Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner

by Patrick Barclay

  Most managers have tended to specialise in a certain kind of role. George Graham, who guided Arsenal to the English championship in 1989 and 1991, was always pleased to be considered a strict disciplinarian. He played up to it and, even though there was usually a slight twinkle in his eye, it was seldom noticed. Yet during his time in charge the club’s disciplinary record off the field left a lot to be desired. Tony Adams, before he began his inspiring recovery from alcoholism, even served a term of imprisonment for a driving offence which could only be described as extreme. As for Arsenal’s on-the-field reputation, suffice it to say that in the glorious season of 1990–91, when they lost but a single match in the League (to Chelsea), the only other people to take more than a point out of a meeting with them were the FA, who docked two as a punishment for their part in a twenty-one-man brawl at Old Trafford (Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United had one point deducted). There was one very disciplined aspect of Graham’s Arsenal: the defence. So maybe he will always be reviewed in the stern image of his back four. Nor will Graham – in real life, always one of the most pleasant and approachable men in the managerial game – mind going down in history as, if not quite football’s answer to Captain Bligh of the Bounty, a man who liked nothing more than to run a tight ship.

  I sometimes think these people are having fun at our expense; I really do. There was often a whimsical air about Clough that suggested he could see through football and the people in it. Maybe one day Mourinho will reach that stage. But at Chelsea he was very different, all but admitting he could tailor his mood to suit what he judged to be his team’s requirements at any given time. It was, however, surely fair to scrutinise the theory that, as he put it eight days before the first Premier League title had been claimed: ‘While I have been fighting every day, there has been calm around the team.’ Does it actually calm a player when his boss is marched down the Millennium Stadium tunnel with half an hour of a cup final to go and the score 1–1? If that were a sight guaranteed to improve a team’s performance, every coach would be trying to get himself collared. True, the vast montage of newspaper headlines that turned nine months of Mourinho’s professional life into the first series of a soap opera must have lightened the mood at Chelsea’s training ground, where everyone exuded confidence in the knowledge that they could tell where the act ended and Mourinho their friend and leader began. Mourinho alluded to this when, on the eve of the Champions League visit to Anfield, he said: ‘I’m not selfish. I’m not the man some people think I am. Only the players really know what and who I am.’ But, for the rest of us, the task of working out a little of Mourinho and analysing why he chose to do things in the way he did was tricky.

  He was an exceptionally gifted psychologist – that much was clear – and a great deal besides. Which is what they used to say about Carl Gustav Jung, the original differentiator between extrovert and introvert personalities. My wild guess would be that Mourinho is, was and always had been an extrovert. But, if we are to discover a bit more, we might as well begin, as the real analysts do, with the child.

  PART THREE

  The formative years

  Born into football

  On 26 January 1963, John F. Kennedy was president of the United States. He had less than a year to live; it was the 700th of the 1,000 days that culminated in his assassination. Harold Macmillan was Britain’s prime minister and that morning he would have noted the West German cabinet’s unanimous declaration of support for British entry into the Common Market, which was to grow into the European Union. The notion of Portuguese membership of the Common Market would have been almost laughable because, quite apart from its relative poverty, Portugal had been a dictatorship since 1926. Although outwardly tranquil enough, it still harboured a widespread fear of António Salazar’s political police, the Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE.

  So much for the political situation. Now for the sport and weather. So deep was this British midwinter that all but eight ties in the fourth round of the FA Cup were postponed and Chelsea flew to Malta to escape the freeze. On 26 January, they played a local select team in Valletta. Meanwhile in Portugal the game went on, dominated by the Benfica of Eusébio, Mário Coluna and José Águas, who had been champions of Europe in each of the previous two seasons (and were to reach the final again that year, only to lose to Milan at Wembley). Benfica were not only respected throughout Europe for their marvellously skilful football but considered rather exotic because, unusually among European sides at that time, they had black players. These had come from the African colonies: Eusébio and Coluna were from Mozambique, Joaquim Santana from Angola. On 26 January, the great Eusébio and his team-mates were engaged in the recovery of the national title from their Lisbon rivals Sporting (they were to win it by a substantial margin). And in the port of Setúbal, just twenty miles south of Lisbon, where the Sado river joins the Atlantic, the creature eventually to be known throughout the world as José Mourinho was born.

  His full name was José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix. His father was Félix Mourinho, a professional footballer, a goalkeeper who was to represent Portugal, albeit only once and very, very briefly. Indeed so short was Félix Mourinho’s international career to be that, if you had put an egg on to boil as it started, you would only just have turned off the gas, spooned the egg from the pan and cracked the thing open when it ended. It lasted from the eighty-second minute of a match against the Republic of Ireland in Recife, Brazil, until the final whistle. Yes, Félix Mourinho had a mere eight minutes in his country’s service, as a substitute for José Henrique. At least he kept a clean sheet. Portugal were leading the Irish 2–1 when he came on and it stayed that way.

  You may wonder what the Portuguese and Irish squads were doing on the north-east coast of Brazil. They had been invited by the host nation to take part in a tournament called the Independence Cup in the summer of 1972. Brazil won it, beating Portugal 1–0 in the final, which was no surprise because two years earlier the Brazilians had lifted the World Cup by the abundant virtue of a team some judges still consider the finest in football’s entire history: Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino and Gérson were among its stars. Portugal’s star of stars, Eusébio, could probably have done without the Independence Cup. He was over thirty and years of brutal tackling had taken a toll on his legs. ‘I was instructed to do a man-to-man marking job on him,’ Mick Martin recalled. Martin, later to begin a career in England with Manchester United, was at that time a spindly twenty-one-year-old part-timer running a Dublin sports shop. ‘I felt I kept the great man pretty quiet,’ he said. ‘I’m serious – our manager, Liam Tuohy, told me that too.’ Félix Mourinho, like Mick Martin, would always remember 25 June 1972. But first he would go home and tell his family about it. Especially his son. His nine-year-old son José.

  Félix Mourinho had long been acknowledged in Portugal as a proficient last line of defence and had made a more than respectable career with Vitória of Setúbal and later Lisbon’s third force, Belenenses, for whom he was playing at the age of thirty-five when he went to the tournament in Brazil.

  Young José and his sister Teresa, four years his elder, had a comfortable start in life. They grew up among an extended family in a large house on the estate of their wealthy great-uncle, Mário Ascensao Ledo, the owner of sardine canneries in not only Setúbal but Oporto and the Algarve, whose beneficence had included the donation of land and money for the building of the Vitória club’s Bonfim Stadium. Both materially and emotionally, José was well looked after. He attended a private school and, when he came home, there were trees to provide shade in the garden, where he played football, sometimes with his father and sometimes with one of the family’s servants, an elderly man; in addition there were two maids. His father also took him horse-riding. ‘Although José was always small,’ an aunt said, ‘he had no fear.’ But most of his spare moments were devoted to football. Either playing or watching his father train; Félix loved to take José to work and clearly intended to give the boy every chance of
following in his footsteps to the professional ranks. José’s mother, Maria Júlia Mourinho (née Ledo), was a primary-school teacher whose spare time would often be spent on church activities. A devout Catholic with a strong personality, she made sure José attended to matters spiritual; he was to remain religious in adulthood, sometimes visiting the shrine at Fátima, a couple of hours’ drive to the north of Lisbon.

  In 1974, by which time the power of Portuguese football had receded to the extent that Benfica were knocked out of Europe in the early rounds in consecutive seasons – by Derby County and the Hungarian club Újpest Dózsa – José was eleven and something truly significant happened around him. He lived through a revolution. He may not have noticed, because it was a very Portuguese handover of power, a near-bloodless triumph for the forces of democracy, which, to the advantage of José’s generation as a whole and José in particular, made educational improvements a high priority. There is a certain irony here. The family benefactor, Mário Ascensao Ledo, had prospered under the old authoritarian regime, the fall of which was followed by a great wave of educational advancement, which José rode. By now Ledo was dead and the canneries had been lost to the revolution – or, as the aunt put it, ‘taken by the communists’ – but modern Portugal was to serve at least one member of the family well. It is doubtful that José Mourinho would have made a living in football without the key that his academic accomplishments, above all his excellence at languages, were to constitute. For he was never quite good enough at playing to live up to the fond hopes he and his father had entertained. He was no more than what the English used to call a decent amateur.

  In 1974, José had still to realise that. He clung to his dreams. Like most adolescents, he cherished his heroes too, and one was Kevin Keegan, who inspired Liverpool’s emphatic victory over Newcastle in that year’s FA Cup final at Wembley. José supported Liverpool from afar, and when Keegan left for Hamburg in 1977, passed his affections on to Keegan’s replacement, Kenny Dalglish; he was also an admirer of Graeme Souness. Those able to cast their minds back to the days when the Scots Dalglish and Souness (with stylish assistance from their compatriot Alan Hansen) were driving Liverpool to supremacy in Europe may have an image of Souness fashioning for Dalglish the goal against Bruges at Wembley that meant the club retained the European title in 1978. It was around that time when reality dawned on Mourinho and he began the process of acceptance that he would never be a top professional footballer. Later, talking it over with his father, he announced that he would instead strive to become the best coach in the world. And Félix, who had himself become a coach after hanging up his goalkeeper’s gloves, liked the sound of that, because he already knew his son had a talent for reading the game.

  He had encouraged it by giving José tasks to perform for his clubs: early in Félix’s coaching career, at Caldas, a little third-division club, he sent José to write assessments of rival teams. As Félix made a growing impact, moving to second-division Amora, near Setúbal, and supervising a successful campaign for promotion to the first division in 1978–79, José also began to learn tricks of the trade: Félix would put him in charge of the ball-boys and have him send messages to players during matches. Coaching came naturally to José and within a few years, having left university, he was looking after Vitória Setúbal’s Under-16s.

  It was nevertheless important for him to play while he could. Mourinho was a defender. An occasional central midfielder too. But basically a central defender. You may think it odd that, having grown up in the era of Eusébio, an attacker so dynamic and thrilling some judges considered him superior to Pelé, a boy would choose to play at the relatively unglamorous back end of the team. But someone has to defend and José Mourinho, though not physically built in such a way as to suggest he would be a natural bulwark of the rearguard, enjoyed the opportunity that position gave him to organise his colleagues and the game. He is remembered as skilful but not overendowed with speed or the fighting spirit later to be exemplified by his Chelsea captain, John Terry, or the Internazionale team he guided to triumph in the Champions League of 2009–10. Nor was he especially keen on the tireless running coaches crave: a trait later noticeable when, during his widely publicised visit to the Peres Center in Tel Aviv, the Chelsea coach took a somewhat languid part in an informal match. So José Mourinho had a modest playing career, which he combined with school and, after an unscheduled gap year, university studies.

  It began in the youth section at Belenenses, where his father’s playing career had finished. Then, when Félix became coach at Rio Ave up in the north, beyond Oporto, he engaged his eighteen-year-old son as a player for one season. Quite a season it was too: Rio Ave finished fifth in the first division, their highest position ever. But José was not able to live at that level. He never got beyond the reserves. He did, however, nearly make it to the first team on the last day of that season. Rio Ave were about to take on Sporting, who needed to win to be sure of the championship, in the Alvalade Stadium in Lisbon when one of their defenders was injured during the warm-up. Félix told his son to get changed. For many years after, José Mourinho disliked being reminded that the club president, José Maria Pinho, countermanded Félix’s order. All he said on the matter was vague and general: that because his father was in a difficult position, his appearances were restricted. At Rio Ave there is no record of his having worn the shirt at all. Anyway, it is fair to add that José could hardly have made things much worse that day at the Alvalade: Sporting won 7–0. Father and son returned to their roots and José, upon entering university in Lisbon, played for the reserves at Belenenses, where his father had a second-division season. José went on to have spells with minor clubs in the Setúbal area. And that was about it.

  He was a good scholar – all secondary-school pupils in Portugal must learn at least two languages, and Mourinho had no difficulties with that – but not universally brilliant. In fact poor marks at mathematics disqualified him from entering university at the first attempt. Hence the year up north. He continued his maths studies during that time with his father and repeated the examination before starting at the Instituto Superior de Educaçao Física in Lisbon. There, his gift for languages (he could speak English, French, Spanish and Italian, and several years later, when he went to Barcelona with Bobby Robson, Catalan players and staff were to appreciate his taking the trouble to acquire a grasp of the regional tongue) allowed him to read widely on the physiology and psychology of sporting achievement. He listened intently to the philosophy lectures of Manuel Sérgio, from whom Mourinho began to derive a fascination for playing with people’s emotions. The professor remembers him as a voracious student: ‘He looked like a cat catching birds.’

  After obtaining a degree in sports science, Mourinho taught PE for three years at junior and secondary schools in and around Setúbal – Arangues, Alhos Vedros and Bela Vista – and helped handicapped children to learn sports. One of his former pupils at Arangues, André Chin, recalled Mourinho with warmth: ‘He was a very good teacher, very comprehensive in his approach, interested in all the kids. If you had a problem, you could go to him with it. Everybody got along with him. Football was always his big thing. He coached some friends of mine at Vitória Setúbal, youngsters of fourteen or fifteen, and there was one particular kid he thought had potential and tried to help, a black kid called António who went on to play for the Portuguese national youth team. I still see António from time to time. He’s a salesman for cable TV. He didn’t make it as a player.’ This may have been connected with an incident in which António got drunk, overslept, missed training and was hauled out of bed by Mourinho, who told him he could forget joining the rest of the lads on a forthcoming trip to a tournament in France. Or, as André Chin decorously put it: ‘I don’t think António had quite enough desire or dedication to become a professional footballer.’

  It was always like this in the field of youth development: even the most gifted need an inner drive. By now Mourinho’s own ambition was focused on coaching. In 1988 h
e spent a week of his summer break from teaching in Scotland, obtaining the first part of his UEFA coaching licence, and the following season Vitória increased his responsibilities, putting him in charge of their Under-18s as well as the Under-16s. His work impressed the coach, Manuel Fernandes, who was to influence his career greatly. Manuel Fernandes had been an international centre-forward of distinction, with twelve years at Sporting Lisbon before ending his playing career at Vitória and being invited to stay in Setúbal and succeed the veteran English coach Malcolm Allison. In 1990, after two years in charge, Manuel Fernandes joined Estrela da Amadora, a club on the outskirts of Lisbon which had just seized its first major trophy in more than half a century’s existence by winning the Portuguese Cup final – and took Mourinho with him.

  Mourinho’s job as assistant with the title of fitness coach meant he would be working with senior players for the first time. But it was an ill-starred venture. Estrela were relegated at the end of the season and both Manuel Fernandes and Mourinho lost their jobs. At least Mourinho had gained a modicum of European experience at the age of twenty-seven – Estrela overcame the Swiss club Neuchâtel Xamax on penalties before succumbing to FC Liège of Belgium in the second round of the Cup Winners’ Cup – but whether that was any consolation as he returned to Setúbal can only be a matter of conjecture. Things were to look up, however, and, when, once again, he took the helping hand of Manuel Fernandes, fate had something much, much better in store. Manuel Fernandes had been in Ovar, a small town in the north that was later to acquire a measure of sporting distinction through the success of its basketball team, and worked for the local club, Ovarense, and it was during this apparently low point of his professional life that he received a call that was to transform a career. Not his – though Fernandes was soon to be back in the top division – so much as Mourinho’s.