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Petr Cech, are approaching their 40th birthdays.
With the notable exception of Scott McTominay, his favourite United players tended to be products of the 1980s: Nemanja Matic, Ashley Young, Antonio Valencia. Those born in the next decade, such as Paul Pogba and Luke Shaw, became targets of his ire.
And Mourinho has tended to lose the generation game to managers such as Jurgen Klopp. Charismatic leadership always formed part of Mourinho’s aura of invincibility. He was the cooler, cleverer winner, not the bitter old man.
When his teams lose, his frequent explanation that they did not follow his instructions sounds like the selfishness he was decrying. Yet if Hugo Lloris suggested that was the case after Thursday’s 3-0 loss to Dinamo Zagreb – Mourinho’s worst result in European competitions – that could both endorse the manager’s version of events and pose the question of why they don’t listen to him.
In Croatia, Lloris hinted at a divided dressing room. Mourinho’s method has always been more to divide and conquer, to criticise some and contrast them with the others. But as he has gone on, he has divided more than he has conquered, finding fault with ever more players just as ever more outsiders have concluded that he is the problem.
Spurs have scarcely benefited from Mourinho’s management of Dele Alli, Gareth Bale and several others. For Mourinho, the manager who once had a claim to be the greatest ever, football nowadays really is not easy.