JOSE MOURINHO PROFILIE: RICHARD FITZPATRICKon how the ever-controversial super coach is playing for the highest of stakes in Real Madrid's four-game series with Barcelona
NOBODY SEEMS to be able to fathom José Mourinho. The Spanish public is desperate to get to the nub of his contrary ways. Earlier in the season, Real Madrid travelled to Alicante to play Hércules, who had just been promoted, at the Rico Pérez stadium. It was Halloween weekend, an eerie time of year. After the match, four pieces of scrunched-up paper were salvaged by the away team’s dugout. They were from Mourinho’s notebook.
The papers were spirited to the studios of El Día Después(The Day After), which is a football show on Canal Plus television. They were pored over by a psychologist and a hand-writing expert. What could they tell us?
There were notes scrawled like “depth, dead balls, switch wings” and “pace, movement, TR9”. There were other initials. Maybe they corresponded to players – DM (Ángel Di María); XA (Xabi Alonso); K (Sami Khedira).
One note mentioned “10 months”, which equates to the length of a football season. Another listed numbers like 38 and 13. Real Madrid will play 38 games in La Liga. They were getting places.
There are 13 games in the Champions League, should they progress all the way to the final. But how could Mourinho know they would? Did he know they’d meet Barcelona in the semi-final tomorrow? Who is this prophet?
He’s a “strong, decisive character”; he has an “astonishing capacity for leadership”, the experts told us. He is a “good man”, a “noble” man.
Not all agree. Two weeks later, Real Madrid travelled up to the Cantabrian coast in the north-west of Spain to play Sporting Gijón, the home team of Asturias. He was not welcome in the Molinón, home to one of Spain’s most feared set of fans.
He’d raised their hackles by having a go at Manolo Preciado, their manager. The tête-à-tête went back to September when Sporting Gijón took the field without eight normal starters against Barcelona – Real Madrid’s great rivals – at the Camp Nou and lost 1-0.
“Look,” said Preciado in despair at the time, “you need to understand algebra to beat this Barcelona side.”
Mourinho fumed, claiming Gijón should be punished for rolling over. Preciado, a man who is comfortable fondling a microphone, let it go. But when Mourinho raised the subject again on a radio interview on the Thursday before their encounter, he opened up.
“In September I thought he’d just got it wrong but then I hear him again and not only does he not take it back, he goes and extends it. If no one at Real Madrid is going to tell this bloke how to behave, I will. Who the f*** does he think he is to say things like that?
“Who does he think he is to say that about a team like us: a humble side that fights to the very last to stay in the top flight? Well, we might be poor but we’re not idiots. He is a bad colleague, egotistical. He is a canalla.”
A canalla is a swine, a creep. As it happened, Mourinho was serving a two-match ban for abusing a referee in a Copa del Rey match, so he had to take up his seat in a VIP box for the match against Gijón. Outside its glass windows, he was abused by irate hometown fans: “¡Ese portugués, hijo puta es” – “he’s Portuguese, he’s a son of a bitch” – they chanted.
He mightn’t have been able to hear them, but if he could read Asturian, polyglot that he is, one of the banners in the stands was telling him: “Mourinho, don’t you come here and wind people up.”
Real Madrid stole a late goal to win 1-0. Mourinho made his way to his coach flanked by three security staff. He took up his seat in one of the front rows, casually flipping two fingers to screaming Sporting Gijón fans as the bus pulled away.
It wasn’t always this way for Real Madrid managers when they toured the Spanish backwaters. Normally Real Madrid would be fêted by smaller, regional teams when they visited stadiums, from Almeria to Zaragoza.
It was like the circus coming to town. The locals would be entertained by Real’s sumptuous, attacking style of play served up by some of the world’s greatest football stars. Now, with Mourinho at the helm, busy needling people wherever he goes, they’re maligned.
Historically, Barcelona, Spain’s other great force, have been identified by their manager. One thinks of Helenio Herrera in the 1950s, the man who preached catenaccio, the dour, defensive system; Dutchman Rinus Michels, the godfather of its free-flowing antithesis, Total Football, in the late-1970s; César Menotti, Argentina’s 1978 World Cup-winning coach and bon vivant who used to schedule training sessions for 3pm in the afternoons, the better to allow him time to recover from the rigours of Barcelona’s nightlife; and, of course, Johan Cruyff, who still pontificates about club affairs from the wings.
Real Madrid’s managers, in comparison, have always lived in the shadows. In Casa Madrid, they’ve occupied a small backroom, sandwiched between larger presences like the president, his directors and the club’s Galáctico footballers.
Fabio Capello managed the club twice. Both times he won La Liga. Both times he got the sack, denunciations of his defensive approach ringing in his ears as he departed the Spanish capital.
Jupp Heynckes had to walk the plank after bringing the club the Champions League crown in 1998, the club’s first in 32 years.
Even sentiment doesn’t get in the way with the kingmakers at the Bernabéu. Vicente del Bosque, who steered the club to two Champions League titles and, of course, led Spain to World Cup glory, was sacked 26 hours after guiding the club to a domestic league title.
Like a reckoning dinner with a Sicilian family, he was popped in a restaurant while Real players celebrated in an adjoining banquet room, a grotty end to his 35-year association with the club as player and coach.
“Coaches”, quipped Juande Ramos, another man who briefly held the tiller at Real, “are useful to have around – as someone to burn”.
Mourinho, like the teams he manages, has been on the counter-attack all season. He’s torched a few of the heavyweights inside the Bernabéu. Jorge Valdano – a World Cup winner with Argentina in 1986 and Real’s director general and resident intellectual – was on an uneasy footing with Mourinho from the off. He had to apologise publicly at the start of the season for referring to the football Mourinho served up at Chelsea as being like “shit on a stick”. He drew Mourinho’s ire after Real Madrid’s historic 5-0 caning at the Camp Nou last November with his criticism.
“He couldn’t bring a major correction to the game,” Valdano said, railing against Mourinho’s tactical inertia, before taking a swipe at his lack of courage: “Today he didn’t even leave the bench,” a wicked dig as Mourinho had been taunted by Barça’s fans in the second half to “come out of the dugout”.
A few weeks later, Real Madrid lost striker Gonzalo Higuaín to long-term injury. He’s only just returning, but still lacks match fitness. Mourinho had flagged the need for another striker at the start of the season. When he pushed the club to let him sign another forward in December, he got nowhere.
Valdano said he already had one in Karim Benzema. Mourinho had yet to be convinced about Benzema. When he left him on the bench for Real’s next league outing, Valdano criticised Mourinho at a press conference. Mourinho responded by freezing Valdano out, refusing to allow him to travel with the team.
Since then, Valdano, famed for his eloquence, has been reduced to a role as the club’s public relations voice, a counterpoint to Mourinho’s belligerence.
“Valdano transmits the image of a señor, a gentleman,” says Tomás Roncero, a pundit on Spanish television. “He always says the appropriate words. If Valdano was as Mourinho, then Real Madrid would be like a Mexican gang. They’d be like Pancho Villa’s army. Valdano gives balance to the club. In spite of some errors, he is necessary for Real Madrid.”
Mourinho has ridden rough shod over an assortment of entities. He’s berated the Spanish Football Federation for their match scheduling, which, ridiculously, he claims has favoured Barcelona, Real’s rivals for the league. Real effectively handed the title to Barça – their third on the trot – last Saturday week. The pair drew 1-1 at the Bernabéu, which means they now trail the Catalan club by eight points with five games remaining.
Mourinho has also carped continuously about Spanish league referees, behaviour which, historically, would have been unbecoming for a manager of Real Madrid, a club renowned for their señoría, or gentlemanliness.
But these are strange times for Real. Fifa’s “Club of the 20th Century” are struggling to keep up with Barça, their fierce, all-conquering rivals.
Real Madrid signed Mourinho, their “Galáctico on the bench”, to put a stop to Barça’s gallop. The true costs of that decision are starting to roll in. In an unprecedented move, Real president Florentino Pérez, one of Spain’s wealthiest men, a man who fired six coaches during one three-year stretch, effectively ceded power over the club to Mourinho in a speech to the members in March.
“Class is earned by acknowledging the merits of our opponents, but also by defending what we believe is just,” he said. “Class is earned by denouncing irregular behaviour both on and off the pitch. It is also an example of true Madridismo to defend Real Madrid from what we believe to be unjust, irregular or arbitrary. And that is exactly what our coach, José Mourinho, does. What José Mourinho says is also an example of Madridismo.”
Three weeks later, Esperanza Aguirre, president of Madrid’s parliament, rowed in. In one of her first public pronouncements after an operation for cancer, she said, “Mourinho is the best manager of the 21st century. I’m with Mourinho a muerte”. The speech sent Spain’s intelligentsia into overdrive.
For deconstruction, La Vanguardia, Catalonia's main newspaper, rolled out a Harvard sociologist. In between excited invocations of pre-feudal knights and German philosopher Hegel's ideas about self-consciousness, he believes Mourinho has been turned into an icon of the Spanish right. The wags in Spain already call his club Real Moudrid. What next for him?
Last Wednesday night, Real beat Barcelona 1-0 in the final of the Copa del Rey, the second instalment of their four-game 18-day series. The winning goal, a scorching header from 12 yards, came from Cristiano Ronaldo in extra-time. King Juan Carlos I of Spain presented the cup, named in his honour, to Real captain Iker Casillas. Mourinho is Portuguese. It is unclear whether he covets the king’s job.
Richard Fitzpatrick is an Irish journalist based in Barcelona, and is currently writing a book on Spanish football.
