The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (29 page)

Ramos moved to right-back, Coentrão started on the left, Alonso, Khedira and Modrić made up the midfield, and Ronaldo and Higuaín played up front. Once again Özil played on the right wing, from where he would have less influence. The squad thought that Özil would be on the bench but he played because Di María’s wife had given birth and the Argentinian had only arrived in Germany that day.

The team-talk did not command the attention of the players as would have been expected before a Champions League semi-final. Since the morning the Radisson Hotel had become a hive of hurried meetings, curses, calls to mobiles and hectic exchanges of information. The players were exasperated when some of the journalists who had been present at the NH told them what Pérez had said – that the president considered them the main culprits for losing the league and yet believed their coach had done everything right. Ronaldo, Higuaín and Ozil paced around furiously until an hour before the game. They formed Madrid’s forward line and it was to them that Mourinho directed the key part of his speech. He stressed to them that if they could score one goal then the job would be done.

Lewandowski opened the scoring. Dortmund controlled the game confidently, defending and attacking with admirable order. But before the break, after a loose pass from Hummels to Weidenfeller, Ronaldo equalised to make it 1–1. Mourinho waited for the team in the dressing room and gave them precise orders. Above all, he said, they had already achieved the most important thing, which was to score a goal. To defend this treasure he called for maximum concentration, putting everything into defensive awareness, a closing of the lines between defence and midfield, and midfield and attack, and a reduced pressing of the ball.

Deep in their own half, Madrid became the victims of what Klopp called ‘impulse’. In the face of co-ordinated pressure and a massed advance of Dortmund’s attackers, marking became a nightmare. Moments before Dortmund went 2–1 up, Madrid were defending in their half and had eight players, as well as Diego López, inside their area. Dortmund attacked with six men, three in the area and three chasing the rebounds on the edge of the box. Blaszczykowski and Piszeck doubled up on Coentrão five yards from the byline; from the cross the ball rebounded to Reus and he played in Lewandowski, who nipped in front of Varane and scored. The central defender had tried to bring down the Pole but stopped himself to avoid conceding a penalty.

Pepe, strictly respecting the orders of Mourinho, took the line of defence so far back that Dortmund’s every attacking move became a defensive nightmare. Any foul could be a penalty or a free kick very close to the edge of the area. Dortmund’s third goal was much like their second, only the German team were this time even more uninhibited. Blaszczykowski rampaged down the right and crossed from the byline, Varane cleared with a header to the other side of the penalty area, where Schmelzer appeared, who sent the ball back to the centre of the box. This time Lewandowski had got ahead of Alonso and Pepe, and shot past López. When the goal went in there were seven Madrid players in their own area, plus the goalkeeper. Dortmund had put five men in the area and two on the edge of the box.

The more Madrid retreated, the more it allowed Dortmund to advance and the more vulnerable they became. The 3–1 scoreline forced the team to change tactics. Mourinho replaced Modrić with Di María in the 68th minute to try to move Özil into his more natural position. But it was too late. They had lost control and there was no way to regain it. Dortmund’s fourth again came from the side of the pitch defended by Coentrão. Götze crossed, Alonso pushed Reus, the referee gave a penalty and Lewandowski scored.

The players considered the game to be a display of incompetence from Mourinho. He saw it the other way around. He bitterly told his friends that since he had started coaching Madrid they had made him suffer the two worst defeats of his career: the Camp Nou 5–0 and now the 4–1 against Dortmund. He had never conceded so many goals. He attributed it to the culture of the club that he now regretted ever having managed, and in particular to his players, as expressed in his dark monologue at the press conference he gave before the second leg:

‘My team only plays within the laws. We’re in one sense so pure, so innocent and so naive, that Lewandowski has scored four goals against us and we’ve not fouled him once … This could be the biggest game in ten years for Madrid, but I thought the same thing in Dortmund and we played as if it were a friendly.’

When Ramos was asked what he thought of his coach’s idea of how to stop Lewandowski, his reply seemed to be challenging Mourinho:

‘Maybe you can stop him higher up the pitch, because conceding fouls on the edge of the area is not advisable.’

Pepe was punished by being dropped, in a switch that anticipated Mourinho’s defensive rules being broken. Ramos regained his place and raised the defensive line further up the pitch. He had a superb match. He managed the team from the back, made his team-mates play, superbly marshalled Lewandowski, conceded only two fouls, picked up a yellow card and scored a goal. He was the leader he could not be in the Westfalenstadion. But 2–0 was not enough to reach the final.

Mourinho’s time at Madrid concluded without him being able to clearly impose his teams on any of the stronger sides in the Champions League. The four games against a young Dortmund side in the 2012–13 season highlighted his poor results, falling so far short of expectations: two defeats, one draw and a win.

In May Mourinho reached an agreement with Abramovich to join Chelsea. As he had not signed the settlement with Madrid, and because his current contract required him to compensate the club to the tune of €20 million in the event of its unilateral termination, Chelsea proposed paying him a bonus if he managed to leave Madrid without complying with the penalty. To achieve this he devised a strategy of provocations that, in his opinion, would destroy any residual esteem towards him from the club’s members, forcing Pérez to let him go because it would be politically impossible to retain him. In Gestifute they claim that the manager’s trump card was a single sentence, crafted for maximum impact. He delivered it on 3 May to the Madrid board, who, having boasted of having come up with one of the greatest inventions in the history of football, Madrid’s
galacticos
, were irritated to the last man:

‘I think that Barcelona are the best team in the world in the last 20 or 30 years,’ said Mourinho.

Beyond its provocative intent, the statement rang true for a man who always longed to return to the club where he began his technical training and work experience as a psychologist and a propagandist. The Catalan club was, above and beyond even Manchester United, his dream of professional fulfilment.

The board, who had been in large part disappointed in Mourinho for months, called for his instant dismissal. In addition, the club’s employees and the players were united in their desire to see him leave. Many of the fans, too, wanted him to go – or at least gazed on the situation with weary indifference. The last league match on 1 June, against Osasuna, revealed painful divisions in the stands of the Bernabéu.
Mourinhistas
and
Antimourinhistas
exchanged whistles, chants and jeers. That afternoon, summing up the three seasons of Mourinho’s residence, football was eaten up by the noise.

Pérez tried on his own to save the manager until the very end. On Monday 20 May they met to sign the release agreement. Mourinho, who was not even charged a €1 penalty, was released. For Pérez it felt like a defeat. Madrid had never given so much power and so much money to one coach. For the club, the total cost of the three-year relationship, adding together gross wages, premiums and the payment of his transfer from Inter, amounted to more than €70 million.

In the afternoon, the president announced the termination of Mourinho’s contract at a crowded press conference. The players, who followed the televised speech, thought they could see Pérez’s true intentions in a furtive confession:

‘Maybe, if we’d reached the final of the Champions League, we’d be talking about something else …’

Pérez never wanted to get rid of Mourinho. In searching for a cause, he attributed his departure to the Dortmund disaster. A disaster that he blamed exclusively on his players.

In his subsequent defence of Mourinho to the members, the president said that what matters at a club like Madrid is not to play according to notions of good taste but to get immediate results. And for that, a tough coach who knows how to lead his flock with a firm hand is required. When asked about the pursuit of a footballing philosophy, an idea that might underpin everything, the response was repeated:

‘Our idea is to win.’

In mid-June 2013 Pérez found himself looking for a coach to continue the search for
la décima
. Three weeks after the departure of their former coach, complaints started filtering through from London about insurrections among the Madrid players and other, unspecified events that occurred months or even years ago. These were emitted periodically by Mourinho from Stamford Bridge. It was suggested that he resented almost everyone who had been his subordinate, but especially the two captains, Casillas and Ramos, for having imposed limits on him that the directors had been unable to.

‘The selfish players,’ said the Chelsea manager, ‘who do not care about the club or the fans, are a big problem. Sometimes you come across a couple of players who are not willing to accept a set of rules and that’s where problematic relationships start.’

These accusations got right under the Madrid players’ skin. Since Mourinho’s departure from Spain, thousands of followers started to question their honesty, without really knowing why. Anyone could be subject to suspicion and for any minor detail: Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Ronaldo, Coentrão, Arbeloa, Khedira, Higuaín, Benzema, Özil, Modrić, Kaká, Varane, Marcelo, Albiol, Callejón, Essien or Alonso; Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, Argentinian, French or German – all were doubted, whether to do so was fair or unfair. It was impossible for the average fan not to suspect something if even the president spoke as though these players had done something darkly illegal.

‘I just don’t see that there was a mutiny,’ Pérez stated in one of the many interviews he gave in late May. ‘What I do say is that we started this season with a little less hunger, and you could see that in the first four matches, where we dropped eight points. This is the advantage that Barça had over us at the end. This is what produced a very normal reaction from the coach to motivate the players. Because, obviously, we had not started as we should have.’

Exempting the manager from most of the responsibility, assigning him to the role of valiant worker on the day of the great disaster in Dortmund, in the eyes of the president there were no grounds to suspect any form of negligence. Nor did Pérez suggest that Mourinho was, above all else, keen to preserve his reputation, even though this meant Pérez had to suggest in every forum in which he spoke that the players had neglected their duties for reasons that were not clear. With the passing days, Pérez shared with his manager an unshakeable resentment towards the Madrid squad.

The rumour floated through the air from the offices of the Bernabéu and spread to the dressing room. Over the following months it was talked about by the club staff closest to the president, and circulated by word of mouth among the players and team employees. The recurring gossip was that Pérez, alerted by the coach, had a list of those responsible for the 4–1 defeat in Dortmund. At its head was Casillas, who despite not having played, was considered by Mourinho as someone who was bad for the atmosphere of the dressing room and who even headed a group of the players known to the coach as the ‘black sheep’ of the squad. Below him on the list were the three forwards who had lined up in attack that fateful night: Özil, Higuaín and Ronaldo.

José Mourinho’s most amazing victory in his three years in Madrid was to convince thousands of people that the football was just an accessory. It did not matter that the team’s play was unrecognisable and ineffective, it was irrelevant whether the left-back was Marcelo or Coentrão, or that the goalkeeper was Diego López or the best goalkeeper in the history of Spain. Even winning their tenth European Cup stopped being so crucial. Because finally, when the club’s administrators arrived at their conclusions, they did not condemn the manager who led the team in the decisive games. He was not even judged for his inability to make his players respect him. For many, what really determined his success was his ability to formulate a message, spread it tirelessly and be convincing. On the street, in certain TV studios, in offices and in the board room, the golden rules of the reality show had repealed the laws of football under a blanket of noise.

‘He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that it is where we really belong.’

Graham Greene,
The Heart of the Matter

Marcelo, Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Özil, Ronaldo, Benzema and Arbeloa came into the Sun Life Stadium dressing room, jubilant. As they took off their boots, they repeated again and again in a loud voice the collective conclusion they had come to after being repressed for so long:

‘If Florentino had sacked Mourinho in January, Madrid would now have ten European Cups. Let’s see if he [Florentino] takes note!’

The humidity of the Miami Gardens atmosphere contributed to the group’s catharsis. The players had so anxiously awaited this moment in the days leading up to the game that at the end of the match they felt liberated. Happy. Strong. Finally alone. At last without him. Without his invasive presence. Without his stifling leadership. They had just won with an overwhelming display of attacking football. They felt they had shown the world a truth that been hidden for three years: they were important, they were talented, and Mourinho had inhibited them.

Madrid had just imposed themselves on Mourinho’s Chelsea 3–1 in the International Champions Cup Final held on 7 August 2013 in Miami. It was not just a summer friendly. For the players it had been a public display that the team had a great future.

For a few moments they believed that they had indeed reached the end of an era. They thought they had survived a long period of contamination. Most did not realise that the governance of Madrid was still in the hands of Mourinho’s greatest ally. Apart from a couple of politically savvy men such as as Arbeloa and Alonso, skilled in handling double-talk, the rest did not pay attention to what was being confirmed in whispers in the club’s offices. Florentino Pérez had kept, like treasured relics, certain pieces of advice that his beloved manager had passed to him before they parted, one of which was: ‘If you want to build a winning team you should get rid of the “black sheep” and their accomplices.’

A month after the party in Miami, the purge began with the transfer of Higuaín to Napoli. Then Casillas, the captain, went into the reserves, and Özil, the creative genius of the squad, was transferred to Arsenal in exchange for €50 million.

To the perplexity felt by the players on the demotion of Casillas was added the astonishment at the sale of Özil, a player who was considered the most brilliant of the squad, a good team-mate and a fine professional. Well founded or not, rumours started that Carlo Ancelotti, the new coach, was not making all the football decisions because the sale of Özil was technically unjustifiable. Ancelotti, who had given ample proof of his appreciation for Özil in training and friendlies in August, could not have changed his mind so quickly. In the eyes of his players, the Italian had executed a pre-existing master plan, in part designed by Mourinho. One of the most widely repeated comments in the squad during the first week of September 2013 was full of bitterness:

‘Before, it was Mendes who picked the team. Now it’s Florentino.’

Di María and Coentrão, the two most
Mourinhista
players in the dressing room, found themselves in a paradoxical situation. The club put them up for sell for economic reasons rather than political ones, because neither Ancelotti nor Pérez deemed them necessary. But they found no buyers. Who could afford to pay €30 million for Coentrão? What club would be willing to pay anywhere close to the €40 million it had cost for Di María in 2010? The response from the market was unequivocal: no one. The years of being an assured starter in the world’s most legendary team had done nothing to raise their value. Madrid did not receive bids that exceeded even half the cost of the two players that Mourinho had insisted on signing.

If Pérez always suspected the criteria used by Mourinho when shopping in the transfer market, Roman Abramovich had no doubts. The Russian hired Mourinho in the belief that with Hiddink and Guardiola ruled out, there was no one else available able to adapt to the peculiarities of Chelsea. But he opposed, by every means possible, the manager’s freedom to construct his own squad. From his experience between 2004 to 2007, Abramovich had reached two conclusions: first, Mourinho was excellent on the training pitch; second, that it was best to restrict his power off it.

There are employees at Chelsea who suggest that Abramovich is wary of Mourinho’s charisma and his extraordinary ability to connect with the masses. It was inevitable that fans would see in him a messianic leader, someone who would put the fate of the club ahead of his own interests, when in fact it was Abramovich’s heritage that was on the line. It was a marvellous image, but Abramovich knew it was a misleading one. Mourinho was primarily attracted to everything that surrounded the cult of his own personality and behind the cloak of heroism he hid his desire to influence things for his – or his own agent’s – good.

Perhaps Madrid’s failure in La Liga and the Champions League deprived the two of them the appropriate means of imposing their requirements. In Gestifute they are confident that the coach and his agent would have put the Champions League trophy on the negotiating table with Chelsea had he won it. The truth is that the contract with Abramovich established that decisions on new players would be in the exclusive power of the club. The Russian owner would have the last word. And for this reason Abramovich employed a technical director, Michel Emenalo.

Chelsea’s structure is as simple on the outside as it is intricate on the inside. There are doubts about whether Emenalo is a true executive with the power to act in the market or simply an ornamental figure behind whom Abramovich hides. Emenalo’s career does not invite the consideration that he might be Chelsea’s most important decision maker. When the former Nigerian international joined the club’s coaching staff in 2007, his only experience had been taking charge of a female U-12 team in the Tucson Soccer Academy in the United States.

The first thing Mourinho did upon arrival at Chelsea was to manoeuvre for Emenalo’s dismissal from the club. The Nigerian offered his resignation. But Abramovich did not accept it.

On 10 June, the same day that Abramovich confirmed the retention of Emenalo, Mourinho was presented at the conference room of Stamford Bridge, his main idea ready for dissemination: the circle of karma had returned him to a state of happiness:

‘I’m the happy one. Time flies. It looks like it was a couple of days ago but it was nine years ago. And since then a lot of things happened in my professional life. I have the same nature, I’m the same person, I have the same heart, I have the same kind of emotions related to my passion for football and for my job. But I’m of course a different person. In this moment if I have to describe myself I describe myself as a very happy person.’

Mourinho was at pains to proclaim that he was blessed to have remained unscathed, despite the wear and tear of his life. But there were sharp suspicions that perhaps that was not the case. In the space of a few seconds he had claimed to be the same person and yet also a new man.

Chelsea’s meeting with Madrid in Miami had been inconvenient, and he revealed something about himself when giving a self-praising interview to ESPN. He put so much emphasis on how well he had done everything that Fernando Palomo, the interviewer, asked why someone of his importance felt such a need to highlight each achievement.

‘Because people forget,’ said Mourinho.

Chelsea’s decline in investment relative to other seasons was striking, the club spending less than at any time since 2010. They say that Willian (about €35 million) and André Schürrle (€22 million), the two most expensive signings, were made by Emenalo – or whoever is behind him – and that Mourinho’s obsession with signing Wayne Rooney never enjoyed the backing of the owner.

Abramovich bristled at the apparent jealousy Mourinho displayed every time he spoke publicly about David Moyes, manager of Manchester United, chosen to fill the position he had always chased.

‘Mou speaks to Rooney more than to his wife,’ said one agent who worked with Chelsea during the summer.

Mourinho spent many hours in August talking on the phone with Rooney, seducing him and plotting a possible transfer. But Abramovich never wanted anything to do with it. The tension between the owner and the manager came to a head in the third league match of the season when Chelsea and United faced each at Old Trafford. According to one member of the Chelsea staff, Mourinho’s line-up was a challenge to the indifference with which Abramovich had responded to his pleas to sign a striker. Chelsea played without a centre-forward until Torres came on in the 60th minute. It was reminiscent of the match that Madrid played in Almería in January 2011, when Mourinho left Benzema on the bench to prove to Pérez that he needed to sign a striker, and that if he didn’t he was ready to disregard the one that he currently had. In 2011 Madrid signed Emmanuel Adebayor. In 2013 Chelsea signed Samuel Eto’o.

A Madrid scout discovered Eto’o in Cameroon in 1996. The boy stood out for his athletic physique, despite his lack of years. At the age of 16 he was elastic, fast, strong and capable of accelerating like an adult. Having the ball at his feet seemed to only increase his agility. His zig-zag runs were unpredictable, and he was able to alter direction and yet maintain a lightning stride. In the summer of 1998, when he was promoted to the first team, he was 17 years old. He was still nearly a child but he spoke several African dialects, perfect French, he understood English, and was as fluent in Spanish as a kid from Fuenlabrada. He had an amazing grace and poise. He shared training sessions with players who had just won the Champions League final in Amsterdam against Juventus. It was an overwhelming armoury of attacking talent: Morientes, Raúl, Šuker and Mijatović.

Anyone else would have been overwhelmed by such competition for two places, but Eto’o looked at his rivals with condescension, like a prince observing the evolution of his subjects:

‘I train with them and I know I’m as good or better. I’m ready. Why can I not play for Real Madrid?’

Eto’o was tremendous. So competitive, in fact, that he moved to Barcelona and helped them destroy Madrid’s hegemony. Ten years later Pep Guardiola had to let him go because he was unable to share the same areas of the pitch with Lionel Messi. The former Barcelona coach lamented his loss for years.

‘Eto’o is the best number nine in Europe,’ he said.

Attentive enough to dig into the inscrutable corners of the souls of the men he works with, Mourinho has always had a special fondness for the jilted player. He himself was a teenage footballer to whom the gates of professionalism were closed, and he knows that frustration can be transformed into rebellion and struggle. Pride is usually a player’s most powerful engine – a player with wounded pride can become a relentless competitor.

Eto’o was anxious to vindicate himself when he joined Inter in 2009. With Mourinho, he found the perfect habitat in which to channel all his rage. He even played at right-back during the successful Champions League campaign in 2010 and forged a relationship with his coach of enduring complicity.

Abramovich was suspicious of a player who, aged 32, would still be charging €13 million net a season. But he gave in and Mourinho finally fulfilled his desire to have alongside him a man whose loyalty was beyond question.

On the day he finally lets the public see his operating manual, in the first article of his code Mourinho will state that no training method, no tactic, no vision nor strategy can ever overcome the power of loyalty.

At Stamford Bridge this complex man was reunited with the devout and united chorus that rang all around the stadium. After years of silence and remorse, he could feel his charisma once again inflame the masses. Back home, the devotion of his own people made him feel powerful, and this emotional recognition allowed him to put to one side the incurable pain of rejection.