“Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.”
The man who announced himself in English football with these iconic words, needs no introduction José Felix Mourinho had already been a serial European Champion with Porto, a team which signified the beauty of football. It resonates feelings like that of Leicester City’s recent Premier League victory and much like Leicester it faced a similar fate as the squad was ripped apart by wealthier European Teams and one of the biggest move that summer was Mourinho joining the English team Chelsea who had set the tone for huge foreign investment in teams (and yes it did not start with Manchester City) and he announced his arrival with this quote and a flurry of expensive signings to play football through his life’s work on Tactical Peroidisation.
While one might remember Jose asserting that he must be respected during his tenure at United, one mustn’t forget that he had managed to garner that of United’s own legend no other than Sir Alex Ferguson and the special relationship the both of them shared was just that these two were as human as all of us.
“Forget the mind games—I like him. I think he sees himself as the young gunslinger who has come into town to challenge the sheriff who has been around a while. He was certainly full of it, calling me “boss” and “big man” when we had our post-match drink.”— this is what Sir Alex Ferguson said of the man with whom he shared a post match drink many a times. Jose is someone who has less than cordial relations with most of his peers and has had infamous run ins with a host of managers which include the likes of Rafa Benitez, Pep Guardoila and not to forget Arsene Wenger. Afterall who can forget the two of them going at each other like schoolboys on the touchlines.
Jose Mourinho is an enigma, an act beneath whom lies a boy who quit just one day after he was enrolled in business school by his mother and vowed to her that he’d make money out of football, someone who started as a mere translator to Bobby Robson and followed him in his journey all over.
Mourinho became the first in the line of many special managers in the game of football who were the first consistent ones to challenge the belief that the absence of a playing career, and in its place a focus on an intellectual approach to football, is any barrier to success as a manager. Mourinho has garnered admirers in the likes of Andres Villas Boas who picked up his football side of thinking and went from winning titles to the racing track to Rui Faria, who picked who eventually left Mourinho alone, however he has picked up another young Portguese footballing brain in Joao Sacramento who hails from Barcelos, just north of Porto. Sacramento completed a degree in sports coaching and a Masters in performance coaching at the University of Glamorgan and will embark on a journey with the Portuguese in his new adventure at Totthenham Hostpurs.
Managing a football club in today’s days is more than just being successful on the pitch but having a lot of pragmatism in the entire approach unless you have the aura of being a favourite during your playing days a benefit afforded to Pep Guardoila at Barcelona to Zinedine Zidane at Real Madrid, I mean who can forget Zidanes goal in the Champions League Final in ‘ 02 against Bayer Leverkusen and as much as I respect Gareth Bale, Zizou has been at the pinnacle of world football in his days. The same treatment is afforded to the likes of Lampard, Ole and even Artreta. The men who belong to the kingdom of not so successful players who preferred to have a not so intellectual approach to football involve alot of work off the field like turning up with Presentations at interviews which include prospective transfer targets and lays the foundation for setting up objectives and demand much more control in the working of the club.
Managers now give detailed presentations about what they can bring to a club – AVB did it and it includes the likes of Julius Nagelsmann, who has earned the nickname ‘Baby Mourinho’ early on in his coaching career. However the RB Leipzig boss also at times shown he’s very much his own man. Somewhere on all of those presentations are Mourinho’s fingerprints, leading back to the days when he used to astonish Bobby Robson by coming back with scouting reports detailing walking postures of players and their shoe sizes.
“I AM NOT ONE FROM THE BOTTLE, I AM A SPECIAL ONE”
Jose Mourinho introducing himself as Chelsea Manager in his first stint at Stamford Bridge
He was, it is true, “not one from the bottle”. Jurgen Klopp loves the excitement of creating a winning football team; Sir Alex Ferguson lived for nothing else; Arsene Wenger was ultimately too soft for the quest but it clearly pushed his buttons; Pep Guardiola is the ultimate control freak who loves winning. All of them, from Klopp’s hurling everyone up the pitch to press, to Guardiola wanting to play one centre-back, to Fergie imploring his players to simply “do something to excite me”, to Wenger wanting no-one in his midfield but beautiful passers, have room in their characters for winning’s essential element: recklessness.
Although his tumultuous reign at Madrid is what people remember, the forgotten part of his time there is the League title with 100 points and Mourinho’s men being the ‘nearly men’ of football in the Champions League, a competition Real has won 4 times after his exit in 8 years, including 3 on the trot. Florentino Perez when aksed about Mourinho stated that- “The balance of Mourinho’s time here, is that we have made a very important qualitative leap, both competitively and sporting. We are back where this club should be; prior to his arrival we were knocked out in the Champions League round of 16 and were not even seeded.” Mourinho continues to be on the list of managers who are linked with the Madrid job consistently.
Therefore wherever Mourinho goes he leaves his mark, for the good in some cases and to the contrary in others and now he will stand under the lights on the touchlines of the Totthenham Hotspurs new stadium and hopefully use his chance at redemption, a chance to either reinvent himself and be the enigma he was once, glimpses of which will surely be seen behind the scenes on the Spurs Amazon Prime Documentary or probably take a less glorious road in his adventure in football. Mourinho’s journey in football is at crossroads but it’s not the first time and after all the man might cut a sorry figure but it’s worthy to remember the famous “I think I am a Special One” and perhaps it would do Mourinho some good to steer Spurs towards something which serves as a reminder that he is still relevant. Whatever happens, Jose will leave his mark on a Spurs team brimming with talent and a team that was the ‘nearly men’ of Champion’s League 2019 and it’s an exciting tale that’s coming out of the white half of North London where Jose Mourinho writes another tale in his rollercoaster ride in football.
With Inputs from: The Football365.com, The Independent, The Daily Mail.co.uk, The NY Times.com, Bundesliga.com
From The Touchline 