I admire Jose Mourinho despite his shortcomings. Mourinho is human and should be prone to mistakes. He is impatient with unserious players and he won’t fail to draw the line between those he wants and those who should look elsewhere for a contract when the season ends. Such characters with strong mien take no prisoners. Little wonder he has fallen out with the perceived untouchables everywhere he has worked. How won’t he when he’s the boss?
Mourinho’s move to Tottenham was a huge mistake. He didn’t need to hurry into a new job. If Mourinho eagerly wanted a job out of boredom, he shouldn’t have chosen to work with Spurs’ owner. This relationship was destined for crises. It was only a matter of time. It was a story of a manager who, too convinced of his own genius, became trapped in the past and of a chairman who was one of the few people in football unable to see it.
Going to handle Spurs, for Mourinho, was a paradigm shift because he was inheriting a club that plays with a flair, not the tightly-knit Mourinho style which is usually anchored on counterattacks. He may have seen Son as one player to perfect that formation based on his speed. But Spurs had become a great team after losing 2-0 in the final of the European Champions League to Liverpool. Breaking that squad which Mourinho was definitely going to do was bound to cause trouble. It did with the dropping of Dele Alli, a cult hero in the North London side.
“I have already spoken with him and I asked him if he was Dele or Dele’s brother,” Mourinho explained. “He told me he was Dele. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Play like Dele’.
“I think he is potentially a fantastic player. Now I have to create a tactical situation he is happy with, give him the right dynamics, and prepare him physically well because he has had important injuries and he is not on the top of his form.
“…… he needs to go through a process that will bring the real Dele back because the real Dele is the one who in the last few years has impressed us all.”
Mourinho ought to have known that with Levy, there was only one winner – the owner of Spurs. The Portuguese started well with Ali being his goal scorer until their relationship turned sour for reasons best known to them. Ordinarily, Mourinho would have replaced Alli, if Spurs was a big-spending club in the transfer market. It would have worked for the Special One. However, Mourinho must be ruing the opportunity he had to trade Alli to PSG since he has turned out to be the manager’s albatross in this latest sack saga.
Falling out with Alli and Gareth Bale, blaming his players, out of the top four picture and an embarrassing Europa League capitulation to Dinamo Zagreb, no doubt put Mourinho in this mess. Alli was dropped from Tottenham’s match-day squad for the first time in the second weekend of the Premier League season back in September. It led to months of Alli being in exile, and nearly led to two separate departures to Paris Saint-Germain over the course of this season.
Bale’s return to Spurs ought to have been an added fillip to the squad. It ought to have lifted the mood in north London and give Spurs belief they could compete at the top.
But claims about Bale’s fitness, form, and dedication made by Mourinho about the Wales winger came to a head in February when the Portuguese coach claimed the 31-year-old lied about saying he had a good training session on social media.
Those claims were similar to that of Mourinho’s row with Luke Shaw at Manchester United. Mourinho once said about Luke Shaw after Manchester United’s 1-1 draw with Everton in 2017: “He was in front of me and I was making every decision for him. He has to change his football brain.
“We need his fantastic physical and technical qualities but he cannot play with my brain. He must accelerate the process. Twenty-one is old enough to have a better understanding. He has a future here but Manchester United cannot wait.”
In fact, fall-outs with his whole squad accompanied his most recent exits at Real Madrid and Chelsea too. Terminating José Mourinho’s contracts early has cost his clubs over £50m in the past, according to club accounts.
Mourinho has had four of his contracts terminated early since he first joined Chelsea – Chelsea in 2007, Real Madrid in 2013, Chelsea again in 2015, and Manchester United in 2018.
The cost of those early terminations is listed in the accounts of each of the English clubs in question. They come to a combined total of £50.97m – Chelsea (first time): £23.07m, Chelsea (second time) £8.30m, Manchester United: £19.60m.
On April 19, 2021, Mourinho was sacked after only 17 months in charge of managerial affairs at the North London side.
Jose Mourinho is truly the cash-out king:
Chelsea (first time): Three years left at £5.00m-a-year – £15.00m.
Real Madrid: Three years left at £11.20m-a-year – £33.60m.
Chelsea (second time): Four years left at £13.00m-a-year – £52.00m.
Manchester United: Two years left at £12.00m-a-year – £24.00m
2021 – Tottenham, £30m Severance Package.
Mourinho’s coaching history is replete with such outstanding benchmarks but he appears not to have mastered the act of going through his club careers without having problems with top players in clubs where he has coached in the second season of his contract. Such needless face-offs with big players have led to his unceremonious exits as a result of players’ mutiny in support of their ‘oppressed’ mates.
The Special One hides under the cloak of instilling discipline to draw the line with such players. Pundits cannot understand why Mourinho takes delight in tackling such players. But he is the coach and the only leader on the pitch. Big players must learn how to respect their bosses no matter how important they perceive themselves to be.
Would Mourinho find a wealthy club to sign him? Yes because of his pedigree in the game. But he should learn how to be the boss without incurring the wrath of the other players. When Mourinho tackles his ‘victims’, he loses sight of the influence such iconic players have on the others. Sadly, Mourinho took delight in lambasting his players publicly after poor outings. This tendency belittled the players with many wondering if it wasn’t the manager who picked those to play and the strategies to adopt. It was rather uncouth for Mourinho to identify with the players each time they won games.
Sky Sports pundit Jamie Redknapp was furious over Mourinho’s comments. He told Sky: ”When I look at Jose right now, he is just reverting to type when things are going wrong. You can’t deny his record, he’s one of the greatest managers we’ve ever seen in football when he’s winning. But when it goes the other way, that’s when you learn a lot about a manager.
”It’s just typical of what Jose Mourinho does. As soon as things go wrong he throws players under the bus and if I was in that dressing room I would be asking him why. You’re the Special One. Why can’t you make us better?
”Why do we keep conceding goals with 20 minutes or 10 minutes to go in games? That’s what you’re so good at, setting the team up to make sure it doesn’t happen. So he has to take an awful amount of responsibility.”
Mourinho needs a reset starting with his human relations especially with the big players. He needs to shelve this tendency of lampooning in players at press conferences. Such angst ought to expressed with the players in the dressing room. Mourinho needs to know that in controversies, players get the backing of the management. owners of clubs are more inclined towards sacking managers if things go awry. Players are the ones to adopt coaches’ tactics. No coach gets onto the pitch to play. Therefore, Mourinho must have chummy relationship with his stars. Star players globally are brats. Successful managers have a way of getting them to deliver his tactics, preferring to change them of create competition for them in the team by recruiting very good players into the squad during the transfer windows in the winter and/or summer.
Don’t you think Mourimho deserves to give himself a one year break to retool? A colleague thinks otherwise, insisting that the Special One could be forgotten. Mourinho’s tactics aren’t the problem. His optics at match venues and how he allows what happens there to dictate how he goes about the next game are some of things he needs to redress.
