The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (21 page)

For the first time in his career Mourinho was managing a squad full of world champions. He said it himself: it was the most talented group of players he had ever had. It was a new experience for him to have taken over a team that, rather than underachieving, had recently won four league and two Champions League titles. Ever since he had been head coach at Benfica in 2000, his players had generally believed in his work, at least for the first year and a half. But in Madrid a significant part of the dressing room resented him personally and professionally from the first season. The players felt that he did not repay the loyalty that he demanded from them. They had given everything, they said, and in return they were increasingly marginalised by his desire to form a team within a team, composed of a few protected individuals.

Mourinho saw himself as trapped in the confines of Valdebebas, uncomfortable in an environment in which neither all the public nor all the press accepted him; where players, many of whom he considered traitors, ignored, feared or failed to appreciate him. He felt intolerably controlled, lacking the power to freely develop his ideas. The most popular story among the longest-serving employees at Valdebebas was that the manager was not used to working with a club that had members, where transparency was so great. With every day that passed he felt that his legendary image was crumbling around him.

The atmosphere was dire when the players met ahead of the first leg of the semi-final of the Copa del Rey at the Bernabéu on 18 January. Facing Barcelona once again, all the same old dilemmas were thrown up for Mourinho, and his team-talks began to peter out in the face of his players’ growing scepticism. When he brought them together for the penultimate meeting and announced the line-up, many shook their heads: he’d selected Casillas, Altintop, Ramos, Carvalho, Coentrão, Pepe, Alonso, Lass, Higuaín, Ronaldo and Benzema.

With Arbeloa, Di María and Khedira injured, the coach was forced to improvise to save his
trivote
, reaffirming his principles and infuriating the Spanish contingent. The unexpected relegation to the bench of Marcelo and Özil, together with his decision to pick Coentrão, were a declaration of intent against his internal detractors. The response from Casillas at the end of the meeting was raucous:

‘Where are we going with this?
Madre mía
! All over again!’

Madrid’s strategy was the same as in previous
clásicos
, prompting questions about the coach’s tactical competence. Ronaldo put them ahead after 11 minutes and then they waited in their own half to see if they could hit Barcelona on the counter-attack. With plenty of the pitch to play in, Barça ended up breaking through and staging a comeback with goals from Puyol and Abidal. The 1–2 final score was greeted by whistling from the home fans. For the first time the public started to suspect that Mourinho’s strategy was getting the team nowhere. The image of Pepe stamping on Messi while he was on the ground was seen worldwide via TV and internet. This time, in the dressing room, Mourinho at first showed no signs of life. Affected by the whistles from the stands, he instinctively returned to the propaganda battleground, persuading Zinedine Zidane, nominally the first-team director, to come out in his defence. The legendary status of Zidane should have served to help put the fires out. The interview that he gave
Diario AS
was published on 20 January and shocked the dressing room. The Frenchman, who very rarely commented in public, exalted Mourinho in such a way that the players were given the impression that he felt they were completely irrelevant.

‘I don’t understand everything that has been said about the system employed by Mourinho against Barcelona,’ he said. You can put whatever system you like up against this team, but right now they’re a rung above the rest … At the break Madrid were 1–0 up. Then came the error for Puyol’s goal from the set-piece … What upsets me is to have to listen to these attacks on the team’s system. I challenge all the coaches of the world to identify the system that should be used to beat Barça … You reach a point where the only beautiful thing in the game is victory … I don’t understand certain people in the press who criticise Mourinho’s Madrid when, deep down, they’re only motivated by personal grudges. How can people say that we should change the coach? Are we crazy? We’re lucky enough to have Mourinho, the coach who makes things evolve and who is building a stronger Madrid … Mourinho is creating the conditions that will enable the team to be successful. Look at the statistics of the team since he took over the reins. They’re incredible. And he’s the person responsible for these performances.’

Zidane suggested that the squad was nothing without the magic hand of the leader. For days after the
clásico
Mourinho barely even spoke to his assistants. He limited himself to attending training sessions, sporting a defiant air, and not saying a word about Barça until the day before the return leg. Then, rather than his usual habit of giving a series of team-talks to his players, he condensed everything into one laconic speech. He delivered this with a bureaucratic coldness, although there was a slightly ironic tone when he said, ‘You have to press, when on the pitch you see that you have to press.’

Some players ended up thinking that he wanted them to lose – and, if possible, for them to lose big – so that the humiliation taught them a lesson. ‘He wants us to crash,’ said one. In that sense, they believed he wanted to show them they had been wrong in thinking that they could play Barcelona on their own terms as equals. As Zidane had said, echoing Mourinho, Barcelona were a ‘rung above the rest’. The line-up, with the exception of Coentrão, was what most of them wanted: Casillas, Arbeloa, Pepe, Ramos, Coentrão, Lass, Alonso, Kaká, Özil, Ronaldo and Higuaín.

For the first time in years Madrid played better football than Barcelona. Their domination was impressive and was reflected in the number of chances both sides had. It seemed that the two teams had switched roles. The ball belonged to the whites. Özil, Ronaldo and Higuaín tested the Barcelona goalkeeper five times in the first half. With the help of the crossbar Pinto kept everything out. Barça only had two shots on target and scored with them both before the break. When Pedro made it 1–0, Mourinho joked so loudly that the substitutes heard him clearly:

‘You’re the clever ones. Didn’t you want to play on the attack? Well, there you have it.’

Mourinho waited for the team in the dressing room with his back to the wall. He flashed half a smile as he looked at the faces around him. But the players went back out on to the pitch without him having given them a single order or any idea how they might come back into the match.

Aware that they had only made the team because Di María was injured, Özil and Kaká passed the game like two shipwreck survivors swimming towards a desert island, so that Higuaín, Ramos, Casillas, Arbeloa and Alonso had to do all they could to help them get into the game. Around the German and the Brazilian a creative complicity was generated that spread throughout the team, with Ronaldo and Benzema scoring the goals that earned the draw on the night. Madrid were at 2–2, with 20 minutes to go until the final whistle. The knockout could still have had another twist. The emotion was as intense in the stadium as it was non-existent in the visitors’ dugout, where Mourinho was unmoved by both of his team’s goals.

Madrid did not reach the final of the Copa del Rey but the game lifted the morale of the dressing room, fed up with having to accept a fatalistic sense of total inferiority. Even Arbeloa, after the return leg, bragged at how he had been able to take on Barça playing football. In the midst of such euphoria, Özil settled some scores and gave an interview in which he said something that the coach perceived as a potential threat:

‘When Kaká and I play together we’ve never lost.’

The two attacking midfielders had played together in nine games; Madrid had won seven of them and drawn two. But the return of Di María always interrupted their partnership. Against Málaga on 18 March, these two friends – two of the most gifted footballers on the planet – found themselves starting together for the last time that season. In the next campaign they would line up alongside each other in just two games, against Rayo Vallecano and Celta Vigo in the league: two wins, with four goals scored and none conceded. Kaká tolerated being marginalised because he earned more than €9 million net per season. But prolonged spells out of the team – and his advancing years – ultimately destroyed his enthusiasm for the game. By the summer of 2013 Rui Faria’s verdict coincided with the truth: Kaká was a shadow of the player he had previously been.

Mourinho was now behaving in an openly authoritarian manner. He accused the Spanish players of leaks to the press, and over the following weeks came across as reclusive and haughty. The theory doing the rounds in the dressing room was one that suggested that he wanted to move to another club, denouncing the indiscipline and disloyalty of the squad to justify his failure at Madrid. Karanka suggested that the situation was insupportable for his boss and that he had said that he would leave in the summer.

Pérez met with Madrid’s senior players, pleading for group cohesion for sake of the supporters. ‘Offer a sense of unity,’ he would say, ‘whatever it takes.’ The president implored them to give this impression to the supporters. They had to think of the supporters because Mourinho never did, and if one day he left they would still be answerable to them. Casillas and Ramos made it known to Pérez that Mourinho was not a clean, fair, good guy, and that he had other interests close to his heart in addition to Madrid’s. Pérez said nothing.

In a private meeting the players agreed that they should not give the coach any grounds for accusing them of treachery, proposing that in all of their statements to the media they should stress their support for Mourinho.

But inside the club, scandal was the norm. Mourinho, who avoided Casillas as much as he could, did not miss any opportunity to make accusing comments against his captain to everyone from the president to the directors, the director general, the team delegate, the sporting director, his assistants and the team doctors. Everyone received a little bit of the antagonism that he felt towards Casillas. There was a feeling that Mourinho saw him as a grass, a mole, a traitor, an egoist, and that all that was missing was for Mourinho to scrawl his stock verdict all over the walls: ‘He thinks he’s the boss of the club.’

Casillas got to hear the gossip but his reaction was measured. He believed that a mutiny would really complete Mourinho’s plan for him, serving to explain to the world why he had not been able to make the team win things playing good football. Instead of giving him what he wanted he looked the other way. But insiders at the club say that when Pérez called Casillas to ask him what he thought of Mourinho, the captain said that the sooner the coach left the club the better it would be for everyone, that he did it no good at all, that he was very destructive and that he did not deserve to represent Madrid. Casillas told his team-mates that the president told him that these things happen in football and that he had to put up with them for the sake of the supporters.

This internal turbulence did nothing, however, to dent Madrid’s league form. The league in general was showing signs of a decline in standards and it was difficult for them to find any resistance anywhere. Casillas, Ramos, Alonso and Ronaldo were the principal motivators in the dressing room. They not only refused to accept that four years could pass without winning the league; no one could contemplate losing their positions in the first team – or even on the subs’ bench – at the end of the season. The squad wanted to stop living under a cloud of suspicion in front of the fans, and the desire to lift this cloud led to an inspired run of results. The team won the title in this part of the season. Between the defeat in the
clásico
in the 16th week of the season and the draw with Málaga in the 28th, Madrid won 11 consecutive matches. After the league
clásico
Madrid and Barça were level on points in the table, but by week 27 the difference was 10 points in Madrid’s favour. When the hard work seemed to have been largely done, however, problems arose.

In the 27th week of the season Madrid played their most difficult game in weeks in La Liga at the Benito Villarmarín in Seville. An injury to referee Eduardo Iturralde González meant that he was replaced by a rookie substitute, which made for a chaotic night. Alonso and Ramos got away with handballs in the area, and Ronaldo scored Madrid’s third and decisive goal with Khedira in an offside position. The referee missed it all and the players went down the tunnel laughing, having secured what had looked like an impossible victory, with Ramos showing off the reddened arm that had blocked Jefferson Montero’s shot in the box.

Madrid’s refereeing delegate Carlos Megía Dávila went to see Mourinho in Valdebebas when the squad got back from Seville. In his capacity as a retired referee, Megía Dávila had good contacts within the governing bodies of his old guild. At Madrid he enjoyed a position that involved being an analyst and link between the club and the refereeing establishment. Employees at Valdebebas saw him arguing with Mourinho, both seeming very agitated, like two men on either side of a council office complaints’ window.

Whatever the message from Megía Dávila, Mourinho was left simmering with anger, and the 1–1 draw in Málaga in the following game did nothing to calm his nerves. In talks with his assistants he began to spread the idea that referees would steal the title from Madrid, and his assistants, in turn, passed this on to the Portuguese players, especially Pepe and Ronaldo. The desperate desire to ensure a result in the next game, and the belief that he knew how to do it, prompted Mourinho to use the
trivote
. In Villarreal on 21 March he lined up Casillas, Arbeloa, Pepe, Ramos, Marcelo, Lass, Alonso, Khedira, Özil, Benzema and Ronaldo.

Madrid took the lead in the 62nd minute with a goal from Ronaldo. Then they deliberately split the team into two parts. The coach indicated that at the back they would form a block of seven players and that they would play the ball directly forward to Özil, Ronaldo and Benzema, who had to stay forward to receive the long passes. Villarreal set up camp in their own half and made it impossible for Madrid to fashion another goal. When, in the 83rd minute, Senna equalised from a direct free-kick, Mourinho exploded. He protested so vehemently to the referee that he was sent off. Özil and Ramos followed him, both for red cards after the referee blew the final whistle. At the end of the game Pepe and Ronaldo, together with Rui Faria, Karanka and Silvino Louro, barged their way down the tunnel in a group. José Manuel Llanez, the Villarreal vice president, said that they were like a ‘herd of bulls’, insulting and provoking everything that moved. Llaneza remembered the war-cry: ‘They have robbed us!’ In the stampede, Ronaldo found himself with Villarreal’s president, Fernando Roig. The director claimed that the forward said to him, ‘This is a shit ground and you’re a shit president.’