Downfall of the ‘Special One’
Downfall
Last week the ‘Special One’ was sacked as Chelsea manager. Alastair Campbell, who interviewed Jose Mourinho for his book on winners, explains how he lost the confidence of his players — and then his boss
Published: 20 December 2015
THIS will be a horrible weekend for Jose Mourinho. That horror is not merely explained by the obvious; he will by now have begun to absorb the humiliation of failure and the shame of being sacked after the most calamitous period of an otherwise brilliant career.
The real pain and crushing emptiness will come from having no match. Nothing to prepare. No pitchside to patrol. No players to direct. No fans to rouse. The man is an addict. Addicted to football. Addicted to winning. Addicted to success. His philosophy is simple and he put it succinctly when I met him last year: “I say to my players, ‘Enjoy the game.’ They know what I mean. I mean that if they lose, they won’t enjoy it. If they win they will. That’s it.”
A man so obsessed with winning could hardly be surprised to lose his job when, for the first time in his life, the defeats began to outnumber the victories.
I doubt Mourinho could bear to watch Chelsea play Sunderland yesterday. These are no longer “my players”. Indeed, Mourinho-watchers had noticed that he had of late stopped calling them “my players”, preferring the neutrality of “the players”. His demise can partly be blamed on the fact that several of them had ceased to be his players in anything but name well before his eventual sacking.
First time round at Chelsea, from 2004 to 2007, Mourinho fell out with plenty of people — other managers, referees, administrators and large sections of the media. But never the players. This time the Mourinho magic dust, the legendary motivational powers, had evaporated.
He told me the players he loved were those who would “kill to win, die to win”. There was precious little evidence of that attitude this season.
As to why, there is no simple answer. The full story will take a long time to unfold and just as Brian Clough’s managerial life has become the stuff of film legend, I suspect Mourinho’s will too. The Fall of Jose would have quite a cast and is quite a story. George Clooney might think of trying out a Portuguese accent.
There is the silent, all-powerful, baby-faced Russian owner whose vast wealth emerged from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Vladimir Putin and who has led the oligarchisation of our national sport — a galaxy of multimillionaire, multinational athletes of varying moral standards known from one end of the globe to another.
There is a glamorous doctor, Eva Carneiro, whose full role in Mourinho’s downfall is likely to be revealed in a court case that can surely only add to the agony he is now enduring. And there is a powerful super-rich super-agent, Jorge Mendes, who is already plotting to see which top clubs emerge to fight — and pay millions — for his client’s services.
So the Mourinho story is far from over. It has just hit a very painful and unusual fork in the road. As to when he comes back and whether he succeeds elsewhere, that will depend in part on how he reacts to this setback and what he learns from these wretched few months that have baffled him every bit as much as they have baffled everyone else in sport.
Humility has never been a big part of his public persona. It will have to be now; “a specialist in failure”, he once called the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger — he won’t be throwing that one again any time soon. He might be better advised to heed the words of the Irish athletics coach Colm O’Connell: “The winner is the loser who evaluates defeat properly.”
I have conducted two long interviews with Mourinho: the first for a book, Winners and How They Succeed, in which his name stands out large in gold lettering on the front cover, and again earlier this year when he won the special editor’s prize at GQ magazine’s men of the year awards, an accolade unlikely to be repeated any time soon.
On both occasions he was riding high, seemingly unstoppable in the race between him and Pep Guardiola — first of brilliant Barcelona, now with brilliant Bayern Munich — to be seen as the greatest manager alive. The first interview was conducted during the 2014 World Cup as he prepared for what turned out to be yet another successful assault on the Premier League title. I asked him about his relationship with the players. Did he want them to like him? He shrugged and the face crinkled with that bottom-lip pout that is known to football fans all over the world. In other words, if they like me, fine, but it is not a big deal.
Campbell, left, says Mourinho likes to be thought of as the best manager in the world
He said what he really wanted was that when he showed up for work, either on the training ground or on match day or in the media, they looked at him and thought: “There is nobody who does his job better than he does.” Across four of the great footballing countries of the world, Portugal, England, Italy and Spain — he was won national titles in all of them and the Champions League in two — hundreds of players have known that feeling.
The fact that he never played at the top level became irrelevant as at every club he genuinely impressed professionals with his knowledge and his phenomenal attention to detail.
You need to be neither a tactician nor a psychologist to know that this season respect from “the players” has been in short supply. Instead, there have been shocking displays of petulance and disrespect. Diego Costa throwing a training bib at him in front of a global television audience. Last Monday, in what turned out to be Mourinho’s last match in charge, Eden Hazard — a man Mourinho told me was the fourth best player in the world behind Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Andres Iniesta — delivering a dismissive wave of the hand and marching off down the tunnel after in effect deciding against his manager’s wishes to substitute himself.
Even when the players have backed him the effect has been counterproductive. I was with a group of managers at a conference shortly after Cesc Fabregas publicly declared his “full backing” for Mourinho. One of his fellow Premier League managers was appalled: “That is the last thing you need. Players’ backing should be a given. What Fabregas said is worse than a statement of confidence from the board.”
There is little doubt that player power played its part in Mourinho’s demise, not least because some of them have a direct line to Roman Abramovich upstairs. Wenger once observed: “If the manager is not the most important man at the football club, then why do we sack the manager if it doesn’t go well?”
Fair point. But no matter the skills of the manager, as Harry Redknapp points out, matches are won and lost by players. He feels that managers get too much praise and kudos when things go well, too much opprobrium when they don’t. Implicit in this observation is the sense that Mourinho has always made it about him. To be fair, he has long adopted the approach that it is part of the manager’s job to be out there taking the heat and protecting the players, not least from the media.
This has ensured, given the 22 trophies he has delivered over 12 years, that he has enjoyed a fair share of the adulation that comes the winners’ way. It also means that as things have gone wrong he has been in the firing line in a way that his misfiring players have not. They can be dropped and substituted and he has dropped and substituted some of the biggest names of all, from Costa to the captain, John Terry, left sulking and simmering behind him on the bench. But they can’t be sacked. Not overnight in the way that a manager can — and often is.
And “Mr Abramovich”, as Mourinho always — until 2pm last Thursday, at least — calls the owner, is unlikely to sack himself.
Insofar as my book has a central theory, it is that winning organisations must have the holy trinity of strategy, leadership and teamship working in harmony. Teams without strategy fail. Teams without good leaders fail. Leaders without strategy fail. Leaders without teamship operating at every level of the organisation fail. Rereading my interviews with Mourinho now, it is clear he was unconvinced that there is much difference — in football, at least — between strategy and tactics. Also clear is his belief that teamship is subservient to leadership. This is a change from his first period in charge of Chelsea, perhaps a result of all the success he has enjoyed and an excessive belief in how much of that was down to him, not the team.
Mourinho’s public row with Eva Carneiro, the Chelsea team doctor, was symptomatic of his season (mike egerton/PA)
Wenger makes the point that the pressures of 24/7 and social media have changed leadership in the modern world “from vertical to horizontal”. In a vertical world, leaders could lead from the top and their decisions would work their way through the system. In a horizontal world, leaders are bombarded every second with the advice and opinions of others.
The point is well illustrated by the hundreds of thousands of tweets that greeted Mourinho’s dismissal, covered in depth by television, the press and radio all over the world. This shift from vertical to horizontal, says Wenger, creates massive stress that can shrink you as a leader and as an individual, so decisions become harder and harder to make.
The only way to deal with it, he argues — rightly in my view — is to ignore the noise and focus on the only things you can actually control: what you do and what you say about it.
It may be this approach that leads to the word “stubborn” being applied to Wenger so much. He would prefer that to the E-word — “erratic” — that has recently defined Mourinho’s leadership, vertical in a horizontal world.
Wenger has survived long trophy-less periods in part because of good upward management (excellent relations with the board), good lateral management (maintaining the support of most fans, sponsors, media, others in the game) and good downward management (he has never “lost the dressing room” and never undermines his players in public). Politics and business could learn from how he has done it.
Wenger, not a friend or much of an admirer of his Portuguese rival, is of the view that the Mourinho management style lends itself well to good times, less so to bad, let alone the horrific run Chelsea have recently endured. But when things go awry people need support and when the winner has made so many enemies en route to success, the support is not always there.
It is this that has led to the theory that Mourinho cannot deliver sustained success for one club. He can be rude to, even contemptuous of, people with the same goals. There have been few fighting hard for him inside the Chelsea circle in recent days. He can be violent in his language, in his enmities, in his determination to create a siege mentality to his own team’s benefit.
It is this that perhaps led to his time in Spain — he admitted he didn’t like it — being until now the least enjoyable period of his career. A colleague of his who has worked in both Spain and England says Mourinho’s mistake was to try to make his Real Madrid players hate their Barcelona counterparts.
He underestimated the extent to which their role as teammates in the Spanish national squad really mattered. He admitted to me that goalkeeper Iker Casillas — captain of Spain yet much of the time on the substitutes’ bench for Mourinho’s Real Madrid — “hates my guts”. I wonder if that was the reason.
Wenger is an interesting figure to compare with Mourinho. The Frenchman is equally obsessed about football and addicted to winning. But he also believes that how you win is important. He talks as much about values as he does about outcomes. He believes that for institutions to endure they must have strong principles as the foundation of a culture.
Chelsea is a club where power is very firmly in the hands of one man — Abramovich — whose values and principles, like much else about him, are mysterious and hidden from view because he never opens himself up to the fans or the media. I asked Mourinho why that was. “Because he is very clever.”
Perhaps the Abramovich model shows that money can only take you so far. Ultimately a club and indeed a manager do need values to guide them through good times and, especially, through bad. Ask any football fan to name the defining managerial figures of the Premier League and Sir Alex Ferguson, Mourinho and Wenger will come up again and again
Mourinho’s record now has an enormous scar across it, while what has followed Ferguson at Manchester United means a key part of enduring success — legacy — has undermined his record, not least because of his continuing role at the club in choosing his successors.
Carneiro: criticised by Mourinho So although Wenger has won the fewest trophies and enjoyed long barren spells, he has made the knockout phase of the Champions League every year since the 1999-2000 season — no mean feat.
And precisely because of his commitment to enduring values and principles, and a belief in the importance of legacy, whether in club structure or playing style or a new stadium, with finances and governance not dependent on one Russian oligarch, he could yet leave the game with the best reputation of the lot.
That would hurt Mourinho almost as much as not having a game to win this weekend, a hurt likely to be compounded if Arsenal win the title this season.
As to how the unemployed Mourinho might spend today, at least part of it will be in church and much of it in prayer. Here we come to the thing about him that surprised me most. When he told me Messi was the best player on the planet and I asked why, he said: “Because God decided.”
AC: Are you religious?
JM: “Yes.”
AC: How religious?
JM: “I am very religious.”
AC: What does religion mean to you?
JM: “I believe in God and I try to have a relationship with Him and it gives me strength and belief in everything I do.”
AC: When you pray, do you pray to God to help you win?
JM: “Basically not. I pray for my family, for our health and happiness, but before a game I like to read a couple of pages of the Bible, read at random, but if I do not win, I am not angry with Him, that is not the point of my relationship with Him, but I like to feel protected and God protects me.”
God didn’t protect him from the sack, not this time. At Chelsea it is Abramovich above, not God above, who decides. It is Mourinho who now joins a long line of people who might have been better advised: “Never go back.”
However, he is only 52 and when he thought about going for the England manager’s job in 2007 his wife Matilde urged him not to, saying he needed matches not every few months, or for a big tournament every couple of years, but every single week. He needed to work with players every single day.
That is why he is hurting badly today. It has gone. But it is also why we can be pretty sure he will be back in top-flight football before too long.
I don’t bet. But if I did I would put a wager on him being with another club within six months and winning the Champions League within three years; provided, that is, he does indeed learn a few lessons about where it all went wrong and doesn’t just look around for others to blame.
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