The punishments began in the autumn of 2010. At the same time as the media was optimistically exalting the marvellous qualities of the new coaching staff, the players began receiving threatening signals from Mourinho. These came without any apparent cause; there was never any act of misconduct that justified them, nor anything in the code of conduct that suggested to those targeted that they needed to swallow their pride. The surprise was part of the method, which would culminate in an invitation to go up to the coach’s office. There, the uninitiated sat at a table on which the trophy for FIFA Best Coach of the 2009–10 season sat. Behind the table was a magnetic board and something approaching a shrine. A photo of Mourinho lifting the Champions League trophy with Inter and a black and white portrait print in a heroic pose stood out among a panoply of trophies, memorabilia and souvenirs.
The players’ attention was most drawn by the portrait print. They used to comment on it. That smouldering gaze, chin up, as in the famous Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara, provoked comment.
‘He’s posing like a model,’ they said.
One young player who went up to see the coach spoke of his unusual body language. Sitting behind the desk, the manager remained motionless like a sphinx or a yogi, showing off his prodigious ability to disengage his facial muscles, fix his gaze on his guest without blinking, and just move his lips – and evidently his tongue – to express his opinion in a metallic voice. Threats of total marginalisation, straightforward tickings-off or confessions of disappointment were given in the straight monotone of a robot. Whatever they were, his revelations were usually preceded by a formula of powerful resonance: ‘I am José Mourinho …’
Xenophon tells how, when King Croesus went to consult the oracle of Delphi, the god’s answer was final: ‘If you are human, try to think of human things.’
Ubaldo Martínez is Professor of Social Anthropology at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid. Over the course of his long career he has taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid, at Columbia University, in Baltimore and at the London School of Economics. He lives 200 yards from the Bernabéu in one of those streets leading to the stadium that is filled with fans on match days. Mourinho’s reliance on the most primitive ways of influencing other people struck him immediately.
‘We’re convinced that we’ve become rational but we’re still more persuaded by magic than by reason,’ he comments. ‘Everything that Mourinho says, that sort of austerity he imposes on players, that continuous punishment thing, that takes you down a certain path – it’s what the shamans do. Here, fear plays a tremendous part. Fear is everything. In this case, fear that they’ll throw you out of the club, that they won’t let you play … everything. Fear is a way of imposing discipline on people. The theoretical problem that we encounter is that these guys, these players, are untameable. They’re cocky. How do you dominate that?’
Football coaches seek to unite the individual into the collective. To want to create a new entity from many wills suggests a certain desire for omnipotence. Mourinho set out on an extreme path. On 23 January 2011, after a match against Mallorca at the Bernabéu, he proclaimed his absolutism:
‘I am the team.’
Mourinho designed a three-level programme of indoctrination – football, psychology and propaganda – with each of these requiring a different type of language and role from the coach. The programme’s main audience, but not its only one, were the players. To understand Mourinho’s work it’s impossible to dissociate the tactical from the technical, the purely footballing from the attempt – through suggestion – to permanently involve people. The multitude of areas in which he attempted to extend his influence turned the whole thing into a sort of play. Gradually he devised character roles for himself, each with their own script and voice. He was inspired by the work of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, the actor and the role that, according to those close to him, he most admired.
The style of Madrid’s play between 2010 and 2013 will leave fewer recognisable traces in the future than the multifarious character assumed by the team’s coach to extend his power over the staff, board and fans. The tactics that Mourinho preached were not nearly as original as his theatrical mode of power management that owed as much to Neolithic sorcerers as to Dr Hannibal Lecter and reality TV shows.
‘Mourinho became the master of putting on a show,’ says the semiotician Jorge Lozano, Professor of the General Theory of Information at the Complutense University of Madrid. ‘He’s an exceptional expert in strategies of space. He has it perfectly organised. He’s very disciplined. Always maintaining the same antagonisms is difficult. It’s over-acting. But he’s a faithful disciple of Stanislavski, he breaks the fourth wall. He puts himself up there and acts for different audiences. And the performance differs according to the situation. First, in front of journalists, he wears a mask behind which there’s always mystery. Always the same. The mask emphasises an exaggerated solemnity. It makes no concession to communication. He’s there because it’s his only option. If he could leave, he would. He presents himself as afflicted. Bored. Full of disdain. Ignoring everyone else. In front of the public he’s Coryphaeus, the leader of the chorus in Ancient Greek drama, the cheerleader of the most radical supporters, emphatic, celebrating goals to the limit, running through and past everything. He acts for the referee, but the referee is always the villain, whatever he does he’s on the side of the opposition, he’s bought, he’s bad, he didn’t see it, he’s the evil fool. Mourinho is delighted when the referee orders him out of the dugout, gloriously proving that he, Mourinho, exists.
‘Mourinho,’ he continues, ‘turns up and puts on a performance: when there’s the need for emotion, he applies the emotion, but when it’s time for zero emotion [that is what he delivers] … He puts on all kinds of shows. “Now I’ll show you that I love this kid who’s come up through the youth team, or this Portuguese player, but I don’t want anything to do with this guy who I don’t care about and who I’m offended by.” And he has to be offended because he’s the one who controls everything. He’s very good at being able to pretend that he’s experiencing feelings. This, like his performances, he does admirably. As to whether these feelings are sincere or not, I’ve no idea. But they do seem plausible. He could be on the big stage with a very narrow range of interpretation. Like Humphrey Bogart. It’s admirable.’
Ubadlo Martínez was also struck by the similarity of his behaviour to that of a tribal leader. ‘Madrid,’ says the anthropologist, ‘is something that many people have access to. It’s influential, it’s fun, it distracts and dazzles. And a man appears with all these self-same qualities, a man with a certain dimension of mystery. Because Mourinho, with his way of saying things, always comes out with something cryptic. It’s not always clear what he wants to say. That much is obvious. He uses an arcane system of language, of religious mystery, of shamans. He doesn’t say, “The player doesn’t know how to take a corner.” No. He comes up with something enigmatic that makes people think he knows more. He plants riddles. People say, “What the hell does he want to say?” He lets slip, “Something has happened here …” And he lets it hang in the air … so that people can think about it. This is typical of pseudo-religious, pseudo-mythical language. I find it fascinating.’
Mourinho represented the figure of the ambivalent legislator-rebel. He obeyed nobody. He created the rules. He broke them. Only he knew why, and from the confusion and bewilderment he always extracted benefits. It is commonplace for primitive religious figures to speak only through intermediaries. The god remains hidden, manifested in the priest. One way of interpreting his sudden absence from public events he should have presided over was that he was upset and wanted his assistant to talk. The process was calculated to have an impact, Mourinho remaining the remote, mythical figure and Karanka – like a priest – reproducing his words. Mourinho put across the idea that the team was more important than the individuals, as if the team were some sort of vaporous soul existing abo
ve all of them, as if he himself were not expressing his own desires and concerns but was speaking in the name of one unintelligible guiding spirit.
The manager assigned the same multidisciplinary functions to his assistants as he did to himself. Silvino Louro was goalkeeping coach and Casillas-watcher; fitness coach Rui Faria was counsellor to Ronaldo; José Morais, besides analysing rivals, had to establish friendly ties with the Portuguese contingent. Aitor Karanka’s mission was not limited to overseeing Mourinho’s programmed training sessions; he was also to gain the confidence of the Spanish players and the club’s veteran employees. The entire back-room staff formed a well-ordered network of data collection that was fed back to the boss so that he could make decisions. Some of them made it their business, at Mourinho’s explicit request, to maintain contact with certain journalists in order to give them prepared information. Karanka, furthermore, took on the task of representing the coach in the press room. His first appearance was on 18 December 2010 on the eve of the game against Sevilla. His press conferences were so devoid of content that they could be summed up in one solitary phrase: ‘As the manager has already said.’
Until Mourinho appointed him his own personal priest at Christmas 2010, the players saw in Karanka somebody they could trust. He was then 37 years old, had finished his career not long before, and as a veteran Madridista and a former youth-team coach at the Spanish Football Federation had a dignified, familiar air. Alongside Casillas, he had been part of the Madrid team that won the Champions League in Paris in 2000. In time, however, even Casillas would start avoiding him. The once frequent chats at breakfast in the dining room between the Spanish players and Karanka took place less and less. The players saw him take a tray in the free buffet and waited for him to sit at a table so that they could sit at another table far away. All they said to him these days, in the majority of cases, involved the exchange of banal bits of information. It was getting more and more difficult to find a place in Valdebebas sufficiently far from the earshot of potential informers. Distrust rolled in like a mist. At first the players were only suspicious of Mourinho; then they suspected that his assistants were play-acting or responding to other spurious interests; then they felt that club employees were setting traps for them to reveal information. Finally, the players stopped trusting each other.
During the 2010–11 season the various groups were quickly delineated. The faction closest to the coach was composed of Pepe, Khedira, Marcelo, Ronaldo, Özil and Di María. On the other side – and not enjoying the same access, but with occasional contact with Pérez, the president – were Casillas, Ramos, Higuaín, Benzema, Pedro León, Lass and Canales. Between the two, an ambivalent group had formed: Arbeloa, Granero and Xabi Alonso. On a planet apart lived Carvalho, bound to Jorge Mendes. Carvalho was the great patriarch of the Portuguese clan, but he could not take the coach seriously. With the passing of time, and according to changing interests and shifting political forces, the groups exchanged members or fragmented. Mourinho managed to impress the idea upon them that to enjoy his professional regard it was essential to fulfil every one of his precepts. And his precepts determined the style of football the team played.
Considering Barcelona to be the active team, Mourinho had to come up with the correct tactics as the reactive team. Barça’s possession of the ball was the backbone of their organisation, so Madrid identified themselves with the hunter, with the wait, with surrendering possession most of the time and occasionally attacking. The players noticed this tendency from the pre-season tour of Los Angeles, when he would pontificate:
‘Nobody in the history of football has closed down and covered as perfectly as Inter.’
Training sessions began with passing drills and simulations of games on pitches of various sizes. Four against four, six against six, eight against eight, three against two, four against three, etc. – more-or-less standardised exercises to loosen up the muscles with the ball, all at a very high and almost constant tempo. Then came the fine-tuning during the second half of the sessions: cycles of exercises working on pressing, closing down as a unit, and defensive movements co-ordinated so that each player knew when to hold his position and when to leave it so that he could press the ball. The exercises were done together with the so-called fifth defenders, Mourinho’s name for those midfielders and forwards who trained specifically in covering techniques. In this, Di María, for his willingness, obedience and ability to cover so much ground, was the benchmark. Based on these exercises, Mourinho would turn to the tactics board when games came, adapting his tactics to the opposition’s strengths, with the aim of neutralising them.
According to the squad, all of this was the bread and butter of Mourinho’s methodology. In many training sessions he grouped the attacking players as far back as their own penalty area, ‘put in the box’, as they called it, and then rehearsed moving as one to reduce the opposition’s space and launch counter-attacks. These moves would be repeated so as to make them automatic: two touches in midfield, a pass out wide, a cross and a strike at goal; ball to the forward, support from midfield, opening out to the wing, cross and shot … Systematised routines, quick passes through the midfield using multiple lanes: down the right with Di María; down the left with Marcelo and Ronaldo; and right down the middle with Higuaín and Özil.
The players complained that Mourinho tended to reproduce the same configuration over and again. The team trained to counteract imaginary adversaries who wanted the ball and who were prepared to put a lot of players in the opposition’s half. Throughout the entire summer he did not devise a single plan for static attacking. Some players also complained that the drawback of this sort of training was that most teams they would face in the league and in the cup would sit back and wait for them to attack, forcing them to keep hold of the ball for longer in midfield to avoid being predictable and to find space. Very few teams would compete against them with the same weapons as Barça, but Mourinho only seemed to be preparing to play against Barça.
A part of the squad began to think that he was not conveying certain footballing ideas because he actually did not really understand them. But he did not seem bothered by the simplicity of his work in attack. He saw his strength – the key to his success – in the simplicity of his model, and he thought that introducing ideas about positional play and static attacking would complicate training. This was not what had turned him into such a well-regarded coach. He owed his fame and his fortune to his ability to get great results quickly in a range of different countries. Until then, his cocktail of virtues had been enough: his instinct for perceiving the vulnerability of his opponent, his gift of explaining to his players how to organise defensively and then how to counter-attack, and his acute power of persuasion were what made his ideas and his psychological penetration possible. His methods did suffer from important tactical limitations, but they offered a greater chance of rapid and efficient adaptation of both means and men.
As a confirmed winner, Mourinho had another decisive element in his make-up. Madrid had not contracted him to entertain the public with a highly evolved style of football. They had contracted him to stop the advance of Barça. To win. To reach this goal, as far as those in the inner circle of the coach understood it, it was enough just to apply his recipe. His agent, Jorge Mendes, repeated this to Pérez, to José Ángel Sánchez, to his friend Peter Kenyon, Chelsea’s former chief executive, and journalists – ‘José always wins titles. Always. And he’s never had a squad with such quality as he now has at Madrid, so … the normal thing would be that here he wins even more.’
During the summer and autumn of 2010 Mourinho thought he should concentrate on creating defensive order. Everything else would be solved by the abundant talent in his squad and it would be enough that the players got to know each other on the pitch. They remembered him being excited by such a wealth of technique, monitoring the practice matches without shouting out advice about how to create space or pull away from markers. He just gave shouts of encouragement: ‘Spectacu
lar … Touch … Quality …!’
He ordered his team to defend in a certain way, but then, once they had recovered the ball, he told them to distribute it according to their intuition. He wanted to experiment with this idea in the friendly Madrid played in Alicante on 22 August. They lined up in a 4-2-3-1 formation, with Gago and Khedira in midfield, and Di María, Canales and Özil behind Higuaín in attack. To everyone’s surprise, in the dressing room he said that he had come up with a new slogan:
‘Occupy space however you want to.’
Madrid came back in at half-time 1–0 down after a half of complete chaos. Mourinho amazed the players again with a completely different message:
‘This is anarchy. You can’t all just do what you want.’
The simplicity and certainty of the way in which he organised his defence turned into vagueness and confusion on the rare occasions he dedicated any time to practising elaborate attacks. Over time, Mourinho stopped persevering along a path that he neither understood nor was convinced by.
On 20 November 2010 Diego Maradona visited Valdebebas. To a starstruck Mourinho it seemed a good time to leave the training pitch, let the players continue with their exercises and sit alongside the legend. Perhaps allowing himself to be carried away by the commercial value of the moment, he allowed a Real Madrid TV camera team to film the conversation. The film shows the Argentine hero lounging on the bench, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, rejoicing at the statements of the coach. Puffed up by the company, Mourinho confesses his principles:
The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho Page 10