Is José Mourinho the best football manager in the world? He certainly thinks so. He spoke with Tim Lewis. Excerpts from the extensive interview in Esquire magazine.
BEFORE José Mourinho starts a new job, he sends an open letter to his soon-to-be co-workers. The first time he did it as an unheralded appointment at FC Porto in January 2002 it was an actual piece of paper, but the 51-year-old Portuguese has moved with the times.
“In this moment, we have an application in our telephones and in our iPads,” he explains, referring to the message that arrived in the inboxes of Chelsea players last summer when he took over for his second spell as manager. Mourinho’s lip curls a fraction in restrained Ludditism, “So, not anymore a paper letter.”
The basic instructions he relays to the group have not significantly altered in more than a decade of management. Mourinho always outlines his belief that football is a collective endeavour and that each individual has to subsume his personal ambition to the team mission. He promises to be fair, but reminds the players that every decision he takes will be in the best interest of the club. Still, he knows that footballers have egos, so he makes it clear that if they fully commit to his way of working, he’ll devote every atom of his being to making them the best they can be.
This document then becomes almost a contractual agreement between manager and players; a written outline of what he expects from his players and what they’ll get in return. “Yes!” says Mourinho. “There is no more: ‘I respect you because you are the manager.’
The football player today in general terms is only keen to give when he receives. So there is: ‘I respect you because you are good. I respect you because you are honest with me. I respect you because you are making me better and I feel that.’ But no more: ‘I respect you because you are the manager.’ A bit like: ‘I respect you because you are the police.’”
Mourinho’s way doesn’t work for everyone. At Real Madrid, he fell out publicly and quite spitefully with two of the galácticos: Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos, perhaps the most revered goalkeeper and defender in the world, respectively.
In a bust-up leaked to the papers after a defeat to Barcelona, Ramos sniped at Mourinho: “Because you’ve never been a player, you don’t know that that sometimes happens.” It’s reported that Mourinho and Cristiano Ronaldo barely spoke to each other at the end of his time in Spain.
But Mourinho’s unconventional methods have also created a small army of players who are acolytes. Zlatan Ibrahimovic claimed the Portuguese manager made him “feel like a lion”. Dutch playmaker Wesley Sneijder went even further: “I was prepared to kill and die for him.” When Frank Lampard’s mother died in 2008, Mourinho phoned him every day, commiserating and offering advice. Mourinho wasn’t even his manager then, and there was a strong chance Lampard would never play under him again.
“He’s the most loyal, the most caring manager I’ve ever worked with,” Lampard said recently. “I might be biased, because I love the man, but he does it instantly. He brings instant success.”
As I read Mourinho the rap sheet the haters, the believers his expression remains neutral, like a diner being told the specials when he’s already made up his mind what to order.
“It’s impossible to make every player better,” he says. “With some I don’t succeed and with some I cannot improve. But if I go player by player my percentage of players who reach the best years and the best moments of their career with me is huge. Of course, there are a few where the connection was not good, because the personalities couldn’t find each other, or because I don’t enjoy working with them. But that percentage is minimal.”
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Mourinho divides dressing rooms; he divides everyone who follows football so basically, the world. His achievements, at least, are uncontested. He is the only manager in the world ever to win the league titles in England, Italy and Spain; he also won in Portugal, but he’s aware that mentioning this fact is like leaving your GCSE results on your CV.
He’s claimed the Champions League twice with objectively speaking the two weakest teams (Porto in 2004 and Inter Milan in 2010) to lift the trophy in the last 10 years. He has also won a clutch of other cups, super cups, trinkets and baubles, but his craziest record is the one he ports from club to club of almost never submitting to defeat in home fixtures. Mourinho does not build teams, he recruits and drills Spartan warriors prepared to defend their citadel to the death.
Any team, therefore, should be desperate to have Mourinho as manager, but that turns out not always to be the case. He was interviewed for the Barcelona job in 2008, but the Catalans opted for Pep Guardiola, at that point untried and, as a man, Mourinho’s antithesis. Manchester United could have pursued Mourinho to replace Sir Alex Ferguson, but the word from inside Old Trafford was that they didn’t like the Portuguese’s tendency to jump clubs when he got bored, instead preferring someone for the long-term.
There’s a whisper that Mourinho cried when he learned he’d been passed over, but he assiduously denies that he was ever approached. Some pundits, most outspokenly Johan Cruyff, don’t like the style of football he schools his teams to play, while almost everyone finds him arrogant and possibly even narcissistic.
Mourinho has heard it all, and perhaps the most extraordinary facet of this extraordinary human being is that he appears genuinely not to care. Of course, he’s aware that, as a football manager, his actions are scrutinised like almost no other profession. Even prime ministers and CEOs have it easy most days by comparison. His successes are public, but equally so is every failure.
If, for example, Juan Mata flourishes as a Manchester United player, people will want to know why he sold him. If he huffs that Arsène Wenger is forever whinging, as he did in January, there’s not a chance on this Earth that the Arsenal manager won’t hear about it. History can show him that his boss, Roman Abramovich, has fired six perfectly decent managers and Avram Grant since Mourinho himself was jettisoned in September 2007.
Does he find the job of being a football manager stressful? “No,” he replies flatly. “I find life stressful sometimes. Not in London, but in Madrid, in Italy, it was stressful.” What keeps him awake at night? “Nothing,” he says, and explodes into laughter.
“Nothing! I sleep seven, eight hours every night.” He pauses. “I cannot compare my job with the doctor who is doing heart surgery. The difference is that I have millions of people know the result of my work and the only people who know the result of his work are the family of the person who is on the operating table. But there is much more responsibility for him than for me. That’s why I sometimes feel that we earn too much money compared to people who do much more than us to benefit humanity.”
“What is football?” Mourinho continues. “Football is emotion. No more than that.”
It was an older, probably wiser, certainly less fashion-forward Mourinho who returned to London last summer. First time around, he was 41, suave and tanned. When he was introduced to the press in 2004, he gave a quote that will forever sandbag him: “I’m not one who comes straight out of a bottle I’m a special one.” Manchester City fans tried to spread a slur that his distinctive slate-grey overcoat was from Matalan, but it was actually made by Armani. That detail alone was enough to tell us we were entering a new era.
Now Mourinho is in his fifties, his hair more salt than pepper. More than half the managers in the Premier League are younger than he is and he appears to have decided it is undignified to be too obsessed about what he wears. These days, he’s often found prowling the touchline in club-issue training gear or a thigh-length puffa. Even a snood.
“I wear clothes to feel good, not to look good,” he explains. “Sometimes I can wear a tracksuit, other times I need a tie and a jacket, it depends on the circumstances, but I’m never worried about being fashionable or looking good or something like that. Feeling good.”
I’m not sure I entirely believe him. This wintry afternoon, in a photographic studio in Fulham midway between his flat in Eaton Square and Stamford Bridge, Mourinho turns up layered deep in tasteful knitwear and tailoring. He wears a shawl-collared, double-breasted, flannel shirt nicer than it sounds and a Zegna gilet. His pre-Christmas buzz cut has grown out into something more benign.
What’s he like in person? The only answer I can offer is: you know how you’d imagine José Mourinho to be? He’s like that. This itself is remarkable; unique among famous people I’ve encountered.
Celebrities always surprise you in at least one or two respects: they are shorter or posher or grouchier or luvvier than you expect. Mourinho in the flesh is the Mourinho from the telly and off the back pages, just less extreme and outrageous, the volume turned down to five or six.
He is not exactly charming, but he is irrefutably charismatic. He has an ingenious knack of making basic lines of enquiry sound preposterous, which you learn not to take personally after a while. (An example: I’d heard he likes cars; he has a few and this year he’s lending his name to a new Mourinho supercar, which comes in an edition of 11. So, I ask, are cars important to him? He juts out his bottom lip: “No.” We move on.) He’s a fearsome intellect, always a few steps ahead; in an interview, you don’t elicit scoops from Mourinho, and he gives you presents, tied with a bow.
One of today’s bugbears is the vanity of the modern footballer. “Lots of times at Real Madrid, the players would be queuing in front of the mirror before the game while the referee waited for them in the tunnel,” he recalls.
“But that’s how society is now. Young people care a lot about this: they are twenty something and I am 51 and if I want to work with kids I have to understand their world. How can I stop my players on the bus doing, er, what do you call? Twitter and these things? How can I stop them if my daughter and my son do the same? So, I have to adapt to the moment.”
Mourinho accepts that football is a less innocent game than when he first arrived at Chelsea a decade ago. He was brought in by Abramovich, a reclusive oil tycoon, who not long before had bought the club for £140m, without even bothering to haggle. Within a month, the Russian had spent £100m, an unfathomable amount back then, on new players.
Now, of course, foreign investors are commonplace: they own stakes in 10 out of 20 Premier League clubs and many in the lower divisions. Players’ wages have inflated from merely disgusting to morally obscene. It’s an age where Tom Cleverley yes, Manchester United’s Capital One Cup stalwart can launch his own fashion label: TC23.
“I’m a manager since 2000, so I’m in my second generation of players,” Mourinho says. “What I feel is that before, players were trying to make money during their career, be rich at the end of their career. But in this moment, the people who surround them try to make them rich before they start their career.” He laughs mirthlessly. “They try to make them rich when they sign their first contract, when they didn’t play one single match in the Premier League, when they don’t know what it is to play in the Champions League. This puts the clubs in difficult conditions sometimes.”
And it makes Mourinho’s job harder? “You have to find the right boy: the boy, who wants to succeed, has pride and passion for the game,” he replies. “His dream is not one more million or one less million, his dream is to play at the highest level, to win titles, because if you do these things you’ll be rich the same at the end of your career. So we are working hard to give the best orientation to young players, to follow examples of guys from the past the Lampards, the Terrys who were always fanatical for victories.”
The rehabilitation of John Terry and to a lesser extent Lampard has been one of the signatures of Mourinho’s first season back in England. Successive managers, starting with André Villa-Boas and gathering zeal with Rafa Benítez, had set about dismantling Chelsea’s reliance on its old guard.
Mourinho came at the problem from the opposite direction: while fully acknowledging the club had to rebuild, he decided to put Terry and Lampard front and centre of the process. Instead, he heaped pressure on Mata: consistently brilliant, never less than polite, modest, a model professional.
Immediately, this strategy appeared to show Mourinho at his most contrapuntal: the world thinks that? Idiots! Certainly, only Mourinho could have got away with it. Perhaps he chose to do it because he wanted to stamp his authority or maybe it was because he’d just had his nose bloodied at Real Madrid. But he has certainly committed to it and the early signs are that Chelsea are heading in the right direction.
“Terry and Lampard are very, very important,” says Mourinho. “It was very important for me to recover them.”
We meet in late January, not long before the transfer window slams shut until the end of the season, and Mourinho spends the first five minutes thumbing his mobile phone. “Now is time to sell players, buy players, players on loan, all these things,” he says, finally looking up. “So, even if I’m not in the office, I’m working on the phone.”
It’s an impressive display of multi-tasking: in the newspaper sports pages the following morning, the lead story will be that, seemingly out of nowhere, Manchester United are close to agreeing terms with Chelsea for Mata, a transfer that will eventually cost a club-record £37.1m.
The standard take on Mourinho accepted by fans and detractors is that everything comes back to his own brief, unremarkable career as a player. Born in Setúbal, a genteel city south of Lisbon, his family had deep roots in football: his father Félix was a goalkeeper, capped once by Portugal; his uncle Mario Ledo, who owned a sardine cannery, built the football stadium for the local team Vitória de Setúbal. Mourinho was a defender and in his teens he joined Rio Ave, a first-division outfit of which his father was manager.
In the creation myth, the furious, bombastic Mourinho was born in 1982 when, aged 19, he was a substitute against Sporting Lisbon, the dominant team in Portugal at that time.
One of Rio Ave’s defenders was injured, but just as Félix was about to call up his son, he was informed by the club president that if he played José, not only would he never turn out for Rio Ave again, but Félix would be fired as manager. Father and son watched their team lose 71 from the stands and Mourinho as the line goes decided he would never endure such humiliation again. From there, he went to business school for one day, transferred to a university course in sports science and eventually worked his way up to coaching football teams.
Mourinho disputes some of the specific details, but mostly he refutes its conclusion. “If people think that, because I was not a top player, I was frustrated with that. I wasn’t,” he says. “Not at all. I enjoyed my football even playing in the second or third division. Since the beginning, I always felt I was much more of a coach than a player, so when I finish my academic studies and coaching badges, I jump naturally into that area. I did in my life always what I want to do.”
This interpretation creates a problem: where does Mourinho’s drive come from if not to prove something to his father perhaps, or to give a middle-finger salute to anyone who doubted his greatness?
For Mourinho, the explanation for his rise is rather more humdrum: he just worked really hard. He taught disabled children, he became a fitness trainer and eventually, in 1992, he hooked up with Bobby Robson, the new manager of Sporting Lisbon, as a translator.
“It’s not obsessive,” Mourinho corrects. “I think details are important: details make players better; details make the team better; details help to win. Of course, there are a few players in the world who by themselves can make a team look better than it is. But basically, football is about teams and teams are better if you care about the details. So, it’s not an obsession, my experience tells me that details can make a difference.”
Mourinho spoke with Mutu and told him that he stood at a crossroads: he could fight and struggle and achieve something special at Chelsea; alternatively, he was already rich, a king in Romania, he could be satisfied with that. “But five years after you leave football, nobody remembers you,” he warned. “Only if you do big things. This is what makes history.” Not long after, Mutu tested positive for cocaine and was banned for seven months. As his career winds down with FC Petrolul Ploiești, he has one Romanian league title and cup to his name.
What becomes clear once you have read dozens of testimonies from former and current players is the sophistication with which Mourinho approaches the mental side of the game.
His ability to gauge the mood goes far beyond the hairdryer treatment or a quick scan of the Wikipedia entries for Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. Brendan Rodgers, now the Liverpool manager, described working under Mourinho for three years at Chelsea as “like being at Harvard University”.
