How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A José Mourinho Story

The Supercopa de España is to Spanish domestic football what the lick of salt is to a tequila slammer – a generally not particularly pleasant way to prepare you for the real action to come. It’s a fixture very much similar to England’s own Community Shield – a play-off between the reigning cup holders and the previous season’s league champions – only contested over two matches rather than one. Generally, as is the way with most trophies these days, it’s not terribly competitive and Barcelona usually win (they’ve snaffled five of the last seven). It could almost be called a friendly – except, that is, when it throws Real Madrid and Barcelona onto a pitch together.

For the first time since 1997 those teams met in this year’s Supercopa, with predictably explosive results: nine goals, three red cards and a bucketload of controversy. Cesc Fàbregas, making his debut for Barça in the second leg, very nearly didn’t have a second leg of his own after Marcelo’s horror challenge in stoppage time, which prompted the Brazilian full-back’s dismissal and a particularly boisterous touchline melee.

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At the end of it Barcelona’s David Villa and Real’s Mesut Özil, both of whom had already been substituted, were sent off. But more remarkably, while players and coaches from both sides pushed and postured just off the pitch, Real’s dapper manager José Mourinho walked calmly into the throng, poked a forefinger into the eye socket of Tito Vilanova, one of Barcelona’s coaches, and scarpered again. It was a shameful new departure for the usually debonair Portuguese – his verbal assaults on his rivals have become increasingly venomous, but this was the first time his vitriol has spilled into violence.

Johann Cruyff, the legendary former Barcelona player and manager, called it “an act of arrogance and impotence”. “There are things that should not be allowed,” he raged. “The problem is his obsession with Barcelona has gone beyond the limits.” Gerard Piqué, the Barcelona defender, said: “Someone has to take action on the matter. Sincerely, Mourinho is destroying Spanish football.” (Not entirely true – what’s actually destroying Spanish football is the two big clubs’ refusal to share their enormous television revenue with the rest of the league, but that’s a story for another day.) And Mourinho? Well, he accused Fàbregas of diving: “We intended to play like men and not fall on the ground at the slightest touch,” and refused to apologise. Indeed when one of his players, the goalkeeper Iker Casillas, did apologise for his team’s behaviour that day, he was promptly dropped.

Mourinho’s bitter resentment of Barcelona is perhaps surprising, given that it is the club who gave him his big break in coaching.

Between 1996 and 2000 Mourinho worked for the club, initially as Bobby Robson’s translator. When the Englishman was replaced by Louis Van Gaal the following year, Mourinho was told that his job would also go. “He was very angry,” Van Gaal remembers. “He was very irritated and shouted. That was very impressive for me, because he had emotions and he was right. I asked him to be the coach, the trainer, because he knew the team and he could help me.” If Barça have been repayed it is with a strange kind of gratitude. “I’ll never forget what the club gave me, but something has been created around me that is hard to make positive,” Mourinho has said. “I’m not stupid enough to think that this hate can be turned into love.”

Mourinho’s recent obsession with Barcelona is born of failure, a concept with which he has little experience and even less patience. Though he memorably knocked them out of the Champions League on his way to winning the competition with Internazionale in 2010, his experiences since arriving in Madrid have been pretty dismal. In his first Clásico Real endured a 5-0 spanking, their heaviest defeat against Barça for 60 years, and matters have barely improved since. After seven meetings his current record reads: won one, drawn two, lost the rest. Real have had one or more players sent off in five of those seven games, and in one of them Mourinho got a red card himself. The solitary victory came in last season’s Spanish cup final, Cristiano Ronaldo scoring the only goal of a sterile game in extra time.

While Mourinho’s Real have regularly savaged inferior opposition – the Spanish top flight is currently so lopsided in favour of the top two sides it makes even the Scottish league look competitive – his tactics in big games have been far from swashbuckling.

This is nothing new, but while Chelsea – who before his arrival had not won the league for half a century – and Inter – who under his control won the European Cup for the first time in 45 years – were prepared to accept his frequently attritional ways for the sake of success, his current employers are less forgiving.

In Madrid they are used to accumulating trophies like Hugh Hefner accumulates buxom brides – they won 52% of all Spanish league titles between 1953 and 2008, and 16% of all the European Cups. “It is normal for us to have great ambitions and to aim for top objectives,” he told Marca, the pro-Real daily sports newspaper, “this is the best club in the history of football, the best in the world.”

But the normally uncritical Marca have called the system he uses against Barcelona (which basically amounts to dumping most of his attackers and replacing them with people who can kick Lionel Messi) “boring and vulgar”. Another voice more used to extolling Madrid’s virtues, their former manager and legendary everything-winning player Alfredo Di Stefano, said: “Barcelona play football and dance while Madrid just run back and forth constantly, tiring themselves out. Barcelona are a lion, Madrid a mouse.” Even Cristiano Ronaldo has spoken out, saying “I don’t like to play like that at all.” (He was promptly dropped). In many ways there is little shame in being second best to this Barcelona team, perhaps the finest ever to lace boot and pound turf. But being a graceful loser is not a trait that Mourinho possesses or even understands. His thought process is clear: if attempting to outplay them ends in a 0-5 arse-whooping and continually thudding your studs into their thighs produces the occasional extra-time victory, it’s going to be the latter every time.

To football’s purists, though, this approach is cowardly. If Barcelona are good enough to humiliate you, they argue, you should be man enough to let them. César Luis Menotti, the Argentinian former Barcelona > manager, says that since that first Clásico defeat Mourinho has “got scared”. “You know what they call Mourinho where I’m from? A chicken,” he said. “To be more explicit, [when he sees Barcelona] he shits himself.”

How long Madrid will put up with this situation is anyone’s guess, but history suggests that if he doesn’t win the league this season Mourinho might as well pack his bags. The last time a manager at the Bernabéu failed to win the league twice in succession and was still given a third chance was 40 years ago this year, and the lucky man on that occasion – Miguel Muñoz – had earned a bit of slack by winning it in eight out of nine years before that barren spell. This is not a club known for their patience – should Mourinho still have a job in the new year his reign would already be the longest in nearly a decade, since Vicente del Bosque won two league titles and two Champions Leagues in three and a half seasons and was sacked for underachieving.

So it is little surprise that speculation is already raging about the identity of his next employers. This summer he was offered a rumoured £22m-a-year deal (and that’s after tax) to take over at Anzhi Makhachkala. Like Chelsea, this is a club that was languishing in relative obscurity before it was taken over by an absurdly wealthy Russian oligarch. Unlike Chelsea, however, they’re based in Makhachkala, the grimly industrial capital of Dagestan (an area so unwelcoming the Foreign Office currently recommends that nobody goes anywhere near it).

Mourinho turned it down.

There is unlikely to be another job for him in Spain. He is utterly despised by the only other club that could possibly afford him. “It is clear that I will end my career without having coached Barca,” he admits. But he’s not on many other people’s Christmas card lists either: Valencia’s coach, Unai Emery, has criticised, “this guy who is unaccessible, disrespectful and without the slightest sense of dignity – he just wants to be the centre of attention.” Manolo Preciado, the manager of Sporting Gijón, thinks Mourinho is “a scumbag”. “He almost always wins but I’m not sure he knows how to do it gracefully,” he said. “One day he will lose. It’s a long way from the top to the bottom, and some people would like to see how he deals with it.”

Of course he could always go back to Italy, where he led Inter to a near-unprecedented treble of league, domestic cup and Champions League in 2010. But then he has few friends there.

His habit of accusing footballing authorities of conspiring against his side may be good for team bonding, but doesn’t tend to win him many friends.

After moving to Italy in 2008 he said the Italian FA “won’t let us wrap up the league early”, that the title race amounted to little more than “a fight of one team against many other things” and that, in one match against AC Milan, “everything was done to try to prevent us from winning”.

To the Italian football establishment, his actions were about as funny as children’s hospital obituray column. “Each time there are over-the-top gestures or comments it creates exasperation,” said Giancarlo Abete, president of the Italian FA, as referees threatened to go on strike in protest at Mourinho’s behaviour. Milan CEO, Adriano Galliani, said his accusations were “tantamount to an incitement to violence”. “It’s too easy to motivate a squad by creating a siege mentality and feeling under attack from everyone,” fumed the former Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri, then at Roma. “Behaving like this is launching ticking time bombs.”

After a 2-1 win in Catania in September 2008 Mourinho suggested that he could have played in goal himself and still won, sending his opponent’s chief executive into a deep and vitriolic strop. “Somebody who says such things has no respect for anyone, neither for his opponents nor for the country in which he is a guest,” said Pietro Lo Monaco. “Mourinho is, plain and simple, the kind of guy who deserves to get smashed in the teeth with a club.”

By February 2010, a few months before his eventual departure, Carlo Ancelotti was suggesting that “all of Italy” wanted Mourinho to lose. When he did finally leave the country Massimo Allegri, head coach at Milan, summed up his stay thus: “He was here for two years and insulted everybody.”

The one remaining major European power where Mourinho has yet to work is Germany. Bayern Munich would be his most likely employers but Arjen Robben, who worked with Mourinho at Chelsea and currently plays in Bavaria, isn’t convinced he’d fit in. “Mourinho puts out a winning team, it doesn’t matter if it’s done with nice football or not,” he said. “The philosophy at Bayern is the coach wants to win games by playing nice football.” Franz Beckenbauer, who spent 13 years and made nearly 500 appearances at Bayern, has this to say of Mourinho: “He’s rude and poorly educated. The fact that he wears cashmere sweaters doesn’t mean he is a gentleman.”

He’s wrong about the education, of course – Mourinho’s fluency in English, French, Italian, Catalan and Spanish as well as his native Portuguese is evidence that this is one of football’s most intelligent operators – but Beckenbauer is not alone in perceiving a lack of class.

Though no society is more obsessed with class and manners as Britain’s, we seem to be unusually patient when it comes to Mourinho’s many foibles.

It’s not as if he hid them from us during his three seasons at Chelsea from 2004. His rampant ego was evident from his first press conference at Stamford Bridge when he announced that he was “the special one”; his appetite for attention was there too, whether it was making provocative gestures to Liverpool fans or coming up with cunning laundry-basket-based ruses to evade touchline bans (and then telling journalists about it); and we knew all about his utter disregard for the feelings of others, most memorably his lies about a clandestine meeting between Barcelona’s then coach Frank Rijkaard and Anders Frisk which forced the Swedish referee – deluged by death threats from the more extreme Chelsea faithful – into early retirement. On the continent, the chairman of Uefa’s referees’ committee furiously labelled him “the enemy of football”. In England, where Frisk’s luxuriant locks and chest-out strut had failed to endear him to fans, it was widely seen as another hilarious jape to add to Mourinho’s growing showreel.

In England he still has influential friends, of whom the best is Sir Alex Ferguson. The man Mourinho calls “my best friend in football” would like his wine-tasting buddy to succeed him at Old Trafford – but not for another couple of seasons. Whether anyone else at Old Trafford would welcome Mourinho’s appointment is still unknown, but a quick word with some of his former players might make him more attractive.

“Within a few weeks of entering our lives Mourinho had taken us from being a talented group with the potential to win major honours to a team that would settle for nothing less,” said Frank Lampard. “Day in, day out, he is a sensational person. He’s passionate about football; he understands. He knows how to deal with the highest-paid players and he never repeats a training session. He makes football seem easy,” said former Chelsea right back Juliano Belletti. “Mourinho is the best coach I’ve ever worked under, he sees football in a different way,” said Tiago who Mourhino signed for Chelsea in 2004. Of all the ex-players his only real critic is Claude Mekélélé, but even he – after moaning that “he is calculated, cruel and ambitious” and that “he used to keep players away from the spotlight so he could take all the fame” – admits that he is “a born winner, who knows how to use you and get the best from you”.

Mourinho’s man-management skills are are legendary. “I don’t have a magic potion,” he has said. “I simply tell my players – and they’re not my words, they’re the words of Albert Einstein – that the only force stronger than steam, electricity or atomic energy is human will. With will you can do things.” His powers are such that even Zlatan Ibrahimovic, that most indolent of strikers, said that while at Inter “I could go out and kill for him. That was the motivation he gave me.”

There is one high-paying, high-profile post in this country up for grabs next summer: the FA will replace Fabio Capello after the European Championships. If any employers would be willing to put up with almost anything for the sake of success, surely it is them. Never mind the odd eye-poke, if he could turn England into a title-winning team Mourinho could insult the Queen, defecate in Downing St, spit at Babs Windsor and still be carried shoulder-high through the streets of London.

And, given his history, it wouldn’t be such a surprise if he tried.

From the November 2011 issue of FHM India.