The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (2 page)

Albiol had replaced Pepe, left out and watching from the stands because of his insurrection. Pepe called for more ‘respect’ to be shown to Casillas and in response was cleansed. Within hours the defender went from being the manager’s right-hand man on the pitch to becoming the object of a public trial.

The emergence of rising star Varane was the excuse. ‘It’s not easy for a man of 31 years, with a standing and a past, being steamrollered by a child of 19 like Varane,’ said Mourinho. ‘But it’s the law of life.’

Varane could not play in the final because of injury. Even so, Pepe watched the game from the stands, giving up his place to Albiol, who had not played regularly for months. Some of the players believed they recognised in this decision the clearest evidence that part of Mourinho’s selection-process was based on a dark code of loyalty even when it was to the detriment of the functioning of the team.

When the referee sent Mourinho off for protesting, Pepe went down to the bench and, in complete violation of the regulations, installed himself in the technical area. It was unprecedented behaviour as he took over from Aitor Karanka, the assistant coach, giving instructions to his colleagues from the touchline as if he were the manager. Not that it prevented an Atlético victory.

Karanka remained confused all evening. His boss had departed the stage, leaving him alone. Breaking protocol, Mourinho did not go up to receive the medal that King Juan Carlos had prepared to honour the coach of the losing team. Instead, it was Karanka who came up the stairs in front of the defeated players. On seeing him, the king grabbed the piece of silver and turned to the Spanish Football Federation president Ángel María Villar, seeking clarification:

‘Shall I give it to him?’

And so it was an embarrassed Karanka who received the salver, while Mourinho went to the press conference room to pronounce his final words as the official representative of Madrid. Three years of stirring rhetoric, shrill speeches, sessions of indoctrination, warnings, complaints and entertaining monologues were interrupted by a confession. There was no hiding from the fact that in his final year he had won nothing.

Never in the history of Real Madrid had a coach been more powerful and yet more miserable; nor one more willing to terminate his contract with the club, happy to end an adventure that had become a torment.

‘This is the worst season of my career,’ he said.

‘It is easy to see thou art a clown, Sancho,’ said Don Quixote, ‘and one of that sort that cry “Long life to the conqueror!”’

Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote

The objective qualities of José Mourinho the coach were not what led Real Madrid to sign him in 2010. It was more that they considered him to be a magical, providential figure blessed with an unfathomable and mysterious wisdom.

Madrid’s director general, José Ángel Sánchez, was the main driving force behind the recruitment and the process took years to reach its conclusion. Perhaps it started in the first months of 2007 when Sánchez made contact with Jorge Mendes, Mourinho’s agent, to negotiate the transfer of Pepe. Képler Laverán Lima, nicknamed ‘Pepe’, was the Porto defender who cost €30 million, becoming the third-most expensive central defender in history after Rio Ferdinand and Alessandro Nesta. It was the highest price ever paid for a defender who had not played in his national team, and the first transaction concluded by Mendes and Sánchez, laying the foundations for a new order. From that moment on the super-agent began to redirect his strategy from England to Spain, those ties of friendship with Sánchez paving the way for the change.

Mendes did not delay building his relationship with Ramón Calderón, Madrid’s president between 2006 and 2009. Bold by nature, the Portuguese agent made him the inevitable offer: he would bring his star coach – at the time, running down his third season at Chelsea – to Madrid.

‘Once you get to know him you’ll not want to hire anyone else,’ Mendes encouraged. ‘If you want to prolong your spell at Madrid, you’ll have to bring in the best coach in the world.’

That is how Calderón remembers it, recalling how Mendes tried to organise a dinner with Mourinho. They promised him a lightning trip to a meeting in a chalet on the outskirts of Madrid in the dead of night to avoid photographers and maintain absolute secrecy. ‘José Ángel was utterly convinced,’ recalls Calderón, who says he looked into the idea with the director general and with Pedrag Mijatović, who at the time was Madrid’s sporting director.

‘This guy is going to drive us crazy!’ said the president. ‘With Mourinho here you won’t last a minute, Pedrag!’

Calderón did not employ any particularly logical reasoning to reject Mourinho. He simply thought of him as a difficult character with outdated ideas. ‘He’s like a young Capello,’ he said, vaguely alluding to a way of playing the game that bored the average fan. The ex-president did not account for the importance of charisma in arousing a crowd eager for Spanish football to regain its pre-eminence. A multitude increasingly in need of a messiah.

Mendes’s capacity for hard work is renowned. He promoted Mourinho in various European clubs when he had still not ended his relationship with Chelsea and continued to offer him around with even greater zeal from the winter of 2007 to 2008. At that time Barça were looking for a coach. Ferrán Soriano, now the executive director of Manchester City, was Barcelona’s economic vice president. Soriano explains that the selection process began with a list of five men and came down to a simple choice: Guardiola or Mourinho.

‘It was a technical decision,’ emphasises Soriano. ‘Football is full of folklore but in this instance you cannot say that it was an intuitive choice. Instead, it was more the product of rational and rigorous analysis. In Frank Rijkaard we had a coach who we liked a lot but we could see that his time was coming to an end. Frank took a team that was nothing and won the Champions League. He inherited a side with Saviola, Kluivert and Riquelme that had finished sixth, and then he won the league and the Champions League.

‘The following year the team’s level dropped a little. A 5 per cent drop in commitment at the highest level creates difficulties and Frank didn’t know how to re-energise the group. In December we decided to make a change. Mourinho had left Chelsea and there were possibilities to bring him in in January but we thought that it made no sense. We had to finish the season with Frank and give the new coach the opportunity to begin from scratch. Txiki was charged with the task of exploring alternatives and he went to various people: to Valverde, to Blanc, to Mourinho …’

Joan Laporta was the Barça president who conducted the operation and Txiki Begiristain, ex-Barcelona player and the then technical director, organised the interviews. Txiki met Mourinho in Lisbon and, after hearing his presentation, told him that Johan Cruyff would have the last word. The legendary Dutch player was at the time the club’s oracle. In the political climate that had always enveloped Barcelona, the presence of a figure whose legitimacy transcended the periodic presidential elections served to prop up risky decisions. The only person who enjoyed the necessary prestige to play that role was Cruyff.

Impatient ahead of the possibility of a return to the club in which he had worked between 1996 and 2000, Mourinho called Laporta: ‘President, allow me to speak with Johan. I’m going to convince him …’ Laporta got straight to the point and confessed that the decision had already been taken. The new coach would be Pep Guardiola. The news completely threw Mourinho, who told him that he had made a serious mistake. Guardiola, in his opinion, was not ready for the job.

Soriano describes the decisive moment: ‘After going through all the coaches that Txiki had examined, the conclusion was that it came down to two. In the end there was a meeting in which it was decided that it would be Guardiola, based on certain criteria.

‘We had put together a presentation and produced a document: what are the criteria for choosing the coach? It was clear that Mourinho was a great coach but we thought Guardiola would be even better. There was the important issue of knowledge of the club. Mourinho had it, but Guardiola had more of it, and he enjoyed a greater affinity with the club. Mourinho is a winner, but in order to win he generates a level of tension that becomes a problem. It’s a problem he chooses … It’s positive tension, but we didn’t want it. Mourinho has generated this tension at Chelsea, at Inter, at Madrid, everywhere. It’s his management style.’

In his book
The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance
, published in 2010, Soriano details the principles that led the club to choose Guardiola: 1. Respects the sports-management model and the role of the technical director; 2. Playing style; 3. Values to promote in the first team, with special attention to the development of young players; 4. Training and performance; 5. Proactive management of the dressing room; 6. Other responsibilities with, and commitments to, the club, including maintaining a conservative profile and avoiding overuse of the media; 7. Has experience as a player and coach at the highest level; 8. Supports the good governance of the club; 9. Knowledge of the Spanish league, the club and European competition.

Guardiola did not meet the seventh criterion, but then neither did Mourinho. What is more it was very unlikely, given past behaviour, that Mourinho could do the job without violating the second, third, sixth and eighth criteria.

The naming of Pep Guardiola as the Barça coach on 29 May 2008 marked Spanish football’s drift towards politicisation. This was paradoxical because Guardiola, one of the coaches most obsessed with the technical details of the game, an empiricist whose strength lay in his work on the pitch, began to be perceived by a certain section of Madrid supporters as an agitator, a manipulative communicator whose propaganda needed to be countered off the pitch. Distracted by this misconception, Madrid would expend much of its institutional energy on taking the necessary steps to wage war in the media.

While Guardiola started an epic landslide that would transform football across half the planet and contribute to reinforcing Spain’s national team as it conquered the world in 2010, institutional and social peace at Madrid became ever more scarce. Calderón, who hired Bernd Schuster, resigned a year and a half later amid accusations of corruption. Florentino Pérez, returning to the presidency in 2009, prompted a criminal investigation that led only to a ruling that Calderón had been the victim of slander and that he was not corrupt.

The return of Pérez to the Bernabéu signalled major changes. The president of the multinational construction firm ACS possessed an incomparable combination of determination and influence. In 2010
Forbes
classified his fortune as the tenth largest in Spain. His origins, however, conform more to the petty bourgeoisie. A graduate of Madrid’s School of Civil Engineering, he formed part of a line of technocrats who have nurtured Spanish administration over the last two centuries. Affiliated to the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), he entered politics in 1979, becoming a Madrid councillor, director general of the Ministry for Transport and Tourism, and undersecretary at the Ministry of Agriculture between 1979 and 1982. In 1986 he abandoned politics to begin a career in the private sector.

Unorthodox and adventurous in the management of sporting affairs, Pérez’s reputation was being increasingly challenged by his followers. Madrid had followed a downward trajectory under his direction between 2000 and 2006. From the initial peak of winning two league titles and a Champions League, the club had stagnated. After three years of failing to win a trophy, he handed in his resignation in February 2006, claiming that he had indulged his players like spoiled children and that it was necessary to install another helmsman, who, without the same sentimental attachment, would be capable of purging the dressing room. Never before in Madrid’s history had a president resigned in the middle of his mandate. But with a stubbornness to regain control of the directors’ box, and an avowed sense of mission, he returned to the club in 2009, although he was not chosen by members because the absence of any other candidates meant there was no election. He was 62 years old and assured supporters that, thanks to his intervention, Madrid had been saved from administrative crisis and financial ruin.

Back in power, Pérez set about hiring a new coach. He began the selection process advised by his right-hand man, the sporting director Jorge Valdano. After failed attempts to sign first Arsène Wenger and then Carlo Ancelotti, Pérez signed Manuel Pellegrini. The Chilean’s switch to Chamartín was preceded by suspicion and disaffection. He had still not completed half a season as first-team coach, and the idea of signing Mourinho was occupying Sánchez’s mind more than ever. The operation had been thought through over a period of several years and he was now close to convincing the president to take the plunge. In meetings with friends the director general sighed: ‘I love him!’

Valdano, however, insisted on protecting Pellegrini. The coach had been the subject of a smear campaign in the press, encouraged from within the club. During internal debates Sánchez identified Pellegrini as being inherently weak and too fragile to resist the rigours of the Madrid job. To convince Pérez, the director general reasoned, ‘Pellegrini needs protection because he’s weak. A strong man would not need protection.’

Sánchez took a two-pronged approach. He maintained contact with Mendes and he established a direct line of communication between the Inter coach and Pérez. When some raised suspicions over the suitability of Mourinho’s technical footballing knowledge to the Madrid team, Sánchez confessed that he believed Mourinho’s personality alone would make him worthy of a blockbuster production, while producing statistics to support his technical expertise.

‘I don’t know how much he knows about football,’ he said, ‘but a man who’s not lost a home game in six years must have something. Six years without losing in his own stadium! If he doesn’t know anything about football then he must know a lot about human beings. In his last game for Chelsea both Terry and Lampard ran to embrace him. That’s just not normal. Both of the team’s leaders!’

Sánchez is the mastermind behind the project that, between 2000 and 2007, turned Madrid into the richest football institution on the planet. His keen sense of humour co-exists with his zeal for his position. On one occasion in 2010 he presented himself in the following written terms: ‘I have been an executive director general for the last five years. Before that I was marketing director general for five years. My responsibility is corporate: the administration, the management, the resources, the facilities and infrastructure of the club, the general services, the purchasing, the information systems and technology, the human resources, the commercial and marketing department, areas of content, internal media, use of facilities, sponsors, etc. I am responsible for 141 of the 190 employees at the club. I am responsible for the economic results, the accounts, etc. I direct the club in these areas and take a certain pride that for six years we have topped the income ranking, including in the bad years or through periods of institutional crisis. I have negotiated the signings and the sales made by the club over the last 10 years … maybe 70 transactions in total. I negotiate the players’ contracts, the tours, the TV rights. I represent the club in the LFP (Professional Football League) and in the relevant international bodies. I have a certain disregard for the role of protagonist; I would even say I resent it … I have worked with different presidents, something that is significant in itself. In this transition (certainly an unusual experience in football) you make many friends, from Platini to Rummenigge, from Galliani to Raúl, from the president of Volkswagen to Tebas through to Roures, or a government minister, many businessmen, and football agents … That expanse of contacts just a phone call away is one of the strengths of the club.’

A philosophy graduate who cut his teeth in business administration with Sega, the electronic games company, serving as head of operations in Southern Europe, Sánchez is the most influential executive in Spanish football. When Pérez hired him for the club in the spring of 2000 he was 32 years old. Nobody imagined then that Pérez was preparing the ground for the development of someone who would dominate the Spanish league with an iron fist from 2006 onwards, contributing to the rapid enrichment of Madrid – and Barça – and, as a consequence, putting the finances of the other clubs in the Spanish league at serious risk. If the unequal distribution of TV income in Spain is something unique in Europe then that is in large part thanks to Sánchez’s ability to take advantage of the entanglement of delay, carelessness and incompetence spun by the three institutions that should be ensuring football’s economic health: the Ministry for Sport, the Spanish Football Federation and the Professional Football League.