21
I STILL DIDN’T HAVE A REAL HANDLE on him. But of course, Mourinho was ‘The Special One’ even then, and I’d heard a lot about him. People said he was cocky, and that he put on a show at his press conferences and said exactly what he thought. But I didn’t really know anything, and just thought, like, I bet he’s like Capello, a really tough leader, and that’s good for me. I like that style. But I was wrong, partly at least. Mourinho is Portuguese, and he likes to be at the centre of things. He manipulates players like no one else. But that’s still not saying anything.
The bloke had learnt a lot from Bobby Robson, the old England captain. Robson was coaching the team Sporting Clube de Portugal in those days and needed a translator, and Mourinho happened to be the guy they took on. Mourinho was good at languages. But Robson soon noticed that the guy could do other stuff as well. He had a quick mind, and it was easy to toss ideas around with him. One day Bobby Robson asked him to write a report on an opposing team. I’ve no idea what he was expecting. Like, what does a translator know? But Mourinho’s analysis was first-class, apparently.
Robson was just amazed. Here was a guy who’d never played football at a high level, but he still came up with better material than he’d ever received. It was like, shit, I must have underestimated that translator. When Bobby Robson went to a different club, he took the guy with him, and Mourinho kept learning, not just facts and tactics, but psychological stuff as well, and finally he became a manager himself at Porto. That was in 2002. He was a complete unknown back then. He was still ‘The Translator’ in the eyes of many people, and maybe Porto was a good team in Portugal.
But come on, it was no big club. Porto had finished in the middle of their league the previous year, and the Portuguese league – I mean, what was that? Not much by comparison. Nobody paid attention to Porto in the European tournaments, especially not in the Champions League. But Mourinho came to the club with something completely new: complete knowledge of every single detail about the opposing teams, and sure, I was clueless about that stuff. But I’d find out later on, that’s for sure. In those days he used to talk a lot about conversions in football, when one team’s offensive was smashed and the players had to regroup from attacking to defending mode.
Those seconds are crucial. In situations like that a single unexpected manoeuvre, one little tactical error, can be decisive. Mourinho studied that more thoroughly than anybody else in football and got his players to think quickly and analytically. Porto became experts at exploiting those moments, and against all the odds they won not only the Portuguese league title. They also made it into the Champions League and came up against teams like Manchester United and Real Madrid, clubs where a single player earned as much as the entire Porto squad combined. But Mourinho and his guys still won the Champions League trophy.
That was a massive upset, and Mourinho became the hottest manager in the world. This was in 2004. Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire, had bought Chelsea and was pouring money into the club, and the key thing he did was to buy in Mourinho. But do you think Mourinho was accepted in England? He was a foreigner. A Portuguese. A lot of snobs and journalists expressed doubts about him, and at a press conference he said: “I’m not some guy coming from nowhere. I won the Champions League with Porto. I am a special one,” and that last bit stuck.
Mourinho became ‘The Special One’ in the British media, but I suppose it was said as much out of scorn as respect, at least at first. That guy got up people’s noses. Not just because he looked like a movie star. He said cocky things. He knew what he was worth, and sometimes he really had a go at his competitors. When he thought Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger was obsessed with his Chelsea, he talked about Wenger like he was some sort of voyeur, a guy who sits at home with binoculars to spy on what other people are doing. There’s always some uproar around Mourinho.
But he didn’t just talk the talk. When he came to Chelsea, the club hadn’t won a Premier League title in fifty years. With Mourinho, they won two seasons in a row. Mourinho was The Special One, and now he was headed our way, and considering his reputation I was expecting harsh commands right from the start. But already during the European Championship I was told that Mourinho was going to phone me and I thought, has something happened?
He just wanted to chat. To say, it’ll be nice to work together, looking forward to meeting you – nothing remarkable, not then, but he was speaking in Italian. I didn’t get it. Mourinho had never coached an Italian club. But he spoke the language better than me. He’d learnt the language in no time at all, in three weeks people said, and I couldn’t keep up. We switched to English, and already then I could sense it, this guy cares. The questions he asks are different, somehow, and after the match against Spain I got a text message.
I get a ton of texts all the time. But this one was from Mourinho. ‘Well played’, he wrote, and then gave me some advice, and I promise you, I stopped in my tracks. I’d never had that before. A text message from the coach! I mean, I’d been playing with the Swedish squad, which was nothing to do with him. But he got involved, and I replied and got more messages. It was like, wow, Mourinho’s checking me out. I felt appreciated. Maybe that guy wasn’t so tough and harsh after all.
Sure, I understood he was sending those texts for a reason. It was like a pep talk. He wanted my loyalty. But I liked him straight away. We clicked. We understood each other, and I realised right away, this guy works hard. He works twice as hard as all the rest. Lives and breathes football 24/7 and does his analyses. I’ve never met a manager with that kind of knowledge about the opposing sides. It’s not just the usual stuff, like, look, they play like this or like that, they’ve got this or that tactic, you’ve got to look out for him. It was everything, every little detail, like, right down to the third goalkeeper’s shoe size. It was everything. We all sensed it immediately: this guy knows his stuff.
But it was a while before I met him. This was during the European Championships and then the summer off-season, and I don’t really know what I was expecting. I’d seen loads of photos of him. He’s elegant, he’s confident, but, well, I was surprised. He was a short man with narrow shoulders, and he looked small next to the players.
But I sensed it immediately, there was this vibe around him. He got people to toe the line, and he went up to guys who thought they were untouchable and let them have it. He stood there, only coming up to their shoulder, and didn’t try to suck up to them, not for a second. He got straight to the point, and he was absolutely cold: From now on, you do it like this and like this. Can you imagine! And everybody started to listen. They strained to take in every shade of meaning in what he was saying. Not that they were frightened of him. He was no Capello, like I said. He created personal ties with the players with his text messages and his emails and his involvement and his knowledge of all our situations with wives and children, and he didn’t shout. People listened anyway, and everybody realised early on, this guy does his homework. He works hard to get us ready. He built us up before matches. It was like theatre, a psychological game. He might show videos where we’d played badly and say, “Look at this! So miserable! Hopeless! Those guys can’t even be you. They must be your brothers, your inferior selves,” and we nodded, we agreed. We were ashamed.
“I don’t want to see you like that today!” he continued. No way, we thought, no chance. “Go out there like hungry lions, like warriors,” he added, and we shouted, “Definitely! Nothing else is good enough.”
“In the first battle you’ll be like this…” he carried on. He pounded his fist against the palm of his open hand. “And in the second battle…”
He gave the flipchart a kick and sent it flying across the room, and the adrenaline pumped inside us, and we went out like rabid animals. There were things like that all the time, unexpected things that got us going, and I felt increasingly that this guy gives everything for the team, so I want to give everything for him. It was a quality he had. P
eople were willing to kill for him. But it wasn’t all just pep talks. That guy could take you down with a few words, like he’d come into the changing room and say in an icy cold voice:
“You’ve done zero today, Zlatan, zero. You haven’t achieved a damn thing,” and in those situations I didn’t shout back.
I didn’t defend myself – not because I was a coward or had excessive respect for him, but because I knew he was right. I hadn’t achieved a thing, and it didn’t mean jack shit to Mourinho what you’d done yesterday or the day before. Today was what counted. It was right now: “Go out and play football.”
I remember one match against Atalanta. The following day I was supposed to receive the award for the best foreign player and the best player overall in Serie A, but we were down 2–0 at half-time and I’d been pretty invisible, and Mourinho came up to me in the changing room.
“You’re gonna get an award tomorrow, eh?”
“Huh? Yeah.”
“Do you know what you’re going to do when you get that award?”
“Er, what?”
“You’re going to be ashamed. You’re going to blush. You’re going to know that you haven’t won shit. People can’t get awards when they play so terribly. You’re going to give that award to your mum, or somebody who deserves it more,” he said, and I thought, I’ll show him, he’ll see I deserve that honour, just wait until the second half, never mind if I can taste blood in my mouth, I’ll show him. I’m going to dominate again.
There were things like that all the time. He pumped me up and cut me down. He was a master at manipulating the team, and there was just one thing that really bothered me: his facial expression when we played. No matter what I did, or what goals I scored, he looked just as ice-cold. There was never any hint of a smile, no gestures, nothing at all. It was as if nothing had happened, sort of like there was a motionless game in midfield, and I was more awesome than ever then. I was doing totally amazing things, but Mourinho had a face like a wet weekend.
Like one time when we were playing Bologna, and in the 24th minute Adriano, the Brazilian, was dribbling along the left side and made it down towards the goal line. He made a cross, a hard kick that came too low to head and too high to shoot on the volley, and I was crowded in the penalty area. But I took a step forward and backheeled it. It looked like a karate kick, just bam, straight into the net. It was absolutely insane. That was later voted the goal of the year, and the spectators went nuts, people stood up and screamed and applauded, everybody, even Moratti in the VIP section. But Mourinho, what did he do? He stood there in his suit with his hands by his side, completely stony-faced. What the hell is with that man, I thought. If he doesn’t react to a thing like that, what does get him going?
I talked it over with Rui Faria. Rui is Portuguese as well. He’s the fitness coach and Mourinho’s right-hand man. The two of them have followed one another from club to club and know each other inside and out.
“Explain one thing to me,” I said to him.
“Okay, sure!”
“I’ve scored goals this season that I don’t even know how they happened. I can’t believe Mourinho has seen anything like them. And yet he just stands there like a statue.”
“Take it easy, fella,” said Rui. “That’s how he is. He doesn’t react like the rest of us.”
Maybe not, I thought. Even so… then I’m bloody well going to make sure I liven him up, even if I have to achieve a miracle.
One way or another, I was going to make that man cheer.
22
I HAD KIND OF A FIXATION about the Champions League. We’d started the league season and my knee was better, and I scored one incredible goal after another, so early on we had a feeling that we were going to bring home the Scudetto that year as well. But let’s get this straight: that wasn’t such a huge thing any more. I’d already won the Italian league title four times and been named best player of the season. The Champions League felt like the crucial thing. I’d never made it very far in that tournament, and we were due to play Manchester United in the first round.
United were one of the best teams in Europe. They’d won the Champions League trophy the previous year and had players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Nemanja Vidić, but none of them carried the game, none of them was the deciding factor for the club – quite the opposite: you really got a sense that United were a team. No player was bigger than the club. No manager drove that philosophy harder than Alex Ferguson – Sir Alex Ferguson, I suppose I should say. Everybody knows Sir Alex. He’s like a god in England, and he never wears out his stars. He rotates them.
Originally Ferguson is a working-class lad from Scotland, and when he joined United as manager in 1986, there wasn’t much going on with the club. United’s glory days seemed to be behind them. Everything was in a mess, and the players used to go out and get drunk. That was considered to be like, a cool thing? But Ferguson waged war on all that. Bloody hell, drinking beer! He put discipline into those guys. He brought home 21 titles with the club and was knighted in 1999 when United won the Premier League title, the FA Cup and the Champions League all in the same year. So you can imagine the rivalry between a bloke like that and Mourinho. The talk was endless about it.
There was Mourinho versus Sir Alex, and there was Cristiano Ronaldo versus Zlatan. There was loads written about us. We were the two poster boys for Nike and we’d filmed an advert together, a duel where we did tricks and shot goals, a fun thing with Eric Cantona as a TV presenter. But I didn’t know him. We never met during the recording. Everything was done separately, and I wasn’t too bothered about that media stuff either. But I felt up for it. I believed our chances were good, and of course Mourinho had prepared us thoroughly. But the first match at San Siro was a disappointment. We’d only managed a 0–0 draw and I didn’t really get into the game, and of course the British papers wrote loads of shit afterwards. But that was their problem, not mine. They could go ahead and write all the rubbish they wanted, I didn’t give a damn. But I really wanted to win the second leg at Old Trafford and progress in the Champions League. It was something that was growing inside me, and I remember when I ran out into the stadium and heard the applause and the boos.
The air was crackling with nerves, and Mourinho was dressed in a black suit and a black overcoat. He looked serious, and as usual he didn’t sit down. He stood right by the sideline, following the game, like a general on the battlefield, and several times the spectators sang or chanted, “Sit down, Mourinho”, and he often waved his hands. He roared, “Get in there and help Ibra!” I was too alone out in front, and I was being guarded really hard. A lot depended on me. That’s how it had been all season, and Mourinho also played 4–5–1 with me in front. I felt pressure to score goals, and sure, I liked it. I wanted the responsibility.
But United were sharper and I became too isolated and crowded up there, and I cursed the situation. Worst of all, just three minutes in Ryan Giggs kicked a corner and Vidić headed it in, 1–0. That was a bucket of cold water. All of Old Trafford stood up and roared:
“You’re not special any more, José Mourinho.”
Mourinho and I were the ones who got the worst boos. But things loosened up more and more, and the fact was: we only needed one goal to progress. If we just made it 1–1, victory would be ours, and I started to shine. Things kept improving, and after 30 minutes I got a long cross in the penalty area and headed it hard, straight down onto the goal line. The ball bounced up, into the crossbar and out. It was so close, and I had a growing sense that we were going to take this one yet, and we had one chance after another. Adriano made a volley shot into the goalpost. But no, it didn’t go in. Instead, Wayne Rooney dribbled it outside the penalty area and shot a cross to Cristiano who headed it in, 2–0, and that felt bloody awful. It was tough, the minutes ticked away and we weren’t managing to reduce their lead. Towards the end of the match the entire stadiu
m was singing, “Bye, bye, Mourinho. It’s over.” I wanted to kick up the turf and smash something valuable, and I remember coming into the changing room. Mourinho tried to cheer us up, like, now we’re going to focus on the league. He’s as hard as a rock before and during matches, and sometimes after a few days have passed and he’s analysed our defeat, he can attack us so we don’t repeat our mistakes. But in situations like this, there was no reason to lay into us. It wouldn’t serve any purpose. We were upset enough as it was.
It felt like everybody wanted to commit murder, and I think that’s when the thought started to sprout inside me. I wanted to move on. I’m a restless sort. I’ve always been on the move. I changed schools, homes and clubs even as a kid. I kind of got addicted to it and now, as I sat there and looked down at my legs, I started to suspect it: I was never going to win the Champions League with Inter. I didn’t think the team were good enough, and already in the first interviews after the match I gave some hints about that. Or rather, I just answered honestly, instead of the usual, oh sure, we’ll win it next year.
“Can you win the Champions if you stay at Inter?” the journalists asked.
“I dunno. We’ll see,” I replied, and I’m sure the fans suspected something already.
That was the start of the tensions, and I talked to Mino. “I want to move on,” I said. “I want to go to Spain.” He understood exactly what I meant, of course. Spain meant Real Madrid or Barcelona, the two top clubs, and Real was tempting. They had brilliant traditions and had had players like Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo, Roberto Carlos and Raúl. But I was leaning towards Barça more and more. They played brilliantly and had guys like Lionel Messi, Xavi and Iniesta.
But how should we approach things? It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t say: I want to go to Barça. Not only because it would be a disaster for my reputation at Inter. It would be like declaring: I can play for free. You can’t go offering yourself around like that. Then the directors realise they can get you cheap. No, the club has to come to you. The management have to feel like they want you at any price. But wasn’t the real problem.
I Am Zlatan Page 28
