Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner

by Patrick Barclay

  Although you could hardly call Benfica a humble beginning for Mourinho’s career as a coach, the club had fallen a long way from the heights occupied in the years of his infancy: the Eusébio years, when they could look any European club in the eye. They were skint and struggling and could barely keep pace with the likes of Sporting Braga, let alone their great rivals Sporting and Porto. But there was still the Benfica name, with all it entailed in terms of tradition and size of support; Mourinho had to give the president a hearing.

  Vale e Azevedo told him the club indeed had no money, so he wanted Mourinho to build a team with hungry, young, Portuguese – or, to put it another way, cheap – players. Oh, and the contract would be for only six months because there was an election for the club presidency coming up (the leaders of most clubs in Portugal were chosen by the members) and that would take place in a matter of six weeks or so. That was the bad news. The good news was that Vale e Azevedo was expected to win and, as and when that happened, Mourinho would be given a two-year extension. Mourinho took the chance, took the job. Vale e Azevedo lost the election.

  The winner, Manuel Vilarinho, had run on a ticket that proclaimed Benfica’s next coach would be Toni, a former star player, and Vilarinho’s first statement was that he hoped Mourinho, being a man of honour, would recognise his duty to step aside, so it could be said that their relationship was getting off to a tricky start. But Mourinho, after receiving an assurance from Vilarinho that he could continue until at least the end of the season, got on with the job. He made the players train less casually and railed at the backroom staff for providing dodgy dossiers – one report listed only ten men in the opposition’s team – and generally strove to change the club’s culture. Then, in his ninth match, they achieved a remarkable 3–0 home victory over Sporting. Few victories are sweeter than in a derby, yet the taste can turn bitter when a coach is consumed by righteous indignation and, as Vilarinho appeared at the door of Mourinho’s office while he was speaking on the phone to his wife, the president was ignored. Furthermore, Mourinho declined to speak to the press, assured Benfica staff he would pay the ensuing fine and drove home.

  Next he attempted to force Vilarinho’s hand. He asked for a year’s extension to his contract, on the pretext that another club had expressed interest in him – and the reply could be most charitably described as lukewarm. Yes, said Vilarinho, I’d happily keep you on; it’s just that some of the other directors, and our commercial partners, are not sure. It was agreed that Mourinho would leave immediately. His team’s derby triumph had a more orthodox consequence when Sporting’s coach, Augusto Inácio, was sacked. And guess who moved into that job? Manuel Fernandes, Mourinho’s old friend and partner, the man who had recommended he be hired as Bobby Robson’s interpreter. Toni, of course, got the Benfica job. So Mourinho’s first solo flight was all too quickly over. It had lasted barely a couple of months. But, as Robson later said, the circumstances had made that almost inevitable.

  It was nearly Christmas. Almost exactly four years before Mourinho and his wife were to take the children ice-skating near Sloane Square in London.

  Mourinho waited at home in Setúbal until mid-April, when he took a call from a representative of the Uniao club of Leiria in the Portuguese midlands and agreed to take over from Manuel José at the end of the season. Leiria were already doing well and finished fifth that season, their highest position ever, but Mourinho had them in fourth place as, once again, Christmas approached and things started happening. Benfica sacked Toni and offered Mourinho his job back – he declined after it became clear there was no room at the club for Baltemar Brito and Rui Faria, who had become the first members of a team of assistants destined to share in his fame – and then Porto beckoned. The president, Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, had assured him at an international match in Oporto several months earlier that he would take command when the time was right. Just after Christmas, an intermediary’s call informed him the time had almost arrived and in January he replaced Octávio Machado.

  Porto, like Benfica, had a proud history. They, too, had been champions of Europe. Just once, but more recently than Benfica – in 1987. The current Porto team, said Mourinho, was their worst for twenty-six years – he would have remembered the mid-1970s, for in those days Porto frequently trailed in behind Vitória Setúbal, whose Bonfim Stadium was his second home and for whom his father kept goal – but no matter, Mourinho added: ‘Next year we’ll win the League.’ They did.

  For the first time since he had attained headline-commanding status, Mourinho had done what it said on the tin. He had begun to rebuild in the remaining months of his first season, setting up deals to bring in the likes of Maniche, Nuno Valente, Paulo Ferreira, all of whom went on to represent Portugal, and Derlei, whom Mourinho had found in Brazil while preparing for his time at Leiria and brought to that club at a knockdown price. Cast aside, sometimes quite unceremoniously, were those he perceived to be of faint heart or unsuitable head. The broad strategy was to make the team more Portuguese in character and hungrier (through incentive-based contracts) and early in the new season he made a tactical switch to the 4–4–2 formation with which European glory was to be seized. He had fashioned a disciplined, resilient unit.

  But Mourinho’s Porto were already more than that. In Deco, also born in Brazil but to be claimed by Portugal, for whom he was to take part in the 2004 European Championship, they had an artful playmaker and he was prominent as Porto proved they also had the sophistication to operate successfully outside Portugal’s borders by winning the UEFA Cup after a long and, on occasion, turbulent campaign, the bargain buy Derlei finally putting paid to Celtic with his eleventh goal in the competition. While Porto’s players celebrated in front of their fans, very much a minority in Seville’s Olympic Stadium, some 40,000 supporters of the Scottish champions indicated by scornful gesture that Mourinho’s men were a bunch of divers (in truth, though Deco and company were not unacquainted with the art of obtaining free-kicks, the frequency with which they fell had as much to do with Celtic’s rough approach). Mourinho had supervised a remarkable, and merited, triumph.

  He did get one thing wrong. Asked how his team would cope with the even greater rigours of the Champions League the following season, he replied: ‘We can do some nice things … but I don’t think we can win it.’ He explained that such aspirations were only for the ‘sharks’, whom he defined as ‘clubs who can afford to spend 20, 30 or even 40 million euros on one player’. Porto hardly caused a ripple in the market that summer. Yet, with virtually the same team, they went on to win the Champions League.

  So had Mourinho’s modest assessment been a psychological ploy, designed to take the pressure of expectation off his players? Not this time. I think that, for once, he genuinely surprised himself and only developed a conviction they could defeat the odds after the dramatic survival of a second-round visit to Manchester United, where, a linesman’s verdict on Paul Scholes having crucially gone their way, Costinha scored a stoppage-time winner and Mourinho wildly celebrated on the touchline.

  A less judicious man might have missed it all by leaving after the UEFA Cup triumph. He did briefly consider the possibility of cashing in. Inevitably, there were offers from abroad that would have doubled or tripled his salary: from Paris St Germain and a couple of mid-range Italian clubs. Among those confidants he consulted was Robson. ‘I told him to stay another year,’ said the Englishman, whose Newcastle had just finished third in the Premier League, a position that meant they could themselves qualify for the Champions League if they beat Partizan Belgrade over two legs, which they were clear favourites to do. ‘I told José, “You’ve got time on your side. Don’t get into a cage unless you know how to get out of it. You’re not ready to move yet. I was at Ipswich fourteen years – you’ve been at Porto barely fourteen months! So stay for at least a year. Apart from anything else, the president has taken a chance with you. Yes, you’ve done well for him. You’ve had a wonderful year. But you might learn more next year if yo
u stay and get more experience.”’ It proved good advice. Meanwhile Robson was unable to join Mourinho in the Champions League. Newcastle, after winning 1–0 in Belgrade, succumbed by an identical score at home and lost the penalty decider. Oddly enough, the subsequent draw for the group stages put Partizan in with Porto; fate was that close to laying on a contest between the erstwhile master and his pupil. It was never to happen, for, after Mourinho came to England, his first encounter with Newcastle took place three months after Robson had been sacked.

  As it was, Porto had to deal with Real Madrid as well as Partizan and Olympique Marseille. If the big and financially muscular clubs of Europe could be likened by Mourinho to sharks, Real were the Great Whites of the European game; they did not even recognise his 40 million euro limit, having spent considerably more than that on the world’s most expensive player, Zinedine Zidane. Other galácticos who came to test Porto included Roberto Carlos, Mourinho’s old Barcelona chum Ronaldo and an even more familiar face: Luís Figo. Real won 3–1. It looked as if Mourinho’s analysis of the relationship between money and Champions League success was right; Porto had been severely bitten. But they healed their wounds by beating Marseille twice (the French club were later to remove poor Robson’s Newcastle from the UEFA Cup) and qualified for the knockout stages in second place.

  Although they came from behind to beat Manchester United with two goals from Benni McCarthy in the new Dragao Stadium, they were not expected to preserve the lead in the face of a shark attack at Old Trafford and duly Scholes put United in front midway through the first half. Later Scholes scored again, or would have done had the linesman not erred in ruling him offside. ‘Porto would never have come back from 2–0,’ said Robson, ‘and that was the only major slice of luck they got in the competition.’ Given that United led on the away-goals rule, it would still not have been enough but for Costinha’s swift reaction to a rebound off the United goalkeeper, Tim Howard, as the majority of a 67,000 crowd prepared to celebrate the final whistle. As Mourinho put it: ‘My team were out after ninety minutes – and in the quarter-finals after ninety-one.’

  Lyon were next and the decisive manner in which the French were overcome sharpened appetites for the semi-final against Deportivo La Coruña. The first leg, at Porto, was dull and goalless, but Mourinho and his team did not appear too despondent and a fortnight later, on a stormy night by the Bay of Biscay, we discovered why: they clearly believed they could win at the Riazor, even though Milan, the reigning champions, had been thrashed there in the previous round. With Costinha shackling the creative abilities of Deportivo’s elegant Juan Carlos Valerón, the opportunity was there for an away goal to settle matters. Deco – slippery as an eel, persistent as a terrier – did the trick after an hour, tempting the stand-in defender César to try a tackle the Spaniard was not sharp enough to execute legitimately and falling just inside the penalty area. Derlei did the rest. Porto were in the final.

  It was to be against little Monaco, who had not only removed Real Madrid but were to overcome a Chelsea backed by the billions of Roman Abramovich. So much for Europe’s sharks. It was the year of the minnows. Well, the smaller fish. You know what I mean. Mourinho, like the rest of us, had underestimated the power of football to overcome economics. It must have been the only thing he had neglected to learn during his prolonged and comprehensive education.

  By now he was established above Didier Deschamps, the Monaco coach, as Chelsea’s choice for the next season and this, despite the Italian alternative presented by Inter, was an offer he could hardly refuse. Peter Kenyon, having been unable to get Sven-Göran Eriksson to Chelsea, was falling on his feet. After the match in La Coruña, Mourinho, brow furrowing as he fiddled with his mobile phone – ‘at moments like these, you want to speak to your loved ones’ – declined to discuss his future, but the next morning he flew from Oporto to London with his wife and children and in the evening, accompanied by a posse of Portuguese journalists, he went to Stamford Bridge, where Monaco’s second-leg victory in the other semi-final ensured that the Champions League would not be culminating in a contest between his present and future employers; it must have been quite a relief, even to such an expert exuder of indifference as Mourinho.

  Next there was some domestic business to attend to. The retention of the Portuguese championship had already been achieved but the task of keeping the Cup in Porto loomed, with a final against Benfica due ten days before the European climax in Gelsenkirchen. Mourinho, aware that Monaco’s Deschamps would be watching, altered and slightly weakened his team, who were reduced to ten men in the second half when Jorge Costa was sent off. They nevertheless played well enough to be level at a goal each after ninety minutes, but Simão scored for Benfica in extra time and afterwards Mourinho decried the referee’s performance. He was quoted as having called the official – Lucílio Batista, from Mourinho’s own home city of Setúbal – a cheat, but Batista’s report referred only to constant querying of decisions from the Porto bench. It was not a first offence. Mourinho was ordered to pay a fine of 600 euros, which the records of the Portuguese Football Federation show him to have duly done, and to serve a suspension of fifteen days, which he avoided by leaving Portugal for England. Via Germany.

  The event in Gelsenkirchen was affected, as Mourinho generously volunteered afterwards, by an early injury that deprived Monaco of their captain, Ludovic Giuly. ‘It changed the face of the match,’ Mourinho said, ‘and enabled us to play the football we like to play.’ Which was on the counter-attack. Carlos Alberto got the first of three unanswered goals in the first half and, after Dmitri Alenitchev had replaced the Brazilian youngster on the hour, Deco, with a piece of deliciously impudent finishing, and the substitute put Monaco out of their discomfort. The scenes at the end were of the usual delirium, except that Mourinho had a subdued look and stayed close to his wife and children. He also chose not to exhibit his medal, removing the ribbon from his neck after the presentation, and later told Andy Roxburgh: ‘On a personal level, the night was difficult because I was full of conflicting emotions, knowing that I would be leaving the team – I did not see my Porto players again until three months later when they came to Stamford Bridge in the Champions League.’ Apart from Paulo Ferreira and Ricardo Carvalho, that was; he wasted no time in bringing them to Chelsea and tried to lure Deco, who chose Barcelona instead. Mourinho had become a shark.

  Before embarking on his predatory activities, he revisited London to brief Chelsea staff and agents and meet the media, who, upon asking why he was so confident about the prospects for a club who had last won their domestic championship eight years before he was born, responded: ‘We have top players and – excuse me if I’m arrogant – a top manager … please don’t call me arrogant, because it’s not true. I think I’m a special one. I’m a champion.’ Having also dealt with more esoteric matters, such as the balance of responsibilities within his coaching department (we did not trouble our newspapers’ readers with that), and outlined his disciplinary code (we printed it, albeit without reference to its uncanny similarity to that of other coaches), he flew to Brazil for a ten-day family holiday. The midsummer he spent commenting for a Portuguese newspaper on the European Championship, which was being held in his homeland. How strange to reflect that he had watched some of the previous European Championship in Scotland while completing his coaching qualifications; now he was the most fêted coach in the world! Then he took his new charges off to the United States to prepare for a season that, being Mourinho-influenced, was bound to be momentous.

  Until that late May evening on which Mourinho’s previous season reached its glorious conclusion, the abiding image had been of his touchline dance in his overcoat at Old Trafford. In my mind this was superseded by the tutorial Mourinho gave Alenitchev in the technical area shortly before he ran on to the field to take over from Carlos Alberto. It lasted several minutes and involved much pointing at a notepad. Usually a substitute gets little more than a quick word and a pat on the bottom; Mourinho’s atten
tion to detail was fascinating (and his method of getting the point over was to become fashionable). Fifteen minutes and two goals later, the job was done. The following spring, while Mourinho was carrying all in England and Europe before him, a seasoned observer of the game told me he was overrated. ‘What he does,’ my friend opined, ‘is painting by numbers.’ Such respect does my friend command that I lacked the heart to reply that, if that were the case, we should all be doing it, and picking up several million pounds a year for our trouble.

  PART FOUR

  José who?

  The three hats

  Andy Roxburgh, the former Scotland manager whose job it became to monitor the work of the coaching profession’s most distinguished exponents, described José Mourinho as the product of an advantageous upbringing and an ideal education, supplemented by ‘the finest example of work experience in the history of employment’.

  Apart from that, he never had much going for him.

  When Roxburgh visited Mourinho at Chelsea in 2005, Mourinho made a wry quip: ‘After fifteen years, I’m an overnight success.’ The UEFA technical director understood. It is less important for a coach setting out on his career to be instantly recognisable to millions than to have learned the elements of his craft. The fame and fortune that go with being a star footballer can mask an inability to cope with the retraining process. Mourinho was once asked why so many players who had failed to reach a high level, either through injury or for other reasons, went on to succeed as coaches. His reply was swift and simple: ‘More time to study.’ While the game’s chosen ones are still playing, the rejects are learning and, increasingly, they are landing the top jobs.