The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

by Torres, Diego

  Pérez consulted his advisors as he mulled over a decision. The people the president listened to most were Valdano; José Angel Sanchez, the corporate director general; Enrique Pérez, director and his own brother; Manuel Redondo, the director general of the presidency; and Fernando Fernández Tapias, the vice president. Another name may be added to the list, a friend who ended up influencing Pérez far more than the others over the years: Antonio García Ferreras, head of the TV channel laSexta, and one of the most influential men in Spanish political journalism.

  The 5–0 defeat, an abject failure from a coaching point of view, was transformed by Mourinho into a political triumph. Something that had originated in serious tactical errors ended up strengthening Mourinho’s position, extending his powers to a level that had only ever been previously enjoyed by Madrid’s president. Sensing that any gesture of taking responsibility for the defeat would weaken him, he acted with unusual political skill to transform a momentous defeat into an opportunity for personal empowerment. Here he employed public mockery, veiled threats, propaganda and – in no short measure – audacity. He used the 5–0 as a lever to remove everything that seemed inconvenient to him within the club. The uproar that began after 29 November lasted until the spring. It was a sustained crisis, with not a moment’s rest. As one player said, ‘There’s trouble here every day.’

  In the midst of the conflict over signing another number nine, Valdano said he was banned from Valdebebas and from official flights. The signing of a centre-forward, Emmanuel Adebayor, on loan until June, failed to bring an end to the skirmishes. Tensions continued into January, February and March, and news was leaked from the dressing room that favouritism, capriciousness and division between the privileged and the not so privileged – all according to their proximity to Jorge Mendes – were rife. Every time a player’s agent called the club to bemoan the influence of Mendes over the decisions of the coach, the answer from Pérez’s entourage was the same: everyone knew that Mourinho would bring confrontations with the press and the referees; what no one foresaw was ‘the other’. ‘The other’ was the code name for all matters linked to Mourinho’s tendency to direct operations towards outcomes that apparently favoured the interests of the Mendes group, to which he himself belonged.

  In early March 2011 news spread in the president’s inner circle that Pérez was preparing a back-up plan, just in case Mourinho did not win a trophy and he was forced to fire him. ‘There’s a 90 per cent chance that the coach will not continue next season,’ Pérez told a friend. The factors against the coach included his mismanagement of people, the damage he inflicted on the club’s image, the poor football played by the team and, above all, the limited chances of winning a trophy that would justify the extravagance of the project.

  ‘This way of playing does not guarantee trophies,’ the directors told each other in the corridors of the stadium. They let slip to Valdano that they would never allow Mourinho to take over all managerial duties and that sports policy would remain the exclusive responsibility of the club. Valdano and Pérez began searching for a possible emergency coach. Juan Carlos Garrido, at the time having a good season with Villarreal in the Europa League, Rafa Benítez, who maintained frequent contact with Pérez, and Alberto Toril, coach of Real Madrid Castilla, were considered as alternatives.

  The relationship between the players and the coach deteriorated. Pérez said many players called him complaining that Mourinho was unjust in his decisions. And it was not only the players who complained. The president said that the coach had serious problems even with the doctors and cooks.

  Every time Mourinho felt threatened he responded with propaganda and agitation. He used his presentations in the press room like a surgical instrument, a case in point being when he took advantage of the visit of Manuel Pellegrini’s Málaga on 3 March. Pellegrini, who had been his predecessor in the Madrid dugout, provided the combustible material. Asked if his situation was comparable to the Chilean’s in the previous year, Mourinho blazed, ‘No, because if Madrid get rid of me I’ll not end up coaching Málaga. If Madrid get rid of me, I’ll go to a big club in England or Italy. I’ll have no problem in ending up back at a big club.’

  Fernando Fernández Tapias was one of the directors most offended by these words. The shipping magnate requested his immediate dismissal as the only way to restore the club’s institutional image. More than just offending Málaga, what upset several members of the Madrid board was the lack of respect shown to Madrid. It was the coldness with which he had said that it was all the same to him whichever ‘big club’ chose to hire him. Pérez believed the words to be ‘inadmissible’, telling a close friend that if Madrid were knocked out of the Champions League against Lyon he would start a campaign to bring down Mourinho and replace him at the end of the season. The next day, during the pre-match meet-up in the Sheraton Mirasierra hotel, Pérez made the coach aware of how badly the board had taken his comments and asked him to retract them in the post-match press conference.

  There are moments that determine the mood of an entire era. The meet-up on 2 and 3 March was the first time that the players had observed the coach adopt an attitude that mixed melancholy, a generalised resentment, suspicion and indolence. Suddenly, he was not even acknowledging people. He treated as strangers those he had previously treated as friends. There were no more jokes. He did not talk with people who not so long ago he had playfully teased. He felt he could be betrayed by the people around him. In the dressing room a rumour started that over the years would become recurrent, periodically spoken, like a litany: ‘He wants to leave.’

  The 0–0 draw in the Riazor on 26 February left Mourinho contemplating a distressing idea: that the team was being swamped in the early parts of matches, and was then not able to come back and win games. In the team-talk before the match against Málaga he emphasised this point: ‘We’re not going to give away the first half.’ This kind of team meeting usually lasted 45 minutes but now it was cut drastically short, being over in less than 10 minutes. It seemed scandalous to many of the players to suggest that they were starting games with reduced intensity, especially taking into account the fact that it was the coach himself who insisted on inviting the opposition forward by using the medium-block.

  Most of the dressing room began to feel a crippling fatigue. Players used the word ‘burnout’ to describe the permanent state of mental exhaustion brought on by the complaints of a coach who not only never seemed satisfied, but also hinted that he did not appear to believe in the honesty of the group. Ricardo Carvalho, who had worked under Mourinho for a decade, reassured his team-mates, explaining that Mourinho had done the same at Chelsea. He summoned trouble up out of nothing just to introduce more pressure.

  Madrid beat Málaga 7–0. But, rather than being a joyful occasion, Mourinho’s post-match press conference was loaded with bitter irony. There was no end to the caustic messages aimed at the directors who had earlier rebuked him, begging him to offer up a public excuse. He began by complaining about the conspiracy mounted by TV schedulers, who in his opinion designed a deliberately difficult calendar that had been meekly accepted by the club:

  ‘News reaches me that we’ll probably have to play against Lyon on Wednesday and then against Atlético Madrid on Saturday, which will be just fantastic after the others [Barcelona] play on Tuesday and Sunday. But, of course, for the sake of the club’s image we should not report this type of thing. So we keep quiet and pretend everyone’s very happy, and on we go.’

  He was asked if he had considered apologising to Málaga, but he apologised to himself instead:

  ‘If you ask those who work in the top clubs if they’d go to Málaga, they’d answer you: “Why not?” But it would not be true. They would not go! If I have to apologise I will, but the truth is I responded without hypocrisy. In a hypocritical world, not being a hypocrite is seen as a defect … Obviously, I’ve nothing against Málaga, neither the club nor the professionals who work there; I simply responded honestly without hypoc
risy. It’s not a problem for me. I’ve said from the start that the day that people are not happy with me I will go. It’s not a problem. The fact that they don’t want me is not any pressure for me.’

  Pérez saw the press conference as a direct confrontation. Even José Ángel Sánchez moderated his defence of the coach. The corporate director general had previously argued that Spanish society was not mature enough to assimilate the pioneering vision of Mourinho. Now, however, he admitted that if Mourinho did not win a trophy he would become an unbearable burden for the club.

  Mourinho has never looked so suffocated as he did in the first week of March. It was then, however, that he began to gain the full support of Pérez – for reasons that even those closest to the president have not been able to clarify.

  Mourinho thus began his advance towards the power that had until then been the exclusive prerogative of the man chosen every four years at the polls. The president was careful not to reveal what was said, and from the directors’ box it was whispered that only the two people involved knew of the reasons for the great change. Suddenly, Pérez, previously so reluctant to support the coach in his attempts to wrestle more power – and such a jealous guardian of the club’s institutional image – became docile. Gradually, he began to allow the club itself to allow such allegations, both formal and informal, against the integrity of Barça’s players, against referees, against UEFA and against TV schedulers. At this point Valdano was being moved back into the shadows without knowing it. His head was soon to be served up on a platter.

  The speech that sealed the deal was given by Pérez during a ceremony to award medals to some of the club’s oldest members. There, the Madrid president formally reformed the scope of the notion ‘Madridismo’ by reclassifying a phrase that had until now had not applied to Mourinho: the ‘señorio’ of Real Madrid. Until then this word, meaning nobility or dignity, had summed up an ideal of sportsmanship that was treated as an unshakeable and distinctive principle of the club. The old hymn reflected this ethos in the verse, ‘If you lose, shake hands’. Señorio necessarily implied a self-control that went against the coach’s desire to operate without restrictions. Sánchez, together with Antonio García Ferreras, head of the TV channel La Sexta, a close friend and advisor to Pérez, applauded the initiative. But it was Pérez himself who put his face to the change, reading the following words:

  ‘This institution is proud of what we call señorio. Señorio is recognising the merits of the adversary, but it is also defending what we believe is right and denouncing irregular conduct, whether inside or outside the institution. Defending Real Madrid from what we think is unfair, irregular and arbitrary is also Madridismo. And that is precisely what our coach José Mourinho does. What José Mourinho says is also Madridismo.’

  The final reconciliation between the two men was staged before the workforce. On 15 March Mourinho invited Pérez to dinner with the team on the eve of the second leg of the second-round Champions League match against Lyon at the Bernabéu. The point was to win something. Winning a trophy. Any trophy. This was the message to Mourinho, a condition of granting him those ultimate powers that he had requested. The coach realised immediately that his fate rested in the hands of the players. To persuade them to offer him their support he conceived of a surprise encounter. During the pre-match meet-up ahead of the game against Atlético at the Calderón on 19 March, he called everyone to attend what they thought would be a tactics talk but was instead 20 unforgettable minutes. Mourinho, said one of the directors, is ‘a speaker who binds his players up with his talk’. That is exactly what he did in a monologue that an assistant recalled as follows:

  ‘I’m going to tell you something. I think you should know. I hate to be hypocritical. I’m honest. I’m not a liar. At the end of the season, either Valdano goes or I go. I cannot bear him and it’s been that way from day one. If I stay the only thing I’ll not be taking care of is the basketball and the financial side of things. But if I stay then I’ll have maximum responsibility for everything related to the football. And the people who have the key to all this are you. If we win, I’ll stay and he [Valdano] will be got rid of. If you lose, he stays and I go. And so, from here on in I’ll be observing who’s with the team and who’s thinking about other things.’

  The players were stunned. Most felt as if they were being put in an impossible situation. There was a makeshift parliament. According to one of those present, Alonso and Lass took the lead. ‘We’ve got into a very strange situation,’ they said. ‘This is not professional. What’s happening? Do they want us to be accomplices? Do they want us to be the judges of Valdano? If he goes it’s because we’ve got rid of him, and if not, we’re the motherfuckers [who have got rid of Mourinho].’

  They soon realised that they were trapped. Anyone who had a bad day – in any game – would automatically become a suspect. If the team won, Mourinho would use the fact to show the president that the dressing room was with him and not with Valdano. There was no honourable way out.

  Chapter 6

  Fear

  ‘If I were to judge the worth of emotions by their intensity, none would be more valuable than fear.’

  Horacio Quiroga

  The Madrid players said that the meat they ate every day at Valdebebas was good. But Mourinho, a man with a discerning palate, disagreed.

  Beef shank or sirloin, chuck steak or hump meat, loin or shoulder top – each cut required its own special preparation. According to Mourinho, this was not being carried out with the necessary skill. Hump meat in the pan, sirloin on the grill, shoulder top in the oven. The chefs had to work with dedication to cook it properly. Otherwise the meat would toughen, and one’s teeth would encounter an unpleasant resistance, followed by cartilage with the consistency of rubber and nerve tissue whose elasticity required a lot of tedious chewing. If this was what was served up, there were two possible explanations: the chefs did not know how to prepare the beef or the suppliers were cheating the club.

  As the winter of 2011 passed without his complaints being resolved, the manager ordered Madrid to sack their chefs and change their butchers. He said the meat had a ‘very high percentage of nerve tissue’.

  Mourinho was living days of prolonged and convoluted pain. Everything spoke to him to him of an unavoidable destiny. At the end of the season, Barcelona awaited – the team that had provoked Madrid into hiring him, the team that would later call into question his competence in the job with the 5–0 and even his status as a visionary. Who knew which nerve, which muscle, which minor occurrence would alter for ever the course of history?

  The way a team plays is determined by the quality of the squad and the message of its coach. The worse the quality in the squad, the more important the message. This message comes in the form of a flow of daily information from the coach, a combination of thousands of notes, images, reactions, suggestions, orders, jokes, rewards and punishments, and acts of rejection, disdain or approval. The first conclusions the Madrid players drew after the first few months of living with Mourinho was that they had to remain in a permanent state of alert, in constant tension, just like the chefs at Valdebebas.

  The nervous system of an elite footballer is a marvellous composite. It is capable of resisting environmental and social pressures that would be unbearable for most people, and it can achieve levels of abstraction and co-ordination inaccessible to the average professional athlete. In psychomotor terms it is capable of offering a more highly tuned response than the nervous system of any other team-sports player. The unnatural essence of football leads to the exceptional. Adapting an organism designed to use its hands to manipulate things rather than its feet implies, in itself, a selection. Those who have stuck it out after passing through the filter of the local neighbourhood, the school, the youth academy and the professional system are frankly extraordinary cases.

  This privileged organism is sensitive to one thing above all others: the threat of inactivity. The absence of offers of work, a serious injury or a co
ach who has other plans constitute every player’s damned trilogy. The brevity of a footballer’s career and the anxiety of youth magnify the drama. Mourinho knew how to master these psychological anxieties to the extent that he made them his main instrument of government.

  To what extent is it traumatic for a professional not to play for a long time because of the coach’s decision? Patricia Ramírez, an expert in professional sports psychology who worked with the staff at Real Betis, says the real trigger for anxiety is uncertainty.

  ‘Not playing can generate a lack of confidence and insecurity,’ she says, ‘but if a player knows the reason why he’s not playing, it allows him to make a change or look for a way out. The greatest insecurity comes from a lack of information, when the player is left to contemplate possible reasons … when the player doesn’t know why the coach has not picked him.’

  If information provides security, its absence can create doubts, fear or panic. Players are usually enclosed in a small universe that tends to magnify even the most mundane issues. They are also incapable of expressing their identity if they do not feel that they are integrated in the team. Mourinho knew perfectly well that the fear of marginalisation was the most flammable fuel in his players’ psychic engines. To manage his players, he turned the control of information into a fine art. Not only inside the dressing room; in addition, he demanded exclusive control of the club’s communication policy, of what each player said when facing the press, and the selection of the club’s spokesmen. Inside the dressing room his behaviour oscillated between two extremes: friendship and indifference. With some players he behaved like a friend you could talk to every day. With others he was distant, even treating them with disdain. There were players such as Kaká to whom he was warm and friendly for months and then suddenly, overnight, would not even acknowledge. No more ‘Good morning’, no more niceties. Kaká never understood the reason. His team-mates realised that if it could happen to Kaká, it could happen to any of them.