The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

by Torres, Diego

  ‘It’s the worst defeat of my career. I’ve never lost 5–0. There’s no doubt about that. But it’s an easy defeat to digest. Because it’s a defeat where there was no chance of winning. It’s not one of those defeats where you’re left with a bitter taste because it’s difficult to accept, because you’ve not deserved to lose but you’ve lost, or you’ve lost because the referee has influenced the result, or because you’ve hit the post, or because of bad luck. No. It’s none of these things. A team have played to their potential and another team have played badly. A deserved victory, and a very deserved defeat.’

  Few press conferences from Mourinho were as measured as this. The calm surface, however, concealed a murky whirlpool. The argument he presented for the changes he had made hinted at the pessimism he felt at the half-time break, the certainty that the best he could do was avoid a thrashing because the lead held at the 45th minute could not be pegged back.

  ‘When you’re 2–0 down against a side that’s very dangerous and very quick on the counter-attack, you have two options. You either say, “I’ll take 2–0” or you say, “I’m going to try to press higher up the pitch, I’m going to give the opposition more space and then they hit you on the counter-attack and score more goals …” I tried to help the team during the break; the only thing I wanted was that the team didn’t lose its balance in midfield and that it continued to play with dignity until the end … I’ve always said that Barça are the finished product. And I’ve always said that Madrid are not the finished product; and they’re a long way from being so.’

  In the days before the clásico a cloud of frustrating unease formed around Mourinho, with the coach feeling that he lacked support. He saw the presence of Valdano as a threat. He thought the club required too much from him and gave back very little in return. He thought that Pérez ignored him every time he asked for a centre-forward, such as when he put forward the name of Hugo Almeida. The recent good news meant these concerns had been temporarily sidestepped. In the two months between the 0–0 at Levante and their visit to the Camp Nou, Real had put together a string of good results. The thrashings of Deportivo (6–1), Málaga (1–4), Racing (6–1), Hércules (1–3), Atlético (5–1) and Ajax (0–4) seemed to show that the team was developing successfully. This was probably the most brilliant period of play for Mourinho’s Madrid. The cohesion with which his team attacked, the absence of the restrictive tactics that would later become standard fare, the freedom afforded some players – all this made the fans think that the coach had tried to develop a mode of play that coincided with Spanish fans’ tastes.

  The results were reflected in Mourinho’s mood. When he was in a good mood he transmitted it immediately. After pre-match meals, he would call everyone’s attention, raising his voice and telling jokes. ‘He’s a showman,’ the players said. ‘Here comes the showman again!’ But on 29 November – after the Barça game – the show was over and the his mood changed dramatically. He became irritable and unpredictable. Players found that he had a bottomless capacity to provoke difficult – and unprecedented – situations. Valencia, Zaragoza and Sevilla, the three games that followed before Christmas, involved one confrontation after another.

  Valencia’s visit to the Bernabéu on Saturday 4 December, five days after the 5–0, caused one of those unexpected moments. When Mourinho brought the group together to talk tactics, the players found a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. According to the testimony of some of those present, the coach talked about the ups and downs of the team in the first person, as was his strange habit:

  ‘Today is not a tactical team-talk. Today what matters is the heart. Today what matters is my son. This week my son is home from school, crying because I was beaten 5–0! Today we’ve got to play for the pride of my son!’

  The boss’s son José Mario Mourinho was named after his father. He was aged 10 and the players knew him well. Sometimes the coach would bring him to Valdebebas, and he used to go down to the dressing room at the Bernabéu after watching matches from behind the bench. But for Mourinho to include the boy in the team-talk baffled the players, almost as much as his team selection. He dropped his centre-forward and picked the trivote – Khedira, Alonso and Lass – to start for the first time.

  Only the sending-off of Albelda in the 65th minute brought calm to a team who had played the most turgid first half of football seen at Chamartín that season. Up against 10 men, Özil and Ronaldo were unstoppable. Ronaldo scored both goals in the match, one in the 73th minute and one in the 87th.

  Mindful of the media reaction to his ultra-defensive line-up – and well aware of how it might be seen as an affront to footballing good taste – Mourinho used the subsequent press conference to justify himself. Sigmund Freud would have said that when Mourinho spoke of the self-esteem of the team, what he was really doing was recognising his own inner weakness:

  ‘Today, we were lacking in a bit of self-esteem and confidence, and the most important thing was to start the game without suffering too much. That’s why I changed the team: with the intention of not suffering. Because I could imagine what would happen to my team and to the fans if we lost control of the match early on. We have problems at the back, and with conceding the first goal. That could have finished off what little self-esteem the team had. For that reason I decided to play with a fuller, more defensively capable midfield.’

  Casillas, Arbeloa, Pepe, Albiol, Marcelo, Khedira, Alonso, Lass, Di María, Özil and Ronaldo made up the strikerless formation. For Mourinho, it was both a way of pointing the finger of blame at Benzema for his disastrous showing at the Camp Nou and of insisting that the club bring in another number nine. Mourinho also explained to those closest to him that the 5–0 had served to confirm his worse fears. For as much as the public and the press demanded attacking football, the last clásico had shown that the team were not mature enough for such a proposal. That rout had reaffirmed his fundamental principle: pressure was the most important part of the game and the team could not face strong rivals without the right players to apply it. Inside him, both a phobia and a fondness were developing. A phobia of Benzema and a fondness for the trivote as a lucky weapon against Barça.

  From the time of the Greek historian Polybius in The Histories, there has been no shortage of public figures who have explained their success by their pragmatism. One of Mourinho’s most repetitive claims during his first months at Madrid was that he thought of himself as a pragmatist. He used the term ‘pragmatic’ to explain a tactical decision, as a slogan or as a clinching argument. He would often preface his reflections by noting the empirical-utilitarian vision of his coaching work: ‘I’m very pragmatic …’ In April 2012, during an interview with Audi Magazine, he verged on self-parody when he said: ‘From a pragmatic point of view, I consider myself a great coach.’

  Laying bare his empirical approach he distanced himself from other idealistic coaches, famous for seeing things only through their own dogmas. Time, however, showed that Mourinho was also wrapped up in principles that he could not easily shake off. One of these principles was ‘mental aggression’.

  At the end of November a back injury put Higuaín out of action for several months. The Argentine forward was the coach’s favourite striker and in the summer he had announced that he would play him more than Benzema. Mourinho had become exasperated with the Frenchman’s sluggish character, his apparent compliance in any situation and his indifference to all advice or warnings.

  Pérez, however, liked Benzema more than any of Madrid’s other strikers. The president had personally overseen his signing from Lyon in 2009, paying €35 million for him after visiting his home and speaking with his parents. The boy had the reputation of being a genius and at youth level had been talked of as a future Ballon d’Or winner. At the end of 2010 he was about to turn 23. As fascinated by rap music as he was by football, the game more than anything seemed to stimulate his sense of hedonism. Some players shine thanks to the rage they have accumulated over the years, others because t
hey are motivated by pleasure. Benzema was in the second category and his attitude clashed directly with the principle of ‘mental aggression’.

  The three goals that Benzema scored against Auxerre in the last group match of the Champions League did not convince Mourinho. On 12 December, before travelling to play Real Zaragoza at La Romareda, the media asked the coach if he wanted to sign another number nine. In reply, Mourinho bemoaned his helplessness working alongside Valdano, and criticised Benzema, stressing the need for a centre-forward whose style would be more to his liking.

  ‘The subject of signings is something that concerns people who are higher up in the club and doesn’t go through me,’ he lamented. ‘I already said in the summer that it would be difficult to go through a season with only Benzema and Higuaín. And if I have to face the second part of the season with just Benzema it will be even more difficult. I’m just the coach, nothing more. If you have a dog to go hunting with, you catch more; if you have a cat, you catch less, but you can still hunt. We only have one attacker, and that’s Benzema.’

  Ronaldo’s omission from the list of strikers was as strange a move from Mourinho as his downgrading of Benzema in his own personal zoological scale. But what the dressing room found most repugnant was Mourinho’s behaviour on the bench at La Romareda. He spent half the game closely following Benzema, criticising his every move with volleys of abuse. Mourinho lost control after Benzema showed how uncomfortable he was playing with his back to the central defender, receiving long passes to bring down and lay off to the advancing midfielders. ‘This is a disgrace,’ he shouted. ‘He’s not even a cat. He’s a rabbit!’

  With every mistake on the pitch, Mourinho would turn to his assistants in search of agreement, or he’d look enquiringly at the substitutes, as if he were waiting for a sign of approval. His outbursts of anger became so frequent that, to spare themselves the aggravation, his players ended up fighting over the seats that were furthest away from him. No one wanted to be party to the ill-treatment of a team-mate. Madrid won 1–3 at La Romareda, but it was the penultimate step on the road to a looming internal crisis.

  Madrid played the last game of the year at the Bernabéu against Sevilla on Sunday 19 December. It was a bad game. Alonso’s absence had stripped the side of the one player capable of imposing order on the match, and when the referee signalled the break the score was an unsettling 0–0.The players were together in a group in the tunnel when Silvino Louro, the goalkeeping coach, went for Cristóbal Soria, the Sevilla official. He acted with such violence that neither friends nor enemies were spared. There was a charge, a shove and a fall. In the melée Agustín Herrerín, the Madrid pitch official, was pushed to the ground. At 75 years old, the man was an institution among employees of the club. Herrerín defended Louro, claiming Soria had taunted the home bench with the open-hand sign that referred unambiguously to the 5–0 defeat at Barça.

  Di María’s goal in the 77th minute, after referee Carlos Clos Gómez had sent Carvalho off, did nothing to end the unrest in the home dugout. In the heat of the moment, Mourinho threw a passionate – albeit coldly calculated – fit of rage. When Miguel Pardeza, the director of football and right-hand man to Valdano, went down to the dressing room to congratulate the players, the coach, witnessed by the squad, launched into a barrage of abuse:

  ‘You lot say that this is a noble club but this is a fucking shit club. Now you can go and you can say this to the president and his friends … Now I’m going on holiday. If you want to sack me, then that’s fine by me, I won’t come back. I’ll be happy to go because this is a fucking shit club.’

  Pardeza maintained his composure and denied that what Mourinho had just said was true. The coach seemed beside himself as he headed off to the press room, holding a piece of paper.

  ‘They’ve given me a list with 13 serious mistakes,’ he said, taking out a folder with the supposed errors of referee Carlos Clos Gómez. ‘Today. They asked me in the last press conference if I was tired of the pressure. I’m not tired of the pressure because I don’t feel pressured doing the things that I like to do. And I like to coach and I like very much to play matches. What I’m a little bit tired of is this, for example. That they give me a list of 13 serious mistakes from the referee and I defend my team. My team has to be defended because my team deserves to be defended. Not just today but many times over. And if I go ahead with this list, the story will be the same. I will be on the front pages: “Mourinho suspended”. We have a club, a structure, an organisation. And I want people to stand up for my team, as it’s not always going to be about me. I just want to say that I have an out-of-this-world team, with an out-of-this-world character. We have achieved what seemed impossible … I prefer not to talk about it anymore. I prefer to request a meeting with the president. I would rather talk to the president.’

  Speaking about referees has always been one of Mourinho’s favoured tactics over the course of his career. In December 2010 he spoke about them for two reasons: they were the perfect alibi when his team played poorly and they enabled him to question the role of Valdano at the club. Annoyed that Valdano was opposed to the signing of Hugo Almeida, Mourinho sought ways to attack him, suggesting that Valdano would do well to spend more time criticising referees.

  That night Pérez went to bed in the early hours with some unpleasant things on his mind. According to a close associate, it occurred to him that if he sacked the coach he would not have to pay any compensation: the contract stipulated that in case of termination, no one had a duty to compensate anyone. But he also asked himself the fateful question: If not Mourinho, then who? Who else can lead Madrid if we bid farewell to the man I myself have described as the best coach in the world? Without Mourinho – and even with him – a deserted landscape dominated by Barcelona lay before him. More unprecedented failure – with nobody to blame but the president, the author of the signing, one that would mark his mandate for better or for worse. A president who ought to have taken more care of his image, his aura of being a solid leader, solvent, with convictions. He could not turn his back, after just six months, on the biggest gamble of his presidential career since the signing of Beckham. The following day he would be playing host at the club’s traditional Christmas dinner with both the football and basketball squads. A director explained away the previous night’s nightmare with some soothing words: ‘Mou’s soul is still wounded by the 5–0 …’

  Mourinho appeared calm as he sat at the table with captain Casillas, the honorary president Alfredo Di Stéfano and Pérez. As if nothing had happened, he smiled and tucked in to the pheasant served with caramelised onions. Pérez took the microphone and, before starting on the congratulations, entered into a dialogue with Di Stéfano, by way of digression:

  ‘There are people who think that they’re qualified to work in any business, but not everyone is. Real Madrid is the biggest company and represents the biggest challenge. You, Alfredo, you came with me when FIFA gave us the trophy for being the best club of the twentieth century. There’s the trophy … It’s not easy to cope with this pressure. You have to live under the pressure within the club to really know it. I understand that some find it impossible and end up going crazy. Because this is not a pressure for everyone …’

  Di Stéfano nodded his head: ‘Of course …’ Casillas blushed with embarrassment. The basketball players followed the speech without really understanding what was happening. Mourinho stared into the distance.

  The private meeting – a dinner – between Mourinho and Pérez was held in late January. The president told his friends that the coach was insistent on renewing Pepe’s contract and the need to sign Hugo Almeida to replace Higuaín, and explained his wish to coach Portugal’s national team, something he considered feasible only if his sole responsibility was training Madrid’s first team. But none of the issues that the coach touched on made the president very excited. The coldness of the meeting prompted Mourinho to come up with one of those statements that would circulate through the offices of the Bern
abéu that winter:

  ‘I’m not the coach you thought I was, and you’re not the president I expected.’

  Pérez realised that his coach did not just want to coach. ‘He’s not happy just training,’ he said after the dinner. The defeat at the Camp Nou had helped remove the mask successfully worn Mourinho up until that point. Mourinho required the complete transformation of the club, saying that the need to resist Barça was a compelling reason for this. He argued that to win a trophy against them, whether it be the league, the Copa del Rey or the Champions League, he would have to beat a team that had just inflicted the worst defeat of his career on him. There was no way to avoid the confrontation. For the first time in many years he felt seriously threatened by a failure that had the potential to haunt his path for ever. Distraught and unable to focus, his reaction was unsurprising: put pressure on his players, pressurise the club and come up with excuses later to explain away the predictable outcome.

  The need to counter Barça coloured all his requests to Madrid. He asked for powers to direct sports strategy, co-ordinate the ins and outs at the club, and reform the chain of command. He wanted to be the one who chose which players joined the club and which were transferred. Without interference. There were to be no more lists imposed by the club. He argued that Valdano was expendable and he continued to suggest signings from the portfolio of his agent Jorge Mendes. And he remained insistent on the need to buy Hugo Almeida.

  Pérez, however, dealt with the situation in his customary way. He did not say yes or no, but promised to give all these things some consideration. He did not rule out Hugo Almeida, nor did he defend Valdano. Moreover, he won time for himself, trying not to show any of his cards until the end of the hand. Every time he needed to justify a delay he said that Madrid belonged to its members and that there was a process that needed to be followed. Mourinho, shrewd like few others at detecting weaknesses in his counterparts during face-to-face exchanges, found these arguments hard to rebuff. Whether at Porto, Chelsea or Inter, he had never encountered such administrative obstacles – for him the club’s presidential system was a useless extravagance.