José Mourinho smiled his winning smile and those in attendance watched his features soften. The analogy was to the family cat, when it is tickled under the chin. “I am the Happy One,” Mourinho declared, and the soundbite fizzed around the world. It was June 2013, he was back for a second spell at Chelsea – where his love affair with English football had begun – and he was making all the right noises.
The enemy of football? Come on. Mourinho had learned from his previous indiscretions, he was older, wiser and more mellow and he simply wanted to work hard to get Chelsea back on top. As ever the delivery was faultless. Mourinho can be the actor supreme or, to paraphrase his rival, Pep Guardiola, “the boss of the press room,” yet it was his next quotation which bears revisiting.
“I have the same nature, I am the same person, I have the same heart,” Mourinho told the room. “I have the same kind of emotions relating to my passion for football and my passion for my job.”
Manchester United have agonised long and hard over whether to appoint Mourinho and it is no exaggeration to measure the time-scale of the deliberations in years. The club considered moving for him as the replacement for Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013 only to conclude that his style and personality were not what was required.
They are now to take the plunge and the elders at Old Trafford – men like Sir Bobby Charlton and Ferguson – hope that they will witness Mourinho's warm and charming side. It is sure to be on show when he is unveiled as the successor to Louis van Gaal later in the week, at the kind of box-office occasion over which he has long demonstrated a mastery.
It is probably fair to say at this point that Mourinho has found his professional fit in England, his spiritual home from home. Unlike in Spain or Italy, say, there is a media preoccupation with personality and all of the attendant trimmings. Mourinho recognises the buttons and he knows how to press them. As an aside, it will be interesting to see how the Manchester City-bound Guardiola copes with this aspect of the job.
Football in Manchester is about to get tastier and one of the questions concerns whether Mourinho will be able to become the figurehead that United want. Could the experiences of his most recent tenure at Chelsea influence him? Might he have learned any lessons from the manner in which it unravelled?
Mourinho’s second stint at Stamford Bridge followed a familiar pattern. There was the initial uplift and the glory of trophies before the sense that the world was against him fuelled the personal outbursts and eventually created an atmosphere of weariness.
That said, the way that it imploded was spectacular and it continues to feel a trick of the mind that Chelsea went from being the defending champions to a position one point above the relegation places last December, when Mourinho was dismissed. His players had patently stopped listening to him or, to borrow a phrase, there was “palpable discord” between them and him.
But this authentic managerial great is not a person to worry about bending to the will of others, nor to doubt himself. The ego makes sure he will not and the accumulated silverware offers further fortification. To recap, the 53-year-old has won eight league titles in four countries, the Champions League with two different clubs, the Uefa Cup, the FA Cup, three League Cups, the Spanish Cup and the Italian Cup.
Change his ways and the uncompromising methods that have made him? Even if Mourinho truly wanted to, he could not. An early charm offensive at Old Trafford can be expected but there will come a point when the win-at-all-costs impulse and the other internal complexes form their usual irresistible force.
It is worth remembering how Mourinho spoke, in the summer of 2013, of having buried the hatchet with Arsène Wenger, his old adversary at Arsenal. In February 2014 he was back on more familiar ground, branding Wenger a “specialist in failure”.
Mourinho has always given the impression that he needs confrontation – either with rivals such as Guardiola, Wenger or Claudio Ranieri [from his time at Internazionale] to groups that have ranged from governing bodies to referees' committees to Unicef, the charity partner of Barcelona. United know what they are getting, for better or for worse, and Mourinho knows they are backing him. Otherwise they would once again have looked beyond him.
Even when Mourinho is wrong, as he was with the inexcusable attack on Eva Carneiro, the Chelsea doctor, at the beginning of the season, he feels that he is right. Their dispute is set to reach a public tribunal next month, as Mourinho has so far been against an out-of-court settlement. This is because he believes he has not been out of order. He also felt that Chelsea’s failed title defence could be attributed to the lack of investment in the squad and a disrupted pre-season – and the negative momentum that subsequently became unstoppable.
United look ripe for a bit of Mourinho-therapy. He will galvanise the place and plenty of the players will love his enthusiasm. After the torpor of Van Gaal anybody – or any style of football – is likely to be more enjoyable. It should be said, however, that, like Van Gaal, Mourinho places an emphasis on discipline and analysis. He first made his name on the technical side of the game as an analyst. His attention to detail is painstaking and he is known for the constant demands he puts on his players.
The squad that Mourinho will inherit does not appear to be heavy on the type of physical powerhouse that he has tended to favour while it will be interesting to see whether he trusts the young players like Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford. Mourinho has often preferred the more experienced ones to execute his orders. Changes are inevitable and it is easy to feel that they could or should be sweeping. Mourinho is a man to shake things up.
(Guardian service)
