The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (16 page)

The meeting came to a close after 40 minutes when Zidane, who had kept himself in the background, looking very serious, was invited by the coach to say what he thought. The Frenchman nonchalantly contradicted what he had just heard:

‘You’re very good players and you should try to beat Barcelona. We are Real Madrid and Real Madrid always go out to win.’

Mourinho threw Zidane an indignant look before leaving the dressing room. (A month went by before the Frenchman returned to Valdebebas, to hold a lengthy discussion with Mourinho. In the dressing room they believed he had been reprimanded for not supporting the coach’s position.)

Ronaldo stayed in the dressing room bad-mouthing in Portuguese. He had been the only one who had dared to respond to Mourinho during the 40 minutes that he took to give his speech. ‘How this son of a bitch has sold me out’, they heard him shout.

Kaká was the only one to confess that he did not understand whose family was constantly being referred to by the coach. To find out he asked Higuaín, one of his close friends.

‘Who is his brother?’

‘The brother is Jorge Mendes,’ Higuaín told him.

The players could not believe what they had just witnessed. ‘This is shit!’ they said. They agreed that if their careers lasted another 100 years they would struggle to ever experience anything even half as strange as this. Going out on to the field they questioned each other in whispers, trying to work out whether everyone had understood the same thing: ‘They had to prepare to lose.’ Then there was the open confession, with no scruples whatsoever, that the coach had plotted with Mendes, his ‘brother’. They recalled that he dared to say that he had changed the tactical model to satisfy his ‘brother’ and agent. But now the needs had changed and this invited him to change the pieces on the board. ‘He’s given us Cristiano’s head,’ someone said. ‘He wants to make new friends.’

Ronaldo went out on to the pitch, took a ball, and kicked it so hard that he sent it flying high out of the enclosure. Then he went to the physiotherapy room and had a massage.

Casillas confessed to a friend in the club that he had never felt so embarrassed. He could not get out of his head the image of his former coach, Bernd Schuster, who was fired in the winter of 2008 for publicly saying, on the eve of a
clásico
, that it was not possible to win at the Camp Nou.

Zidane contacted Pérez that same Sunday to tell him what had happened at the meeting. Club sources say that the president did not like what he heard. The senior players waited for a call from the president, thinking that Pérez would overrule the coach and ask them to try by all means possible to win the tie. The team travelled to Barcelona on 2 May without receiving any such order and stayed at the Hotel Juan Carlos I. Mourinho insisted that they should be concentrating on defending their goal. Nothing about planning a comeback.

He met with the president at the hotel but there was no change of plans. No one knows what Pérez said. Then it was time to go to the stadium. Uncertainty reigned. Casillas waited for a call, a signal, a message to force the issue. Compelled to show his hand, Pérez made the choice that would characterise what remained of his mandate: backing Mourinho to the end. The president had decided to use Mourinho as the figurehead of his project long before that trip to the Camp Nou. By the time the team took the team bus to the game, the die was cast. Mourinho, suspended by UEFA, decided to stay in the hotel and watch the match on TV.

For a long time afterwards, Madrid employees on this trip recalled Casillas’s distress in the bus on the way to the stadium. No Mourinho, and Aitor Karanka silent in the front seat. The captain called his team-mates to the back, then told them to try to win the game. He asked them to respect the agreed tactics but to forget to take as many precautions and dare to attack Barça without inhibition, thereby going against the strict orders of Mourinho, someone with more power in the club than anyone in his position since Muñoz:

‘Come on! We’ve got to go out to win. We have to respect the formation but our attitude has to be to try to win the tie,’ Casillas shouted. ‘It has to be seen that we’re trying to win the game. They have to see that!’

Casillas said to his team-mates that they could tell the press what the coach had instructed them to say, but that on the pitch they should not surrender, adding that if they closed up shop they would look incompetent to the watching world. Huddled around him, everyone agreed.

Caught out by Madrid’s sense of adventure at the start of the match, Barcelona failed to impose themselves on the game. But despite the creativity of players like Kaká, Higuaín, Ronaldo, Di María and Marcelo, Madrid’s play failed to result in goals and their improvised tactics eventually faltered. Both teams failed to make the final ball count and the game finished 1–1. Manchester United – and ultimately the title of Champions of Europe – awaited Barcelona at Wembley.

UEFA did not fine Guardiola or any of his players. Quite the opposite. A Madrid director consulted Ángel María Villar, president of the Spanish Football Federation, on the chance of doing something about the appeal. Villar said that the best Madrid could do was to rid themselves of their coach. He warned that complaining was a mistake because UEFA thought that what Mourinho had implied was that their most prestigious competition – and their main source of income – was not clean. It was a head-on attack on the credibility of their organisation. The same competition that had enabled Mourinho to become a internationally known reference point in world football was now the subject of a complaint by the coach, with the formal backing of his club.

‘What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called if I would submit to you and all your orders.’

Homer,
The Iliad
, Book 1

One day during the 2010–11 season Madrid were staying in a hotel ahead of a match when some supporters gave Iker Casillas a photograph in which he was shown lifting the World Cup in Johannesburg. A team-mate came up to him to look at the image with admiration.

‘How cool …’

‘Six and a half kilos. It weighs six and a half kilos.’

Casillas mentioned the weight when talking about the solid-gold trophy that Silvio Gazzaniga had designed for FIFA and that he had held aloft as captain of the Spanish national team. Although, according to some, the weight of the trophy is eight kilos, the goalkeeper thought differently. For him it was six and a half kilos. When he remembered this moment, his team-mates saw how he got excited as only small boys and extremely happy men can. If there were two things that he felt deeply proud of, they were the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2008 European Championships in Austria and Switzerland. To have represented one of the greatest national football teams of all time filled him with total satisfaction. The team-mates who helped him to achieve it occupied a special place in his heart. Especially Xavi Hernández, who had been his accomplice in the national team since the time they were both teenagers.

Casillas was not picked by Mourinho to play the last game of the 2010–11 season against Almería at the Bernabéu on 21 May. Mourinho, seemingly content with Casillas’s work, had given him the day off. He was not in the dressing room when, after the referee blew the half-time whistle, his team-mates found Mourinho at his most challenging. They were winning 3–0, but, before they went back out on to the pitch and then went on their holidays, he wanted to send them off with a message that was both cryptic and threatening, according to certain witnesses:

‘Let’s be clear. You’re the first to know … I’m going to tell you the truth … Apart from the fact that we’ve lost the league because the
titulares
[first-team regulars] surrendered, the year has been fucking shit. A disaster. Why? Because of the
titulares
. Because they haven’t shown their faces. Between ourselves, let’s not kid anybody. The
titulares
haven’t been up to it. I’m sure that next year, with new recruits, we’re going to win everything.’

One player tells of a dressing room full of pent-up physical violence. Another thought that the absence of Casillas had encouraged the coach to come out and say things in a tone that he would not have been bold enough to have used if the captain had been present. Ronaldo tapped his boots insistently on the floor. Ramos looked disapprovingly at Mourinho. Albiol puffed out his cheeks and blew. But nobody opened their mouth to interrupt the boss. Mourinho finished his team-talk with a brief coda in which he attributed the team’s salvation in the public’s eyes to the distraction that his campaign of systematic denouncements of the referees, the TV companies and UEFA had generated.

‘It’s a good job that, thanks to me, we’ve come out of this looking OK. Thanks to me, people haven’t realised how bad the season has been.’

They went back out on to the pitch so motivated – or so afraid of losing their places ahead of the squad overhaul that had just been announced – that Almeria were to concede another five goals. It meant an 8–1 scoreline against a team that had already been relegated. Some fans celebrated as if this spectacle of humiliation had some sporting value, and the home team, with the backing of the crowd, went about their work with enthusiasm. But the magnitude of the result did nothing to diminish the sense of impending threat that accompanied them on their holidays. Many began to realise that the excuses that they had given Mourinho throughout the season came at a considerable price.

The 2010–11 season ended with Madrid winning the cup, and Barcelona the league and the Champions League. A modest return, but lauded by the club. Before the final match, Casillas and Karanka held press conferences to broadcast Mourinho’s version of Madrid’s year:

‘I would give this season 8 out of 10.’

If there was one player who deserved his season to be rated at 8 out of 10 it was Casillas. But the captain has never stood out for his ability to sell himself. Introverted and not particularly hot-blooded, he lacked the gift of self-promotion. The more famous he became, the more uncomfortable the resulting social commitments made him. He liked the fact that he was still treated as if he were some kid from the suburb of Móstoles, but what he most longed for was the contact he had with the residents of Navalacruz, the village of his grandparents. In this small bastion of the Sierra Avila he was able to enjoy some isolation, in the company of people who believed that parish-life routines provide a person with everything they need. He lacked the ambition for power and the desire to control others that distinguish many great football leaders. Lazy when it came to official matters, he was someone who avoided disputes until there was no other alternative. He was ‘
Cachazudo
’: calm, easy-going, phlegmatic.

In the summer of 2011 Casillas celebrated his 30th birthday. He had made his début in the first team in 1999 and had stood out when Madrid won the Champions League, although he was still practically a youth-team player. He was more experienced than any of his team-mates, and even though he found Mourinho unbearable he was prepared to travel along the same road with him for as long as that was what the club wanted. Mourinho had put Casillas up for the Ballon d’Or in 2010, knowing that it was to Casillas that he owed his continuity and his consolidation at the club. He was convinced that not even Pérez would have been able to justify backing Mourinho if he had not won the Copa del Rey, the cup secured by Casillas with some unforgettable saves.

The goalkeeping coach, Silvino Louro, said many times that he had never in his life seen a save like the one produced by Casillas to deny Iniesta in the final at the Mestalla. The Barcelona midfielder popped up in the number 10 position and hit a shot that looked to be curving perfectly into the far corner. But Casillas reacted incredibly quickly. His legs propelled him like two springs and his elastic body stretched, floating in mid-air as he reached for the ball, turning it away with the tips of his fingers for a corner. Mourinho admired the save so much he stressed its importance to Louro, Faria, Karanka and Chendo on the bench. They heard him say that the reason his time at Chamartín had not ended miserably in June 2011 was because of Iker’s saves at the Mestalla. But the manager would never recognise this outside of his inner circle.

After a year of insisting that the club needed modernising urgently, the sacking of Jorge Valdano, his immediate superior in the organisation, had given Mourinho control of all the levers necessary to remodel the institution from its centre: the squad. The coach had dreamed all his life of such a scenario – counting on the support of a club with worldwide influence, working shoulder to shoulder with Jorge Mendes, financially backing him to pick up players in the global market, with control over who was brought into the club and who left, whose contracts were improved and whose renewed. It was the kind of control that would give him influence in the market, prestige in the media and an impressive image in the eyes of his players. Until then not even Pinto da Costa, the Porto president, nor Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea, nor Massimo Moratti at Inter, had offered him such a wealth of resources. In the summer of 2011, after a career as first-team coach spanning 12 years, Mourinho reached the summit of his power.

Alarmed by what they had learned on the last day of the season, the Madrid players imagined a wave of intimidating new signings capable of challenging them for their places in the team. The dressing room never expected the list of new players that was eventually announced: Varane, Altintop, Sahin, Callejón, Coentrão, Pedro Mendes. Neither had it foreseen that the most expensive and most requested new recruit from that group would be Fabio Coentrão, a left-back signed to replace Marcelo, the best left-back on the planet, whose progression had seemed unstoppable.

Coentrão had been a winger for most of his career, but had not found recognition until he established himself at left-back at Benfica. A tenacious player, strong and daring, he stood out less for his ability, more for his motivation. As soon as his enthusiasm waned he struggled to lift himself much above average. The supporters at La Romareda only vaguely remembered him for his spell at Real Zaragoza – where Benfica sent him on loan during the 2008–09 season – because he rarely played. Marcelino García Toral, his coach at the time, tried to get him back on track following several visits by the police to Coentrão’s house after calls by neighbours complaining of noise in the early hours of the morning.

‘He didn’t take his football very seriously,’ said Marcelino. ‘He was 20 and lived alone with some friends whose appearance suggested they weren’t perhaps the best influence on him. He never really got involved in games and maybe for that reason I let him go. As the years passed he transformed himself. At the time I didn’t really look at him as a potential full-back. He wasn’t lazy, and he was obedient, but he was soft, flimsy in the challenge, and didn’t offer a great deal defensively. He was a forward player, a little winger.’

Madrid paid €30 million for Coentrão. The left-sided player became the fifth-most expensive signing of the summer, after Falcao to Atletico (€47 million), Agüero to Manchester City (€45 million), Pastore to PSG (€42 million) and Fàbregas to Barça (€34 million). Below him in the transfer rankings that summer were Nasri to Manchester City (€28 million), Alexis to Barcelona (€26 million), Mata to Chelsea (€26 million), Ibrahimović to Milan (€24 million) and Cazorla to Arsenal (€23 million).

Bayern were on the brink of signing Coentrão in 2010 for €15 million but Benfica did not close the deal. Jorge Mendes, according to Gestifute sources, offered Benfica the chance to wait a year when they would be able to sell him for double that. Benfica only took 50 per cent of the transfer. The other half was for the investment fund Benfica Stars, the private capital group that shared players’ rights with the club.

At first, even though Mourinho said that Coentrão had not come to play as a left-back, Marcelo felt that a competitor had been signed. At 23, Marcelo Vieira was a Brazil international, had played for Madrid since the 2006–07 season, and enjoyed the friendship and respect of his team-mates. There are some players that have the kind of sensibility in their feet that most people only have in their hands. Maradona belonged to that category. At Madrid the only player with those juggler’s qualities was Marcelo. Quick, skilful and brave, over the years he improved his level of defensive concentration. He was a marvellous footballer. Both Mourinho and Mendes saw it immediately.

Marcelo struck up a friendship with Pepe and Ronaldo, the three of them soon spending every day together. That is until they starting to propose to him that he put his affairs in the hands of Mendes. The Brazilian pretended not to pay too much attention until one day at the start of 2011, during a lunch in the presence of Mendes himself, they put the question to him directly: ‘Are you going to sign with Jorge?’ Marcelo explained that his agent had been with him since the beginning, was like a member of the family to him and that he did not want to leave him. From that point, according to the full-back, strange things started to happen. Pepe distanced himself. On one occasion, Mourinho criticised him in a press conference without mentioning him, saying that he preferred full-backs like Arbeloa because they never surprised him with moments of carelessness. And then he saw in a magazine that Ronaldo had said that he would be pleased if Madrid signed Coentrão.

For the Spanish contingent the influence of Mendes had become oppressive. The agent intervened in almost everything that happened at Madrid, either directly or indirectly, offering his mediation services or sharing work with other agents. One of his most regular partners was Reza Fazeli. The company director of the ISM agency based in Düsseldorf, Fazeli represented Altintop, Sahin and Özil. According to sources at Gestifute, Fazeli tried to convince Özil that the best thing for him was to let Mendes become his advisor, moving on to his payroll. Persuaded that in Gestifute there were very well-defined hierarchies, and suspecting that, for example, he would be attended to with less care than Ronaldo, the German took a step that few footballers dared: he told Fazeli that he would be leaving him, that he was Mesut Özil and did not need any professional agent to promote him. Since then he has been represented by his father Mustafa.

Unpredictable with the players whom he brought in, Mourinho was ruthless with the footballers he no longer wanted. The list of those discarded included Drenthe, Gago, Canales and Pedro León. First of all he arranged one-to-one dates for them with José Ángel Sánchez so that he could tell them that the club would take care of the business of finding them new clubs that suited Madrid’s interests. When Sánchez mentioned German, Italian and Turkish clubs the players believed he was acting in concert with Mendes, whose relationships in Germany and Turkey were well known. The players refused to sanction the deals and as a result were not taken on the pre-season tour, being left out of the squad and left to train alone at Valdebebas while their team-mates went to California. According to one interpretation of the sports labour law, their severance from the heart of the team was a footballer’s equivalent of being expelled from the workplace. It was the first time in the history of Madrid that a coach had separated players from the team without having disciplinary reasons for doing so.

Lass was a case apart. His team-mates nicknamed him
‘antisistema’
, as he combined an indomitable spirit with the defiant republicanism taught in the French schools he attended. Mourinho wanted to take him to Los Angeles because he appreciated him as a player; Lass refused to go, saying that he did not want to spend any more time under Mourinho’s charge, and that he had warned him months earlier that he hoped he would be allowed to leave. When Mourinho continued to insist that he join up with the squad and did not stop calling him, Lass told him where to go with a string of insults, turned off his mobile, ordered his agent to do the same and disappeared for a few days, presumably to Paris.