• ! ! ! IMPORTANT MESSAGE ! ! !

    Discussions about police investigations

    In light of recent developments about a player from Premier League being arrested and until there is an official announcement, ALL users should refrain from discussing or speculating about situations around personal off-pitch matters related to any Arsenal player. This is to protect you and the forum.

    Users who disregard this reminder will be issued warnings and their posts will get deleted from public.

José Mourinho: See Mou Later

balthazar

Well-Known Member
super.png
"Superpower" LOL
 

Juan Matas Beard

Pronouns: dat, guy 🫶
Trusted ⭐

Country: England
Scott Parker linked with the job, would be a good appointment.

Probably loses you Kane and doesn’t pull in any top players, but gives you a young cheap manager who builds a good young team.

He’s done great with Fulham.

Can’t say with confidence I watch Fulham games. Has he really done that great with Fulham considering they are relegation bound?
 

Rex Stone

Long live the fighters
Trusted ⭐

Country: Wales
Can’t say with confidence I watch Fulham games. Has he really done that great with Fulham considering they are relegation bound?

It’s too much of a step for him I reckon. I rate him way higher than Lampard as a manager but he’s still young.

I think he’s done a good job considering after they got relegated in 2018/19 I thought they’d be candidates for a consecutive drop to League One.

They did really well to come straight back up and considering that half their squad is loanees and deadwood to get them as close as he has to safety is an achievement.

His style is very pragmatic though so with the multiple different pressures of a top club I think the Sp**s one isn’t a good idea. If Roy left Palace that’d be an ideal job for him.

Better players than he has at Fulham and fans who are used to negative football.
 

GDeep™

League is very weak
Simon Jordan, ex Palace owner, on Talksport said Mourinho might have been sacked now because Sp**s just don’t fancy him and winning the Carabao cup means he could be in line for unfair dismissal if they sack him after that.

He said Conte got unfair dismissal money after he took Chelsea to court, on top of the money he was due anyway.
 

Juan Matas Beard

Pronouns: dat, guy 🫶
Trusted ⭐

Country: England
Simon Jordan, ex Palace owner, on Talksport said Mourinho might have been sacked now because Sp**s just don’t fancy him and winning the Carabao cup means he could be in line for unfair dismissal if they sack him after that.

He said Conte got unfair dismissal money after he took Chelsea to court, on top of the money he was due anyway.

Makes no sense, they are in no position to sacrifice a cup like that. Redknapp's reason probably makes the most sense if at all.

 

Lidl_Reed

Wants a new name
The Athletic tell-all from the last page.....

It was half-time at Anfield Stadium is on April 3. Arsenal were 1-0 down to Liverpool but had barely been in the game at all. No shots on target, no corners, 35.9 per cent possession.

Jose Arteta walked in and was unusually positive, telling the players they were doing well and to keep it up. Some of the senior players in the dressing room were shocked that such a passive, negative approach could be right for this club. “You really think this is good?” remarked one. Arsenal lost 3-0

That one moment encapsulated the divide between the players and their head coach, the divide that has finally cost Arteta his job. His defensive tactics, his reactive training and his repeated public criticism of the players have driven Arteta apart from the squad, the fans.


Arsenal are now twelvepoints away from fourth place, a stark contrast from the optimism of April when they won the FA Cup

The Arteta reign at Arsenal has unravelled faster than anyone could have expected six months ago.

The Athletic can reveal how:

  • Arsenal players were left bored and untested by his training sessions
  • Most of squad were expecting his sacking
  • Tactics were so obsessed with stopping opposition that players were unsure how to attack
  • Arteta ran out of allies at the club, on and off the pitch
  • Only Bellerin was loyal to Arteta at the end
  • His dismissal had nothing to do with the Super League and was based purely on results
The result is that Arteta , 17 months after his appointment, is now on gardening leave with the rest of his coaching team.
 

A_G

Rice Rice Baby 🎼🎵
A-M CL Draft Campeón 🏆
I don’t suppose I’ll ever discover if, when we met for our interview five days before he was sacked by Sp**s on April 19, José Mourinho had any inkling that he was about to be binned. The inside word is that, unlike when the axe fell at his previous employer, Manchester United, the Tottenham termination came as a total shock. The club were, after all, sitting in a respectable seventh place in the Premier League at the time. Moreover, they were poised to contest the Carabao Cup final ten days later. Weird timing.

We barely talked about his day job – we talked much more about his life in England, his future plans (which may have to come to fruition more quickly than envisaged) and his forthcoming role as a pundit during Euro 2020, starting in June. Reports suggest he was ignorant of impending unemployment until the Sunday night before it happened on the Monday. He was thus reportedly devastated by the news. Hard to feel sorry for him, maybe. Then again, losing your job, however lucrative the payoff may be, is never easy. Certainly, when we spoke briefly on the phone afterwards, he sounded wounded. “I have no plans,” he said. “I am going on with my normal life. I feel fresh. I feel calm. I am on holiday. I have more time to be doing my homework and analysis. I’ll wait to be back in football. Not just for the right club, but for the right culture. Maybe next season is premature, we will see.”

Back when he was still Sp**s manager, in a photographic studio in Islington, north London (“Where are we? Close to Arsenal stadium, yes?”), Mourinho is more troubled by an injury recently sustained playing football against his staff. “I thought I was 28! Grade three hamstring tear,” he winces, sitting down for our chat.

Mourinho is casually dressed in sports gear and a hoodie. He has a bit of a paunch and looks a bit tired, a bit worn down, dark-rimmed around the eyes. At 58, he isn’t as handsome as when he first arrived at Chelsea in 2004. But then, are any of us? He is clean-shaven, neither belligerent nor charming, merely dutiful.

Generally speaking, in an hour’s interview, even if things don’t go brilliantly, you feel the occasional moment of connection with the subject. Some shared interest, a moment of humour. Last September, interviewing Arsène Wenger for instance, it was never like we were going to be best mates, but there was an understanding that while there are better ways for two strangers to pass an hour, there are also worse. You might as well try to find common ground.

None of that happened with José. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, nor even that he didn’t like me. More that he had no interest in me. Paul Pogba recently revealed that one day at Manchester United he was on good terms with his manager, the next he was blanked like they had no relationship at all. I scored the second-half version of that.

Other players could probably relate to that. He was especially hard on Luke Shaw at Manchester United, who since Mourinho’s departure has revived his career as an international full back. It will be interesting to see what happens to Dele Alli at Sp**s – whom Mourinho publicly called “a f***ing lazy guy” – now his tormentor has departed. Alli was one of England’s stars at the World Cup in 2018. Under Mourinho, he could barely get on the subs’ bench. When Mourinho arrived at Chelsea, he was known for his easy informality with his players. In the years since, as other coaches have increasingly adopted the carrot rather than the stick, Mourinho seems to have started channelling his inner Seventies PE teacher as his chief means of motivation.

I’d learnt the correct pronunciation of his name (Joe-say, with a hard J) from the Amazon Prime documentary series All or Nothing. I’d practised saying it, in an attempt to impress the great man. When it comes to it, I **** it up and say, “Hello, Jose,” as in “Yozay”, just like everyone else does.

How was lockdown? Mourinho immediately switches on, the emphatic, slightly sulky accented tones familiar from a hundred Match of the Day post-match snippets. There’s a compilation of his press conference greatest hits on YouTube I highly recommend. Aside from anything, they remind you of how devastatingly handsome he was. Just as our football writer Alyson Rudd describes her mum as asking after “that handsome one”, my wife always perks up whenever José pops up on the screen. Although latterly, and not just on the field, he’s faced competition from Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola.

“I found it hard!” he declaims. “But I was privileged, because our lockdown was different to people outside the football world. I still could work. When I was feeling down or frustrated, I was comparing my life with other people’s – I realised I was OK. We didn’t lose jobs, we didn’t lose salaries, we were still going to the training ground. We still had human contact.” I ask if he acquired other skills, learning a language or an instrument or an appreciation of nature? “The life outside football, no! The life in the job, yes!” (Many of his statements, even uncontroversial ones, cry out for the exclamation mark.) “I used to say I am a team coach not an individual coach. For that period you become more a personal trainer and less a team trainer. So yes, in the end I got some skills. We try to find a way to organise sessions so they feel connections on the pitch, even if their team-mates are not there.”

I’d been struck, I say, still trying to curry favour, by his use of the expression “structural empathy” in All or Nothing. “Yeah!” he says. I took it to mean, I continue, that to succeed, every group of players had to get along? “Yeah,” he agrees, showing neither interest in, nor impatience with, this long-winded preamble. Well, how did he set about maintaining this, er (by now I’ve started to bore myself), structural empathy under the restrictions of lockdown?

“During the lockdown I felt exactly the opposite that sometimes you feel when you are working for a long time together. The football is so intense, so many matches, so much travelling, so less free time, there is a moment in the season where people gets a bit tired of each other. In that period [lockdown] was exactly the opposite thing!”

What, people that might otherwise have been getting fed up with one another craved their company instead? Yes, pretty much, he says. “Every morning, 10 o’clock, when that Zoom work started, I had to give always half an hour before the session, just for the guys to be in contact. Every session, one guy per pitch training, these six go home, other six are coming. If they could be five minutes late and the other guys five minutes early, even in the car park, to have a little touch, it was clearly the missing of human relations. Which again, puts things into perspective, how many people were alone at home? We were privileged. If anyone is in football and doesn’t think it’s a privilege, he’s wrong.”

At the time of our interview, Mourinho had had his first jab in addition to 96 negative Covid tests, roughly two a week since the testing regime got up and running. He is surprised he has not caught the virus. Many people close to him – players, coaches, family, although he won’t say who – have had it. “I had lunch with my assistant, same table, the guy is positive. I thought, ‘I have to be positive!’ But then test, no. One occasion, one match, I ’ugged a player, I remember clearly, I ’ugged a player, because that player was so good, the next morning we test, the player was positive. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s my time now.’ No!” Other than the odd overenthusiastic ’ug he has, he repeats several times, “been very careful”.

Moving on to his role as a pundit this summer, analysing Euro 2020 for The Times and The Sunday Times, I mention there was a time when he was, for example, very scornful of those ex-pros sitting in judgment in the TV studios. What’s more, he suspected some of bias against him, due to allegiance to their former clubs. Having done a stint for Sky when between jobs at the start of the 2019 season, he’d gained a new respect for the Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers. What’s more, he’d enjoyed it. Not least, I think, because it was a way of staying involved in the game, albeit at one remove.

“I enjoyed it very much because I felt I could make a difference. When it is a career, then for profile, success and audience, a pundit sometimes has to go into directions that I don’t need to go. I don’t want an audience. It’s not a job for me. They have to be more extreme, more aggressive, to make a name for themselves. I go with two perspectives. One is, I do it for myself. I’m not working. I’m on holiday. I have some fun. I meet people. I learn something. That’s the selfish part of it.”

The second reason he has signed up to spend a chunk of his summer doing analysis rather than sitting on a sofa in his house in Belgravia, central London (or, even better, a lounger at his home in Portugal) is a minor Mourinho classic. “The second part,” he tells me, putting on his eyes-lowered, humble expression, “is it’s kind of a service to football. Because I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have this need of audience. I go there and I’m just PURE. I tell what I see.”

But not, he is swift to add, in a lurid, shock-jock vulgar way, no. “I tell in a soft way. I like to listen to the opinions of people with different experiences. For example, when I sat with Roy Keane and Graeme Souness in the same match, they have experiences as top players that I didn’t have. I have experiences as a coach that they didn’t have. They know what is to play Champions League final as a player. I know what it is to play Champions League final on the touchline, as a coach. I learn with them; they learn with me. I like that a lot.”

While Souness is always identified with Liverpool, and Keane with Manchester United, which team does he have in his own blood? “The team that is on my blood is my city club, Vitória de Setúbal. Everything that happens to them, for good or for bad, I feel deeply. Apart from that, I have a huge respect for the clubs I’ve been working before. So one of my previous clubs against another club, normally I am supporting my club – you feel connections with people there, with the supporters... I was not a guy that stayed in the same club. But if Real Madrid play against some club that doesn’t mean anything, who do I want to win? Real Madrid.”

What if Real Madrid play against Chelsea, as in this year’s Champions League semi-final? “I would try to go in the direction of my friends. Where is more people from my time? Same president? Same owner? Players who were my players? I am grateful to all of them. I paid them back with my work in the winning. Winning more, winning less, don’t winning, I give everything I have to every club. When I leave clubs I only tell the good things about the club. I’m not the kind of person who is going to wash the dirty clothes, no! I always go to the positive. Inter! I won everything with Inter. There is a special affection. But if one day I have to go to Italy and coach a rival club, I don’t think twice. I have this professional way of look to things. I feel good with myself.”

No surprise there. José has never struck any of us as a man tortured by self-doubt. Maybe that’s because he entered the family trade at a young age. His father, José senior, while good enough to play for Portugal (as a goalkeeper), was known primarily during his son’s childhood as a manager. And manage is what the young José opted to do. He briefly played professionally, but at 19 opted for the dugout instead. Most young players become young coaches because they suffer a serious injury (like Ryan Mason, Mourinho’s temporary replacement at Sp**s), or they realise they won’t be good enough to play at the very top level and they drift to the sidelines (like Klopp or Wenger). José did it because, “I was in love with the methodology.”

Was it a big disappointment to realise you weren’t going to be a great player? “No.” It didn’t upset you? “Not at all. I could be better [as a player] than I was if I don’t give up for the good reasons, which was to become a football coach very early. I would be much better than I was. I could have got to a higher level. I would never play the highest level. Of course not. The majority of the coaches were not very good players, but they always say, ‘I got an injury, I fell from a bicycle.’ They always find the big excuse. I am the only one that is honest. I was in love with coaching.”

Besides – and here José says something every minor club or park player, not just in football but all sports, will relate to – “the other day I played with my staff and it looked like the World Cup final! For me to play a big game or a small game doesn’t change much. And,” he adds, wincing again as he gestures to his painful leg, “it ended badly for me because I got injured. Because my brain wanted to go to the extreme but my body could not go to the extreme.”

Having left his native country for London in 2004, Mourinho has worked in Milan, Madrid and Manchester, but has always come back to London. That has been mostly for football reasons, but also because he and his family love the city. “Portugal is Portugal, don’t get me wrong,” he counsels. “Is where I want to live my last days, when I feel they are arriving. But London gives a lot. Is a bit the consequence of what my children’s lives have been. They start schooling here in my first period. Then different countries, but always English schools. International schools. When I come back to England for the second period they are at the age where they can make their own choices. Everybody loves it.”

He declines to comment on Brexit, saying “It was a British decision. I want to respect that. I respect the country. I defend the English country, the history, the tradition. Not like you English do, but almost like you English do. I was here when the bombing occurred [the 7/7 attacks in 2005], I feel it like it was my city.” He says people here are polite and positive towards him in the street. “I want to believe that people think I am a very good professional, that I am a person of good will. The nature of my job made me at some moments in my career in England have reactions that were criticised and fairly criticised. You get a red card for bad behaviour, that’s fair. I say that I am genuine. I want to believe that being genuine is a good quality. Sometimes people feel that being a little bit of a hypocrite, a little bit two-faced, is a big quality.”

His daughter Matilde (the same name as her mother) is 24, his son (also José) is 21. Matilde has set up a jewellery business, in which her father has invested. “She did her master’s and is following her passion – that’s sustainable jewellery. The diamonds are lab-grown diamonds. The gold is recycled.” What is his role? “I’m the proud dad that supports everything that is a passion, exactly as happened with me.” His son, José III (the naming is a tradition in Portugal) “is preparing to go to his passion, which is football. He will work with me one day. As a player, he is better than the dad.” But young José’s future will also be in coaching. “He is very clever. He understands football well.”

Mourinho says that “England is special for football. That was my initial attraction. I made the choice of England for football. I really wanted to do Italian football, Spanish football.” But after Inter Milan and Real Madrid, I ask, he could have gone to Germany or France, instead of returning to Chelsea? “Yeah, but in Germany and France, you know if you are going to the club A [he means Bayern Munich] or club B [he means Paris St Germain], you know your destiny is written immediately. In England it is competition at the highest level. That attracted me. It’s all about the pressure. I want it. I would choose pressure, always. Sometimes that pressure becomes unbalanced, or out of proportion, but I refuse the opposite! I refuse to go to a country where the pressure doesn’t exist. I refuse!”

Does this desire for pressure, for adrenaline, almost qualify as an addiction? He shrugs, not denying it. “It is to wake up on the Saturday or the Sunday and you know in a few hours I am going to be very happy, medium-happy or very sad. When I was born, I was a player’s son. I grew up a manager’s son. All my Saturday or Sunday mornings, I wake up and it’s a big day.”

Is it true, I ask, that he has kept records of all the training sessions he’s ever done, going back to coaching youth teams in his twenties? “Yeah! I have them all, absolutely.” Being something of an archivist myself, I take the chance to show him my diary, in which I record various statistics in different coloured felt pen. I think I spy the ghost of a nod of appreciation as he glances at it. “Is now video-recorded, fixed cameras and drones. At my first session [this is going back almost 40 years] I use just a piece of ****.”

Excuse me? “A piece of ****. Sheet? Like paper? With lines?” Ah, graph paper? “Yes, graph paper. Pencils. Coloured pens. I’ve got them all.” Where are they? A sly, appraising expression steals over his rugged features. “I don’t want to say. Because [maybe someone] wants to go to steal them.” I’m not going to steal your training sessions, I assure him.

If he was conducting a training session now, and it reminded him of a situation at, say, Inter Milan in 2009, could he access the relevant record? “Yes.” And does he? “Absolutely! I play against a team 3-2-1-4-5, I remember when I was most successful playing against a team in that system. I have everything recorded.” 3-2-1-4-5 is an unusual formation. For one thing, it’s very attack-minded for a Mourinho team. For another,it comprises 15 players, 16 with the goalie. Maybe that’s been the secret of Jose’s success over the years. We ought to have noticed.

“But,” he adds, “I cannot run away from which team I have in my hands. The way Harry Kane is playing now, doing the movements he does. When was the last time I had a striker doing this? Benzema! Because Didier Drogba was not that, Ibrahimovic was not that, Lukaku was not that. So sometimes the statistics don’t fit into the reality.” Echoes there of his now infamous, “Same coach, different players,” put-down when asked why his Sp**s team could not protect a lead, a skill his teams were once well known for.

There’s a general sense, I say, that having been such a breath of fresh air in 2004, he has now turned into a bit of a misery. From the Special One to the Grumpy One? That’s he’s lost his twinkle, his sense of fun, his enjoyment? “I don’t agree. Of course I enjoy it. But I enjoy to win. I go every day to work with that – how do you call that? This twinkly? – in my eyes. I am never tired in the morning. I prepare every game with the same passion. But if I don’t win, I cannot be as happy as if I do win!”

So you’re not one of those middle-aged men who say everything used to be better? “Of course I’m open to ideas. Otherwise I would be doing my sessions with, how do you call it, graphic paper? But I think the world should be open to new, better things but fight against new bad things. Not everything that is new is good.”

Does he really think he is unfairly treated by the media? “Yes, of course.” Why? “I think people have the perception that I’m not the humblest guy. I think people is wrong! I think my nature is really humble. But sometimes because I say things that are so direct the perception is I’m not a humble guy. I think I sell a lot.”

I’m sorry? “I SELL a lot. Is reality. There are ways of analysing that and I can tell you 100 per cent that in the past two years coaching Tottenham and not winning anything, I am the coach in the world with most news. I could tell you how many per day worldwide.” How does that mean you are unfairly treated? “I’m treated unfairly because with me things are always taken in a different proportion. People look at me with different eyes that they look to others.”

Of course, his great rivals back in the day, Alex Ferguson and to a lesser extent Arsène Wenger, used to say exactly the same. He and Ferguson got on; he and Wenger did not. Are they in touch? “Ferguson, only SMS.” You have his number in your phone? “Of course, yes.” Wenger? “Not on my list, no.” Klopp? Guardiola? Arteta? “I have their number, yes. I’m not saying I’m calling them every day.”

And so to the Euros. Who will win? England? “England is one of the candidates. I don’t think they can run away from it. They play the group phase in England. And is not just England looking good, is nobody looking phenomenal. There’s a balance. They have home advantage, they make a camp at the Tottenham HQ. They have the same coach for a few years. They have the experience of playing at the World Cup where they did very well. In that World Cup [Russia, 2018], they were still a little bit young. Marcus Rashford in that World Cup was just a little bit young. Many players the same. I think is big chance.” Who does he want to win? Portugal? “Yeah.” And if they got knocked out? “England. I don’t think twice about giving you my answer.”

What, I ask, was his first memory of the Euros? “The first World Cup that I really enjoyed was 1974. But I can go to 1970. I don’t remember 1970 but I know the two teams that played the final from the first to the last player. One thing is to have memories. But the other is to live it deeply. The Portuguese one [Euro 2004], OK, I was 40 years old, but I lived deeply. It was the one that made me understand that the Euros is not football. The football is, how do you call it, the icing on the cake. It is much more than that. You are not going to find a player, everybody knows them. Is not going to appear a new talent that nobody knows. Is it going to be innovation in football? No. Are the national teams better than the best clubs? No!”

Steady on, I interrupt, we’re trying to sell a tournament here! “I know!” Mourinho laughs. “One day I want to do it! I want to do a Euro or a World Cup!” As a national manager? “I can coach any team,” he shrugs. Would he like to end his career as a national coach? “I want to do it! Portugal or anyone. Portugal would be more natural because I could add the honour, but if one day I accept to do it for another country, I want to feel the same honour.” England? “England has many options,” he shrugs again.

The way things have turned out, we will discover the recipient of Mourinho’s next pledge of allegiance, city or country, sooner than he or we thought. For now, though, time’s up.
Pretty good interview, surprised he has Arteta's number on his phone tho 😂
 

GDeep™

League is very weak
Yeah, joining Talksport is rock bottom stuff.

He also said he doesn’t want to going a German or French club because there is “no pressure”. Nah mate, you don’t want to join those leagues because Bayern and PSG already have too young managers who they’ve just hired.
 

balthazar

Well-Known Member
Arteta on S
I don’t suppose I’ll ever discover if, when we met for our interview five days before he was sacked by Sp**s on April 19, José Mourinho had any inkling that he was about to be binned. The inside word is that, unlike when the axe fell at his previous employer, Manchester United, the Tottenham termination came as a total shock. The club were, after all, sitting in a respectable seventh place in the Premier League at the time. Moreover, they were poised to contest the Carabao Cup final ten days later. Weird timing.

We barely talked about his day job – we talked much more about his life in England, his future plans (which may have to come to fruition more quickly than envisaged) and his forthcoming role as a pundit during Euro 2020, starting in June. Reports suggest he was ignorant of impending unemployment until the Sunday night before it happened on the Monday. He was thus reportedly devastated by the news. Hard to feel sorry for him, maybe. Then again, losing your job, however lucrative the payoff may be, is never easy. Certainly, when we spoke briefly on the phone afterwards, he sounded wounded. “I have no plans,” he said. “I am going on with my normal life. I feel fresh. I feel calm. I am on holiday. I have more time to be doing my homework and analysis. I’ll wait to be back in football. Not just for the right club, but for the right culture. Maybe next season is premature, we will see.”

Back when he was still Sp**s manager, in a photographic studio in Islington, north London (“Where are we? Close to Arsenal stadium, yes?”), Mourinho is more troubled by an injury recently sustained playing football against his staff. “I thought I was 28! Grade three hamstring tear,” he winces, sitting down for our chat.

Mourinho is casually dressed in sports gear and a hoodie. He has a bit of a paunch and looks a bit tired, a bit worn down, dark-rimmed around the eyes. At 58, he isn’t as handsome as when he first arrived at Chelsea in 2004. But then, are any of us? He is clean-shaven, neither belligerent nor charming, merely dutiful.

Generally speaking, in an hour’s interview, even if things don’t go brilliantly, you feel the occasional moment of connection with the subject. Some shared interest, a moment of humour. Last September, interviewing Arsène Wenger for instance, it was never like we were going to be best mates, but there was an understanding that while there are better ways for two strangers to pass an hour, there are also worse. You might as well try to find common ground.

None of that happened with José. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, nor even that he didn’t like me. More that he had no interest in me. Paul Pogba recently revealed that one day at Manchester United he was on good terms with his manager, the next he was blanked like they had no relationship at all. I scored the second-half version of that.

Other players could probably relate to that. He was especially hard on Luke Shaw at Manchester United, who since Mourinho’s departure has revived his career as an international full back. It will be interesting to see what happens to Dele Alli at Sp**s – whom Mourinho publicly called “a f***ing lazy guy” – now his tormentor has departed. Alli was one of England’s stars at the World Cup in 2018. Under Mourinho, he could barely get on the subs’ bench. When Mourinho arrived at Chelsea, he was known for his easy informality with his players. In the years since, as other coaches have increasingly adopted the carrot rather than the stick, Mourinho seems to have started channelling his inner Seventies PE teacher as his chief means of motivation.

I’d learnt the correct pronunciation of his name (Joe-say, with a hard J) from the Amazon Prime documentary series All or Nothing. I’d practised saying it, in an attempt to impress the great man. When it comes to it, I **** it up and say, “Hello, Jose,” as in “Yozay”, just like everyone else does.

How was lockdown? Mourinho immediately switches on, the emphatic, slightly sulky accented tones familiar from a hundred Match of the Day post-match snippets. There’s a compilation of his press conference greatest hits on YouTube I highly recommend. Aside from anything, they remind you of how devastatingly handsome he was. Just as our football writer Alyson Rudd describes her mum as asking after “that handsome one”, my wife always perks up whenever José pops up on the screen. Although latterly, and not just on the field, he’s faced competition from Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola.

“I found it hard!” he declaims. “But I was privileged, because our lockdown was different to people outside the football world. I still could work. When I was feeling down or frustrated, I was comparing my life with other people’s – I realised I was OK. We didn’t lose jobs, we didn’t lose salaries, we were still going to the training ground. We still had human contact.” I ask if he acquired other skills, learning a language or an instrument or an appreciation of nature? “The life outside football, no! The life in the job, yes!” (Many of his statements, even uncontroversial ones, cry out for the exclamation mark.) “I used to say I am a team coach not an individual coach. For that period you become more a personal trainer and less a team trainer. So yes, in the end I got some skills. We try to find a way to organise sessions so they feel connections on the pitch, even if their team-mates are not there.”

I’d been struck, I say, still trying to curry favour, by his use of the expression “structural empathy” in All or Nothing. “Yeah!” he says. I took it to mean, I continue, that to succeed, every group of players had to get along? “Yeah,” he agrees, showing neither interest in, nor impatience with, this long-winded preamble. Well, how did he set about maintaining this, er (by now I’ve started to bore myself), structural empathy under the restrictions of lockdown?

“During the lockdown I felt exactly the opposite that sometimes you feel when you are working for a long time together. The football is so intense, so many matches, so much travelling, so less free time, there is a moment in the season where people gets a bit tired of each other. In that period [lockdown] was exactly the opposite thing!”

What, people that might otherwise have been getting fed up with one another craved their company instead? Yes, pretty much, he says. “Every morning, 10 o’clock, when that Zoom work started, I had to give always half an hour before the session, just for the guys to be in contact. Every session, one guy per pitch training, these six go home, other six are coming. If they could be five minutes late and the other guys five minutes early, even in the car park, to have a little touch, it was clearly the missing of human relations. Which again, puts things into perspective, how many people were alone at home? We were privileged. If anyone is in football and doesn’t think it’s a privilege, he’s wrong.”

At the time of our interview, Mourinho had had his first jab in addition to 96 negative Covid tests, roughly two a week since the testing regime got up and running. He is surprised he has not caught the virus. Many people close to him – players, coaches, family, although he won’t say who – have had it. “I had lunch with my assistant, same table, the guy is positive. I thought, ‘I have to be positive!’ But then test, no. One occasion, one match, I ’ugged a player, I remember clearly, I ’ugged a player, because that player was so good, the next morning we test, the player was positive. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s my time now.’ No!” Other than the odd overenthusiastic ’ug he has, he repeats several times, “been very careful”.

Moving on to his role as a pundit this summer, analysing Euro 2020 for The Times and The Sunday Times, I mention there was a time when he was, for example, very scornful of those ex-pros sitting in judgment in the TV studios. What’s more, he suspected some of bias against him, due to allegiance to their former clubs. Having done a stint for Sky when between jobs at the start of the 2019 season, he’d gained a new respect for the Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers. What’s more, he’d enjoyed it. Not least, I think, because it was a way of staying involved in the game, albeit at one remove.

“I enjoyed it very much because I felt I could make a difference. When it is a career, then for profile, success and audience, a pundit sometimes has to go into directions that I don’t need to go. I don’t want an audience. It’s not a job for me. They have to be more extreme, more aggressive, to make a name for themselves. I go with two perspectives. One is, I do it for myself. I’m not working. I’m on holiday. I have some fun. I meet people. I learn something. That’s the selfish part of it.”

The second reason he has signed up to spend a chunk of his summer doing analysis rather than sitting on a sofa in his house in Belgravia, central London (or, even better, a lounger at his home in Portugal) is a minor Mourinho classic. “The second part,” he tells me, putting on his eyes-lowered, humble expression, “is it’s kind of a service to football. Because I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have this need of audience. I go there and I’m just PURE. I tell what I see.”

But not, he is swift to add, in a lurid, shock-jock vulgar way, no. “I tell in a soft way. I like to listen to the opinions of people with different experiences. For example, when I sat with Roy Keane and Graeme Souness in the same match, they have experiences as top players that I didn’t have. I have experiences as a coach that they didn’t have. They know what is to play Champions League final as a player. I know what it is to play Champions League final on the touchline, as a coach. I learn with them; they learn with me. I like that a lot.”

While Souness is always identified with Liverpool, and Keane with Manchester United, which team does he have in his own blood? “The team that is on my blood is my city club, Vitória de Setúbal. Everything that happens to them, for good or for bad, I feel deeply. Apart from that, I have a huge respect for the clubs I’ve been working before. So one of my previous clubs against another club, normally I am supporting my club – you feel connections with people there, with the supporters... I was not a guy that stayed in the same club. But if Real Madrid play against some club that doesn’t mean anything, who do I want to win? Real Madrid.”

What if Real Madrid play against Chelsea, as in this year’s Champions League semi-final? “I would try to go in the direction of my friends. Where is more people from my time? Same president? Same owner? Players who were my players? I am grateful to all of them. I paid them back with my work in the winning. Winning more, winning less, don’t winning, I give everything I have to every club. When I leave clubs I only tell the good things about the club. I’m not the kind of person who is going to wash the dirty clothes, no! I always go to the positive. Inter! I won everything with Inter. There is a special affection. But if one day I have to go to Italy and coach a rival club, I don’t think twice. I have this professional way of look to things. I feel good with myself.”

No surprise there. José has never struck any of us as a man tortured by self-doubt. Maybe that’s because he entered the family trade at a young age. His father, José senior, while good enough to play for Portugal (as a goalkeeper), was known primarily during his son’s childhood as a manager. And manage is what the young José opted to do. He briefly played professionally, but at 19 opted for the dugout instead. Most young players become young coaches because they suffer a serious injury (like Ryan Mason, Mourinho’s temporary replacement at Sp**s), or they realise they won’t be good enough to play at the very top level and they drift to the sidelines (like Klopp or Wenger). José did it because, “I was in love with the methodology.”

Was it a big disappointment to realise you weren’t going to be a great player? “No.” It didn’t upset you? “Not at all. I could be better [as a player] than I was if I don’t give up for the good reasons, which was to become a football coach very early. I would be much better than I was. I could have got to a higher level. I would never play the highest level. Of course not. The majority of the coaches were not very good players, but they always say, ‘I got an injury, I fell from a bicycle.’ They always find the big excuse. I am the only one that is honest. I was in love with coaching.”

Besides – and here José says something every minor club or park player, not just in football but all sports, will relate to – “the other day I played with my staff and it looked like the World Cup final! For me to play a big game or a small game doesn’t change much. And,” he adds, wincing again as he gestures to his painful leg, “it ended badly for me because I got injured. Because my brain wanted to go to the extreme but my body could not go to the extreme.”

Having left his native country for London in 2004, Mourinho has worked in Milan, Madrid and Manchester, but has always come back to London. That has been mostly for football reasons, but also because he and his family love the city. “Portugal is Portugal, don’t get me wrong,” he counsels. “Is where I want to live my last days, when I feel they are arriving. But London gives a lot. Is a bit the consequence of what my children’s lives have been. They start schooling here in my first period. Then different countries, but always English schools. International schools. When I come back to England for the second period they are at the age where they can make their own choices. Everybody loves it.”

He declines to comment on Brexit, saying “It was a British decision. I want to respect that. I respect the country. I defend the English country, the history, the tradition. Not like you English do, but almost like you English do. I was here when the bombing occurred [the 7/7 attacks in 2005], I feel it like it was my city.” He says people here are polite and positive towards him in the street. “I want to believe that people think I am a very good professional, that I am a person of good will. The nature of my job made me at some moments in my career in England have reactions that were criticised and fairly criticised. You get a red card for bad behaviour, that’s fair. I say that I am genuine. I want to believe that being genuine is a good quality. Sometimes people feel that being a little bit of a hypocrite, a little bit two-faced, is a big quality.”

His daughter Matilde (the same name as her mother) is 24, his son (also José) is 21. Matilde has set up a jewellery business, in which her father has invested. “She did her master’s and is following her passion – that’s sustainable jewellery. The diamonds are lab-grown diamonds. The gold is recycled.” What is his role? “I’m the proud dad that supports everything that is a passion, exactly as happened with me.” His son, José III (the naming is a tradition in Portugal) “is preparing to go to his passion, which is football. He will work with me one day. As a player, he is better than the dad.” But young José’s future will also be in coaching. “He is very clever. He understands football well.”

Mourinho says that “England is special for football. That was my initial attraction. I made the choice of England for football. I really wanted to do Italian football, Spanish football.” But after Inter Milan and Real Madrid, I ask, he could have gone to Germany or France, instead of returning to Chelsea? “Yeah, but in Germany and France, you know if you are going to the club A [he means Bayern Munich] or club B [he means Paris St Germain], you know your destiny is written immediately. In England it is competition at the highest level. That attracted me. It’s all about the pressure. I want it. I would choose pressure, always. Sometimes that pressure becomes unbalanced, or out of proportion, but I refuse the opposite! I refuse to go to a country where the pressure doesn’t exist. I refuse!”

Does this desire for pressure, for adrenaline, almost qualify as an addiction? He shrugs, not denying it. “It is to wake up on the Saturday or the Sunday and you know in a few hours I am going to be very happy, medium-happy or very sad. When I was born, I was a player’s son. I grew up a manager’s son. All my Saturday or Sunday mornings, I wake up and it’s a big day.”

Is it true, I ask, that he has kept records of all the training sessions he’s ever done, going back to coaching youth teams in his twenties? “Yeah! I have them all, absolutely.” Being something of an archivist myself, I take the chance to show him my diary, in which I record various statistics in different coloured felt pen. I think I spy the ghost of a nod of appreciation as he glances at it. “Is now video-recorded, fixed cameras and drones. At my first session [this is going back almost 40 years] I use just a piece of ****.”

Excuse me? “A piece of ****. Sheet? Like paper? With lines?” Ah, graph paper? “Yes, graph paper. Pencils. Coloured pens. I’ve got them all.” Where are they? A sly, appraising expression steals over his rugged features. “I don’t want to say. Because [maybe someone] wants to go to steal them.” I’m not going to steal your training sessions, I assure him.

If he was conducting a training session now, and it reminded him of a situation at, say, Inter Milan in 2009, could he access the relevant record? “Yes.” And does he? “Absolutely! I play against a team 3-2-1-4-5, I remember when I was most successful playing against a team in that system. I have everything recorded.” 3-2-1-4-5 is an unusual formation. For one thing, it’s very attack-minded for a Mourinho team. For another,it comprises 15 players, 16 with the goalie. Maybe that’s been the secret of Jose’s success over the years. We ought to have noticed.

“But,” he adds, “I cannot run away from which team I have in my hands. The way Harry Kane is playing now, doing the movements he does. When was the last time I had a striker doing this? Benzema! Because Didier Drogba was not that, Ibrahimovic was not that, Lukaku was not that. So sometimes the statistics don’t fit into the reality.” Echoes there of his now infamous, “Same coach, different players,” put-down when asked why his Sp**s team could not protect a lead, a skill his teams were once well known for.

There’s a general sense, I say, that having been such a breath of fresh air in 2004, he has now turned into a bit of a misery. From the Special One to the Grumpy One? That’s he’s lost his twinkle, his sense of fun, his enjoyment? “I don’t agree. Of course I enjoy it. But I enjoy to win. I go every day to work with that – how do you call that? This twinkly? – in my eyes. I am never tired in the morning. I prepare every game with the same passion. But if I don’t win, I cannot be as happy as if I do win!”

So you’re not one of those middle-aged men who say everything used to be better? “Of course I’m open to ideas. Otherwise I would be doing my sessions with, how do you call it, graphic paper? But I think the world should be open to new, better things but fight against new bad things. Not everything that is new is good.”

Does he really think he is unfairly treated by the media? “Yes, of course.” Why? “I think people have the perception that I’m not the humblest guy. I think people is wrong! I think my nature is really humble. But sometimes because I say things that are so direct the perception is I’m not a humble guy. I think I sell a lot.”

I’m sorry? “I SELL a lot. Is reality. There are ways of analysing that and I can tell you 100 per cent that in the past two years coaching Tottenham and not winning anything, I am the coach in the world with most news. I could tell you how many per day worldwide.” How does that mean you are unfairly treated? “I’m treated unfairly because with me things are always taken in a different proportion. People look at me with different eyes that they look to others.”

Of course, his great rivals back in the day, Alex Ferguson and to a lesser extent Arsène Wenger, used to say exactly the same. He and Ferguson got on; he and Wenger did not. Are they in touch? “Ferguson, only SMS.” You have his number in your phone? “Of course, yes.” Wenger? “Not on my list, no.” Klopp? Guardiola? Arteta? “I have their number, yes. I’m not saying I’m calling them every day.”

And so to the Euros. Who will win? England? “England is one of the candidates. I don’t think they can run away from it. They play the group phase in England. And is not just England looking good, is nobody looking phenomenal. There’s a balance. They have home advantage, they make a camp at the Tottenham HQ. They have the same coach for a few years. They have the experience of playing at the World Cup where they did very well. In that World Cup [Russia, 2018], they were still a little bit young. Marcus Rashford in that World Cup was just a little bit young. Many players the same. I think is big chance.” Who does he want to win? Portugal? “Yeah.” And if they got knocked out? “England. I don’t think twice about giving you my answer.”

What, I ask, was his first memory of the Euros? “The first World Cup that I really enjoyed was 1974. But I can go to 1970. I don’t remember 1970 but I know the two teams that played the final from the first to the last player. One thing is to have memories. But the other is to live it deeply. The Portuguese one [Euro 2004], OK, I was 40 years old, but I lived deeply. It was the one that made me understand that the Euros is not football. The football is, how do you call it, the icing on the cake. It is much more than that. You are not going to find a player, everybody knows them. Is not going to appear a new talent that nobody knows. Is it going to be innovation in football? No. Are the national teams better than the best clubs? No!”

Steady on, I interrupt, we’re trying to sell a tournament here! “I know!” Mourinho laughs. “One day I want to do it! I want to do a Euro or a World Cup!” As a national manager? “I can coach any team,” he shrugs. Would he like to end his career as a national coach? “I want to do it! Portugal or anyone. Portugal would be more natural because I could add the honour, but if one day I accept to do it for another country, I want to feel the same honour.” England? “England has many options,” he shrugs again.

The way things have turned out, we will discover the recipient of Mourinho’s next pledge of allegiance, city or country, sooner than he or we thought. For now, though, time’s up.
Pretty good interview, surprised he has Arteta's number on his phone tho 😂
Has Arteta on SpeedDial for asking advice
 
  • Funny
Reactions: A_G

balthazar

Well-Known Member
I don’t suppose I’ll ever discover if, when we met for our interview five days before he was sacked by Sp**s on April 19, José Mourinho had any inkling that he was about to be binned. The inside word is that, unlike when the axe fell at his previous employer, Manchester United, the Tottenham termination came as a total shock. The club were, after all, sitting in a respectable seventh place in the Premier League at the time. Moreover, they were poised to contest the Carabao Cup final ten days later. Weird timing.

We barely talked about his day job – we talked much more about his life in England, his future plans (which may have to come to fruition more quickly than envisaged) and his forthcoming role as a pundit during Euro 2020, starting in June. Reports suggest he was ignorant of impending unemployment until the Sunday night before it happened on the Monday. He was thus reportedly devastated by the news. Hard to feel sorry for him, maybe. Then again, losing your job, however lucrative the payoff may be, is never easy. Certainly, when we spoke briefly on the phone afterwards, he sounded wounded. “I have no plans,” he said. “I am going on with my normal life. I feel fresh. I feel calm. I am on holiday. I have more time to be doing my homework and analysis. I’ll wait to be back in football. Not just for the right club, but for the right culture. Maybe next season is premature, we will see.”

Back when he was still Sp**s manager, in a photographic studio in Islington, north London (“Where are we? Close to Arsenal stadium, yes?”), Mourinho is more troubled by an injury recently sustained playing football against his staff. “I thought I was 28! Grade three hamstring tear,” he winces, sitting down for our chat.

Mourinho is casually dressed in sports gear and a hoodie. He has a bit of a paunch and looks a bit tired, a bit worn down, dark-rimmed around the eyes. At 58, he isn’t as handsome as when he first arrived at Chelsea in 2004. But then, are any of us? He is clean-shaven, neither belligerent nor charming, merely dutiful.

Generally speaking, in an hour’s interview, even if things don’t go brilliantly, you feel the occasional moment of connection with the subject. Some shared interest, a moment of humour. Last September, interviewing Arsène Wenger for instance, it was never like we were going to be best mates, but there was an understanding that while there are better ways for two strangers to pass an hour, there are also worse. You might as well try to find common ground.

None of that happened with José. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, nor even that he didn’t like me. More that he had no interest in me. Paul Pogba recently revealed that one day at Manchester United he was on good terms with his manager, the next he was blanked like they had no relationship at all. I scored the second-half version of that.

Other players could probably relate to that. He was especially hard on Luke Shaw at Manchester United, who since Mourinho’s departure has revived his career as an international full back. It will be interesting to see what happens to Dele Alli at Sp**s – whom Mourinho publicly called “a f***ing lazy guy” – now his tormentor has departed. Alli was one of England’s stars at the World Cup in 2018. Under Mourinho, he could barely get on the subs’ bench. When Mourinho arrived at Chelsea, he was known for his easy informality with his players. In the years since, as other coaches have increasingly adopted the carrot rather than the stick, Mourinho seems to have started channelling his inner Seventies PE teacher as his chief means of motivation.

I’d learnt the correct pronunciation of his name (Joe-say, with a hard J) from the Amazon Prime documentary series All or Nothing. I’d practised saying it, in an attempt to impress the great man. When it comes to it, I **** it up and say, “Hello, Jose,” as in “Yozay”, just like everyone else does.

How was lockdown? Mourinho immediately switches on, the emphatic, slightly sulky accented tones familiar from a hundred Match of the Day post-match snippets. There’s a compilation of his press conference greatest hits on YouTube I highly recommend. Aside from anything, they remind you of how devastatingly handsome he was. Just as our football writer Alyson Rudd describes her mum as asking after “that handsome one”, my wife always perks up whenever José pops up on the screen. Although latterly, and not just on the field, he’s faced competition from Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola.

“I found it hard!” he declaims. “But I was privileged, because our lockdown was different to people outside the football world. I still could work. When I was feeling down or frustrated, I was comparing my life with other people’s – I realised I was OK. We didn’t lose jobs, we didn’t lose salaries, we were still going to the training ground. We still had human contact.” I ask if he acquired other skills, learning a language or an instrument or an appreciation of nature? “The life outside football, no! The life in the job, yes!” (Many of his statements, even uncontroversial ones, cry out for the exclamation mark.) “I used to say I am a team coach not an individual coach. For that period you become more a personal trainer and less a team trainer. So yes, in the end I got some skills. We try to find a way to organise sessions so they feel connections on the pitch, even if their team-mates are not there.”

I’d been struck, I say, still trying to curry favour, by his use of the expression “structural empathy” in All or Nothing. “Yeah!” he says. I took it to mean, I continue, that to succeed, every group of players had to get along? “Yeah,” he agrees, showing neither interest in, nor impatience with, this long-winded preamble. Well, how did he set about maintaining this, er (by now I’ve started to bore myself), structural empathy under the restrictions of lockdown?

“During the lockdown I felt exactly the opposite that sometimes you feel when you are working for a long time together. The football is so intense, so many matches, so much travelling, so less free time, there is a moment in the season where people gets a bit tired of each other. In that period [lockdown] was exactly the opposite thing!”

What, people that might otherwise have been getting fed up with one another craved their company instead? Yes, pretty much, he says. “Every morning, 10 o’clock, when that Zoom work started, I had to give always half an hour before the session, just for the guys to be in contact. Every session, one guy per pitch training, these six go home, other six are coming. If they could be five minutes late and the other guys five minutes early, even in the car park, to have a little touch, it was clearly the missing of human relations. Which again, puts things into perspective, how many people were alone at home? We were privileged. If anyone is in football and doesn’t think it’s a privilege, he’s wrong.”

At the time of our interview, Mourinho had had his first jab in addition to 96 negative Covid tests, roughly two a week since the testing regime got up and running. He is surprised he has not caught the virus. Many people close to him – players, coaches, family, although he won’t say who – have had it. “I had lunch with my assistant, same table, the guy is positive. I thought, ‘I have to be positive!’ But then test, no. One occasion, one match, I ’ugged a player, I remember clearly, I ’ugged a player, because that player was so good, the next morning we test, the player was positive. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s my time now.’ No!” Other than the odd overenthusiastic ’ug he has, he repeats several times, “been very careful”.

Moving on to his role as a pundit this summer, analysing Euro 2020 for The Times and The Sunday Times, I mention there was a time when he was, for example, very scornful of those ex-pros sitting in judgment in the TV studios. What’s more, he suspected some of bias against him, due to allegiance to their former clubs. Having done a stint for Sky when between jobs at the start of the 2019 season, he’d gained a new respect for the Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers. What’s more, he’d enjoyed it. Not least, I think, because it was a way of staying involved in the game, albeit at one remove.

“I enjoyed it very much because I felt I could make a difference. When it is a career, then for profile, success and audience, a pundit sometimes has to go into directions that I don’t need to go. I don’t want an audience. It’s not a job for me. They have to be more extreme, more aggressive, to make a name for themselves. I go with two perspectives. One is, I do it for myself. I’m not working. I’m on holiday. I have some fun. I meet people. I learn something. That’s the selfish part of it.”

The second reason he has signed up to spend a chunk of his summer doing analysis rather than sitting on a sofa in his house in Belgravia, central London (or, even better, a lounger at his home in Portugal) is a minor Mourinho classic. “The second part,” he tells me, putting on his eyes-lowered, humble expression, “is it’s kind of a service to football. Because I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have this need of audience. I go there and I’m just PURE. I tell what I see.”

But not, he is swift to add, in a lurid, shock-jock vulgar way, no. “I tell in a soft way. I like to listen to the opinions of people with different experiences. For example, when I sat with Roy Keane and Graeme Souness in the same match, they have experiences as top players that I didn’t have. I have experiences as a coach that they didn’t have. They know what is to play Champions League final as a player. I know what it is to play Champions League final on the touchline, as a coach. I learn with them; they learn with me. I like that a lot.”

While Souness is always identified with Liverpool, and Keane with Manchester United, which team does he have in his own blood? “The team that is on my blood is my city club, Vitória de Setúbal. Everything that happens to them, for good or for bad, I feel deeply. Apart from that, I have a huge respect for the clubs I’ve been working before. So one of my previous clubs against another club, normally I am supporting my club – you feel connections with people there, with the supporters... I was not a guy that stayed in the same club. But if Real Madrid play against some club that doesn’t mean anything, who do I want to win? Real Madrid.”

What if Real Madrid play against Chelsea, as in this year’s Champions League semi-final? “I would try to go in the direction of my friends. Where is more people from my time? Same president? Same owner? Players who were my players? I am grateful to all of them. I paid them back with my work in the winning. Winning more, winning less, don’t winning, I give everything I have to every club. When I leave clubs I only tell the good things about the club. I’m not the kind of person who is going to wash the dirty clothes, no! I always go to the positive. Inter! I won everything with Inter. There is a special affection. But if one day I have to go to Italy and coach a rival club, I don’t think twice. I have this professional way of look to things. I feel good with myself.”

No surprise there. José has never struck any of us as a man tortured by self-doubt. Maybe that’s because he entered the family trade at a young age. His father, José senior, while good enough to play for Portugal (as a goalkeeper), was known primarily during his son’s childhood as a manager. And manage is what the young José opted to do. He briefly played professionally, but at 19 opted for the dugout instead. Most young players become young coaches because they suffer a serious injury (like Ryan Mason, Mourinho’s temporary replacement at Sp**s), or they realise they won’t be good enough to play at the very top level and they drift to the sidelines (like Klopp or Wenger). José did it because, “I was in love with the methodology.”

Was it a big disappointment to realise you weren’t going to be a great player? “No.” It didn’t upset you? “Not at all. I could be better [as a player] than I was if I don’t give up for the good reasons, which was to become a football coach very early. I would be much better than I was. I could have got to a higher level. I would never play the highest level. Of course not. The majority of the coaches were not very good players, but they always say, ‘I got an injury, I fell from a bicycle.’ They always find the big excuse. I am the only one that is honest. I was in love with coaching.”

Besides – and here José says something every minor club or park player, not just in football but all sports, will relate to – “the other day I played with my staff and it looked like the World Cup final! For me to play a big game or a small game doesn’t change much. And,” he adds, wincing again as he gestures to his painful leg, “it ended badly for me because I got injured. Because my brain wanted to go to the extreme but my body could not go to the extreme.”

Having left his native country for London in 2004, Mourinho has worked in Milan, Madrid and Manchester, but has always come back to London. That has been mostly for football reasons, but also because he and his family love the city. “Portugal is Portugal, don’t get me wrong,” he counsels. “Is where I want to live my last days, when I feel they are arriving. But London gives a lot. Is a bit the consequence of what my children’s lives have been. They start schooling here in my first period. Then different countries, but always English schools. International schools. When I come back to England for the second period they are at the age where they can make their own choices. Everybody loves it.”

He declines to comment on Brexit, saying “It was a British decision. I want to respect that. I respect the country. I defend the English country, the history, the tradition. Not like you English do, but almost like you English do. I was here when the bombing occurred [the 7/7 attacks in 2005], I feel it like it was my city.” He says people here are polite and positive towards him in the street. “I want to believe that people think I am a very good professional, that I am a person of good will. The nature of my job made me at some moments in my career in England have reactions that were criticised and fairly criticised. You get a red card for bad behaviour, that’s fair. I say that I am genuine. I want to believe that being genuine is a good quality. Sometimes people feel that being a little bit of a hypocrite, a little bit two-faced, is a big quality.”

His daughter Matilde (the same name as her mother) is 24, his son (also José) is 21. Matilde has set up a jewellery business, in which her father has invested. “She did her master’s and is following her passion – that’s sustainable jewellery. The diamonds are lab-grown diamonds. The gold is recycled.” What is his role? “I’m the proud dad that supports everything that is a passion, exactly as happened with me.” His son, José III (the naming is a tradition in Portugal) “is preparing to go to his passion, which is football. He will work with me one day. As a player, he is better than the dad.” But young José’s future will also be in coaching. “He is very clever. He understands football well.”

Mourinho says that “England is special for football. That was my initial attraction. I made the choice of England for football. I really wanted to do Italian football, Spanish football.” But after Inter Milan and Real Madrid, I ask, he could have gone to Germany or France, instead of returning to Chelsea? “Yeah, but in Germany and France, you know if you are going to the club A [he means Bayern Munich] or club B [he means Paris St Germain], you know your destiny is written immediately. In England it is competition at the highest level. That attracted me. It’s all about the pressure. I want it. I would choose pressure, always. Sometimes that pressure becomes unbalanced, or out of proportion, but I refuse the opposite! I refuse to go to a country where the pressure doesn’t exist. I refuse!”

Does this desire for pressure, for adrenaline, almost qualify as an addiction? He shrugs, not denying it. “It is to wake up on the Saturday or the Sunday and you know in a few hours I am going to be very happy, medium-happy or very sad. When I was born, I was a player’s son. I grew up a manager’s son. All my Saturday or Sunday mornings, I wake up and it’s a big day.”

Is it true, I ask, that he has kept records of all the training sessions he’s ever done, going back to coaching youth teams in his twenties? “Yeah! I have them all, absolutely.” Being something of an archivist myself, I take the chance to show him my diary, in which I record various statistics in different coloured felt pen. I think I spy the ghost of a nod of appreciation as he glances at it. “Is now video-recorded, fixed cameras and drones. At my first session [this is going back almost 40 years] I use just a piece of ****.”

Excuse me? “A piece of ****. Sheet? Like paper? With lines?” Ah, graph paper? “Yes, graph paper. Pencils. Coloured pens. I’ve got them all.” Where are they? A sly, appraising expression steals over his rugged features. “I don’t want to say. Because [maybe someone] wants to go to steal them.” I’m not going to steal your training sessions, I assure him.

If he was conducting a training session now, and it reminded him of a situation at, say, Inter Milan in 2009, could he access the relevant record? “Yes.” And does he? “Absolutely! I play against a team 3-2-1-4-5, I remember when I was most successful playing against a team in that system. I have everything recorded.” 3-2-1-4-5 is an unusual formation. For one thing, it’s very attack-minded for a Mourinho team. For another,it comprises 15 players, 16 with the goalie. Maybe that’s been the secret of Jose’s success over the years. We ought to have noticed.

“But,” he adds, “I cannot run away from which team I have in my hands. The way Harry Kane is playing now, doing the movements he does. When was the last time I had a striker doing this? Benzema! Because Didier Drogba was not that, Ibrahimovic was not that, Lukaku was not that. So sometimes the statistics don’t fit into the reality.” Echoes there of his now infamous, “Same coach, different players,” put-down when asked why his Sp**s team could not protect a lead, a skill his teams were once well known for.

There’s a general sense, I say, that having been such a breath of fresh air in 2004, he has now turned into a bit of a misery. From the Special One to the Grumpy One? That’s he’s lost his twinkle, his sense of fun, his enjoyment? “I don’t agree. Of course I enjoy it. But I enjoy to win. I go every day to work with that – how do you call that? This twinkly? – in my eyes. I am never tired in the morning. I prepare every game with the same passion. But if I don’t win, I cannot be as happy as if I do win!”

So you’re not one of those middle-aged men who say everything used to be better? “Of course I’m open to ideas. Otherwise I would be doing my sessions with, how do you call it, graphic paper? But I think the world should be open to new, better things but fight against new bad things. Not everything that is new is good.”

Does he really think he is unfairly treated by the media? “Yes, of course.” Why? “I think people have the perception that I’m not the humblest guy. I think people is wrong! I think my nature is really humble. But sometimes because I say things that are so direct the perception is I’m not a humble guy. I think I sell a lot.”

I’m sorry? “I SELL a lot. Is reality. There are ways of analysing that and I can tell you 100 per cent that in the past two years coaching Tottenham and not winning anything, I am the coach in the world with most news. I could tell you how many per day worldwide.” How does that mean you are unfairly treated? “I’m treated unfairly because with me things are always taken in a different proportion. People look at me with different eyes that they look to others.”

Of course, his great rivals back in the day, Alex Ferguson and to a lesser extent Arsène Wenger, used to say exactly the same. He and Ferguson got on; he and Wenger did not. Are they in touch? “Ferguson, only SMS.” You have his number in your phone? “Of course, yes.” Wenger? “Not on my list, no.” Klopp? Guardiola? Arteta? “I have their number, yes. I’m not saying I’m calling them every day.”

And so to the Euros. Who will win? England? “England is one of the candidates. I don’t think they can run away from it. They play the group phase in England. And is not just England looking good, is nobody looking phenomenal. There’s a balance. They have home advantage, they make a camp at the Tottenham HQ. They have the same coach for a few years. They have the experience of playing at the World Cup where they did very well. In that World Cup [Russia, 2018], they were still a little bit young. Marcus Rashford in that World Cup was just a little bit young. Many players the same. I think is big chance.” Who does he want to win? Portugal? “Yeah.” And if they got knocked out? “England. I don’t think twice about giving you my answer.”

What, I ask, was his first memory of the Euros? “The first World Cup that I really enjoyed was 1974. But I can go to 1970. I don’t remember 1970 but I know the two teams that played the final from the first to the last player. One thing is to have memories. But the other is to live it deeply. The Portuguese one [Euro 2004], OK, I was 40 years old, but I lived deeply. It was the one that made me understand that the Euros is not football. The football is, how do you call it, the icing on the cake. It is much more than that. You are not going to find a player, everybody knows them. Is not going to appear a new talent that nobody knows. Is it going to be innovation in football? No. Are the national teams better than the best clubs? No!”

Steady on, I interrupt, we’re trying to sell a tournament here! “I know!” Mourinho laughs. “One day I want to do it! I want to do a Euro or a World Cup!” As a national manager? “I can coach any team,” he shrugs. Would he like to end his career as a national coach? “I want to do it! Portugal or anyone. Portugal would be more natural because I could add the honour, but if one day I accept to do it for another country, I want to feel the same honour.” England? “England has many options,” he shrugs again.

The way things have turned out, we will discover the recipient of Mourinho’s next pledge of allegiance, city or country, sooner than he or we thought. For now, though, time’s up.
Pretty good interview, surprised he has Arteta's number on his phone tho 😂
Thanks, btw.
 
  • Like
Reactions: A_G

Latest posts+

Top Bottom