Bar set low for Special One
LOOK past the evident inconsistencies. Like Ed Woodward, the Manchester United executive vice chairman, saying “Jose [Mourinho] is quite simply the best manager in the game today”. Which, obviously, begs the question why Woodward did not appoint him in January when United still had a season to salvage.
(Better yet, don’t: that would be a bit like asking why he spent £36 million, potentially rising to £57m, on Anthony Martial when he was available for less than a quarter of that fee a month earlier.)
Or the fact he has signed a manager who is represented by an agent who also looks after a number of United players, including the goalkeeper who agreed to join another club on deadline day and a host of potential summer transfer targets.
(This particular agent, Jorge Mendes, also happens to be the guy who acted as intermediary in the Martial deal with the amazing rising asking price.) In normal businesses, you would ask questions about corporate governance and conflicts of interest, but, hey, this is football.
Or, indeed, this business about youth development – which is quickly becoming a stick with which to hit Mourinho over the head – and whether he will ignore United’s academy and stuff the team full of high-priced veteran mercenaries. (Odd how those fretting over Mourinho’s nurturing of young talent at his previous career stops haven’t asked themselves whether those clubs made it a priority. Or, indeed, how often there was young, home-grown talent which he ignored who then grew into superstars.)
Focus instead on a simple fact. For the first time in a long while there is genuine excitement at Old Trafford. Mourinho’s teams may occasionally be boring to watch, but he rarely is. That matters to the owners, who make no secret of the fact they see United as a part of the sports entertainment business. And they have got themselves a premium brand in that department, as evidenced by the fact that it took ages to untangle Mourinho’s myriad personal endorsements and sponsorships to ensure deals did not clash with United’s own commercial sponsors.
Another factor is that, in many ways, and, yes, it sounds absurd to say it, Mourinho won’t be lacking for motivation. If he screws this up, it will likely be his last stop at this level and we will either see him slinking off to Paris St Germain or taking that national team job he has talked about for a long time.
In other words, he’s all-in. And Manchester United need to be too. Expect the coffers to be raided again. United told investors two weeks ago that they expected transfer spending to decline after the excesses of the past two seasons, but it’s hard to imagine Mourinho taking the job without some sort of guarantee that the resources will be there to overhaul this side. And, make no mistake, an overhaul is needed.
Work it out for yourself. How many of these players could you imagine starting for United in two years’ time in a hypothetical Champions League final? Half a dozen, tops? And that’s assuming Marcus Rashford continues to develop at lightning pace, Wayne Rooney’s performances don’t fall off a cliff (whether in midfield or elsewhere), and David de Gea sticks around.
That means at least five new, United-calibre (as in Sir Alexera United, not the present lot) signings and a couple of this year’s duds reclaimed and turned into viable top footballers. And that will take some serious coin.
Still, he is in his element. This is where he has done his best, if not lasting, work: on the big stage with the big guns, generating big news and hundreds of millions of eyeballs and page clicks.
For now, he’s a rip-roaring success. The test will come in what the club do this summer and what he can do this coming season. The bar is set nice and low, so there’s reason to be optimistic.
TWO years ago, Antonio Conte, fresh off three consecutive Serie A titles with Juventus, had the world at his feet. He opted to manage his country rather than play the old “manager-on-sabbatical-waiting-for-acall” game.
His reward is a trip to the European Championships with a team hampered by injuries and with perhaps the shallowest talent pool of any Italy side in 60 years.
The Azzurri side who take on Scotland tonight will be a blue-collar group with a small club ethos, lots of work-rate, attempts at being more than the sum of its parts, plenty of team spirit and unity, but not much in the way of stars.
Take away the back four – with goalkeeper Gigi Buffon and centrebacks Andrea Barzagli, Giorgio Chiellini and Leo Bonucci – and you won’t find much in the way of star quality, especially now midfielders Marco Verratti and Claudio March-isio are out of the squad through injury. The old warrior, Daniele de Rossi, is as close as you get but he missed most of the second half of the season.
Beyond that, you have guys like Matteo Darmian, in and out of Louis van Gaal’s underachieving United, Eder, who struggled to get on the pitch for a poor Inter side and Graziano Pelle, who at one point this season went four months without scoring for Southampton.
Here, you rather feel for Conte. Managing the Azzurri is often a thankless task in the best of circumstances. Unless you get to the final of a major tournament, you’re generally considered a dud and doing it with this group of players seems almost masochistic.
He promised a group with an underdog, never-say-die mentality, the same qualities that helped him carve out a long career in Serie A and with the Azzurri as a player. To the public, that’s great if you’re managing Slovakia or Sweden (without Zlatan Ibrahimovic).
But this is Italy. These are the guys with the four stars on their chest and the reigning runners-up in the Euros.
Whether the public will accept the blue-collar effort in lieu of live results remains to be seen.