The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (26 page)

The commitment to Arbeloa instead of Carvajal, to Pepe and Carvalho instead of Ramos, and to Coentrão instead of Marcelo was something that anyone unfamiliar with Mourinho’s strategies would struggle to understand. In footballing terms it made no sense, unless it was thought that defenders should never participate in the preparation of an attacking move. When adding other criteria, however, such as psychology, using intimidation as a means of persuasion, and building a shield of loyal players who might not be at the highest technical level, the reasons behind Mourinho’s selections become more understandable.

On 3 December an extraordinary episode took place in a press conference given by Mourinho. After two and a half years in his position as the most powerful sporting figure at Madrid since the death of Santiago Bernabéu in 1978, Mourinho came up with the best definition to date for his style of play:

‘We need to play every game with the same amount of concentration, with the same personality, the same ambition. We need to be at the limits of our potential and with the objective of winning clearly in our minds, even when we have difficulties. We lack emotional continuity. That is the first thing. Then the football questions come on their own. We have a perfectly designed style, but sometimes when we’re not mentally right it makes us lose that identity. In order to have continuity of identity the emotional aspect is very important.’

The previous week Mourinho had given up on the league, after the 1–0 defeat against Betis. Madrid were 11 points behind Barça. In the 2012–13 season the questions would come thick and fast, but there were other puzzles where the lack of solutions worried fans. How had the team that had won the league while breaking records and scoring so many goals disappeared so fast? What were they playing at, after their model had been so rigorously monitored for two and a half years? The speed, the strength, the goals, the competitiveness already existed. So what were the positive things that the manager had brought to the club?

Reluctant to talk about football when there was nothing concrete at stake – and far less to give details about his most intimate football convictions – suddenly on 3 December, during those few seconds, Mourinho had suggested something completely taboo. The model did not exist. The rage, the ambition, the fear that each player projected; the storm of energy, channelled to a particular goal – that all existed. But when all of these were extinguished the team had nothing left beyond a collection of individual wills and a few obedient people waiting for orders.

What most exasperated Mourinho in the autumn of 2012 was the discovery that his players were no longer afraid of him. He would have preferred to be surrounded by enemies who hated him. But they treated him like anyone else. They ignored him. And the less they responded to him, the more anxious he became. He was restless when watching games from the bench. One of his most quoted comments was when, testing his team’s mental state, he said something that would usually be anaethema to him: ‘Go out and enjoy yourselves!’

Speaking at a conference on chaos, the philosopher Jorge Wagensberg, scientific director of La Caixa, warned that shamans are ‘masters of chaos’ and that primitive societies need these individuals for evolutionary reasons. Wagensberg found some logic in the behavior of Mourinho:

‘If not for crisis we would all be just bacteria,’ said the philosopher. ‘Uncertainty is the engine of innovation. The chaos forces you to decide between persisting or disappearing. Nothing ever comes from balance and tranquillity. The second law of thermodynamics says that when a system is isolated thermal death occurs. Canned sardines are in a state of perfect equilibrium. Living beings flee that balance. Since the environment sometimes fails to cause sufficient doses of uncertainty, the shaman offers the solution by instilling fear.’

The second law of thermodynamics also warns that the amount of chaos in the universe tends to increase over time. In other words, destiny is irreversible, dark and quiet. No matter how rabid their grappling, shamans are ultimately consumed by the cosmos’s own chaos.

The players could no longer stand to live in this state of continual upheaval without the compensation of enjoying the game. But Mourinho had failed to explain in his 3 December speech how to maintain this continual upheaval. The misunderstanding was mutual, leading to all sorts of assumptions or simply to bad faith. The manager told his aides that he believed the players were capable of bringing forth his destruction by no longer performing at their best on the pitch. Disoriented, he began calling José Ángel Sánchez and Pérez, warning them of this while at the same time asking for more power. He made it known to Pérez that if he did not get what he wanted, then he would leave the club.

The list Mourinho presented to the president in mid-November 2012 was half ultimatum, half desideratum. His first demand was that senior players should be reprimanded, with the warning that Casillas and Ramos now possessed intolerable levels of power. He complained that Casillas had belittled him by publicly saying that he was inspired by Guardiola and that the club had not officially corrected him. He highlighted similar incidents in relation to Ramos, calling him subversive. The club as an institution, in his opinion, had to apply exemplary punishment to those who dared to question his authority.

His second demand was for the signing of a goalkeeper to compete with Casillas. He clarified that it should not just be a regular goalkeeper but a young one, about 24 or 25, who was an international in a world-class team. Casillas, he added, was getting older.

Next he demanded that Madrid hire a spokesman, someone respected by everyone connected to the club, such as a former player with an untainted record. This person should say whatever he was asked to say by Mourinho and, if necessary, publicly criticise the players.

The fourth requirement was that the club get rid of those players whose names he had included in a list, and that it was the institution that took care of this so any comeback in the media was not directed at him. Of the names included in the list there were five that circulated through the offices of the club: Higuaín, Albiol, Kaká, Marcelo and Özil.

Pérez responded that if he won the Champions League then he would give him what he wanted, but that without the credit afforded him by a Champions League title he did not feel he could bow down to Mourinho’s demands. He repeated that Madrid belonged to its members and that he would need their backing for such measures. At the moment such backing seemed unlikely because support for the manager had declined since 2010. Put a Champions League trophy on the table and, in the new presidential cycle that was due to start in 2013, the landscape would change. As far as Mourinho’s request for a spokesman was concerned, the president promised to search for someone who fitted the profile requested.

As the weeks went by Pérez told his manager that he had not found anyone suitable. Those consulted rejected the idea, not wishing to lose credibility as Karanka had done. On hearing this explanation Mourinho flew into a rage, saying he could not believe that there were people who thought representing him or Madrid would be to the detriment of their own image.

Madrid’s defeat against Betis in the league on 24 November followed the pattern of matches that took Madrid down a familiar footballing cul-de-sac. Betis took the lead with a goal from Beñat on 16 minutes and then shut up shop. Being given most of the pitch and virtually all of the ball, Madrid suffocated. The game ended 1 –0 and Pepe Mel, the Betis coach, repeated what Klopp had said, by now the worst-kept secret in Spanish football: ‘We tried to make sure Madrid had the ball because that way they harm themselves.’

What Mel suggested was confirmed by the Madrid players, who recognised that they had been found out. In the press room of the Benito Villamarín Mourinho accused his players of a lack of ambition:

‘When I see a guy like Štěpánek, who’s 34 and plays Davis Cup games three days in a row, and who dies to win and give victory to his country, don’t tell me that guys who are 23, 24, 25 and 26 cannot play on a Wednesday and a Saturday. Sport’s about the head and the heart, too, not only the legs. When you want it, when you want it a lot, you can be dead but you come back to life … But it’s all my fault, because that’s the law of football. When we win, we all win – and some more than others. And when we lose, the coach loses. So it’s my fault.’

While Mourinho delivered his accusations, in the dressing room the rumour spread that Pérez had called Casillas to ask him – for the benefit of the fans and the club – to come out in front of the press and denounce the referee.

‘There were a few things that the referee didn’t get right,’ Casillas said before the cameras. ‘Perhaps the referee hurt us on these occasions. The manager does have to feel better supported by us. We’re on the pitch and it’s true, there were certain key moments that changed the game. There was a goal ruled out for an offside that never was, there was a handball that was not spotted and the Betis players were time-wasting. Sometimes we have to come out and show how upset we are by these type of incidents.’

The team and the officials set off for the airport when the players discovered that Mourinho had criticised them in front of the press for negligence and laziness. Casillas felt betrayed. The next day he addressed the coach in front of his team-mates:

‘Who were you referring to when you said that when we lose, it’s you who loses, and when we win, some win more than others? So that’s fine, is it? I’ve gone out and criticised the referee for the good of the club even though I don’t believe the referee was a determining factor; last season against Betis the referee did not give a penalty against us. And then afterwards I find out that you’ve said this against the players. I bit my tongue in public for the good of the institution. Why don’t you do the same? And if you have something to say to someone then say it to their face.’

While Casillas told him off like a schoolmaster reprimanding a rude child, the manager smiled, turned and walked away, eventually saying:

‘I wasn’t talking about anyone specifically. I was talking in general …’

Pérez was afraid of being out of all competitions before Christmas. The road to the distant horizon, with a possible presidential election campaign in June, was a bleak one. In his search for solutions he began to look into how viable it would be for the manager to stay. Saturday night into Sunday morning was spent making calls to Madrid employees, directors, advisors and personal friends, trying to find an answer to these unknowns.

He wanted to know if people thought winning the Champions League with Mourinho was possible. Those closest to the first team told him that the relationship between the players and the manager was broken and that mistrust had now reached extremes. It was beyond repair. In its current condition, they advised him, winning major honours was impossible.

Zinedine Zidane and Antonio García Ferreras, the two advisors the president listened to most, usually had completely contrasting opinions. But they coincided in one thing: neither now worked for the club. Zidane was Mourinho’s assistant for almost all of the 2011–12 season, until the Frenchman could no longer put up with him. Before withdrawing to one side he advised the president that with Mourinho the club was heading for a sterile crisis. The footballing and human analysis that Zidane presented was so clear that everything he predicted came to pass. ‘It’s happening as Zizou said it would,’ repeated the president. ‘It’s happening just as Zizou said.’

In November 2012 Zidane warned Pérez that, if the team did not quickly react, the sooner he sacked Mourinho the more likely it would be for the squad to win something. He also said that Pérez needed to hurry because the players were suffering psychologically and that the spent energy would take its toll. Asked who would be the ideal coach to snap them out of their trance at least until June, Zidane proposed Marcello Lippi, winner of the World Cup with Italy in 2006.

Ferreras was the director of communications at Madrid between 2004 and 2006, before leaving to run La Sexta, one of the main TV stations in Spain. His friendship with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain between 2004 and 2012, had turned him into an extremely influential man. But it was his friendship with Pérez that gave weight to what he said in some of the most important decisions made at Madrid. Pérez respected what he said to the point where many in Pérez’s inner circle considered the journalist to be the president’s most valued advisor. They say he listened to him more than to his own directors and that in sporting matters he gave greater credit to what he had to say than his director of football Miguel Pardeza or his old sporting director Jorge Valdano. On this occasion, he put his opinions before those of Zidane.

Ferreras convinced Pérez that he should worry less about the players than about his own political future. What would happen if the team won nothing with Lippi? It was best to remain inextricably linked to Mourinho until the end because his banner carried Mourinho’s name. If he sacked him his own position at the club would be weakened and only winning
la décima
or the league would save him. Ferreras’s position was also laid out in his column in
Marca
, published on 3 May 2013:

‘Some might celebrate and take pleasure in his departure, but for Madrid Mourinho has been a blessing. His management techniques, his strength, his raging against defeat, his rebellious and daring pronouncements have been key to ending the domination of the greatest Barcelona team in history. He arrived when the wounds of that famous 2–6 defeat had still not healed. He arrived when Messi and Guardiola were still floating around the world on a magic carpet. Florentino Pérez came back. He signed Ronaldo, he revolutionised the squad, he regenerated the club, and finally a year later he put in place the appropriate commander-in-chief. From then on everything changed. Of course, there are a lot of people who hate him. And many do so because they hate Madrid or they cannot boss the club around from the inside. The rest of us love him.’