The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

by Torres, Diego

  ‘I score and I win.’

  ‘Sure,’ Maradona responds.

  ‘And another thing – you score and you don’t know if you win!’

  If Mourinho’s football philosophy could be summed up in a single aphorism, it would be those 14 words in which he boasted to Maradona: ‘I score and I win, you score and you don’t know if you win.’ I score against you and drop deep to focus on protecting my goal to close down the game. I score and your hopes disappear, because I forget about attacking you unless you make a mistake. And if I don’t score? Only then am I forced to attack, but only gradually, using more and more resources, rationing every advance. What if I still don’t score? Then the limits of a model that fits into one slogan have been reached. The dark side of the theory was not revealed to Maradona, but the players eventually discovered it as winter turned into the spring of 2011 in visits to the Riazor, the Sardinero and the Vicente Calderón.

  Madrid‘s line-up at the Riazor on 26 February invited fans to dream of a great attacking display: Casillas, Ramos, Carvalho, Pepe, Marcelo, Lass, Alonso, Kaká, Özil, Ronaldo and Benzema. If these same fans had heard what the coach told the players in the team-talk before the match they would have been confused. Madrid needed to face the matches ahead of them with resolution, in order to regain ground lost to Barcelona, topping the table with 65 points to Madrid’s 60. But in La Coruña Mourinho called for caution. The phrases rained down on the players like a depressing drizzle: ‘Don’t take any risks in defence’, ‘Come out from the back with great caution’ and ‘Don’t be aggressive in attack’. By now the word ‘aggressive’ had only negative connotations. The full-backs applied the handbrake, the ball barely touched the midfield, and the transition from defence to attack, rather than being fast, was just poorly timed. With 25 minutes left Mourinho made changes – Di María for Lass, and Granero for Marcelo – and ordered a charge. But it was too late. The match ended 0–0, with nobody explaining to the players exactly what it was that the coach had feared from Deportivo’s forwards Guardado, Adriano or Riki.

  Mourinho waited for the players in the dressing room to ask them to tell the press that the schedule imposed by the TV companies favoured Barca’s recovery between games, while at the same time Madrid were being physically worn down. But after taking a shower, Casillas took the microphone with something quite different in mind. The captain conscientiously expressed his dissatisfaction:

  ‘We let the first half get away from us. We threw 45 minutes away. The team needs to give much more. We have to be more focused from the start and press a lot more because the league is running away from us.’

  Mourinho deeply disliked his players failing to reproduce the soundbites that he prepared for them to give to the media after the match. As he saw that no one had given his account of the game, in his next public appearance he launched a hidden warning to the squad – and to Pérez:

  ‘There are clubs that have a different communication strategy from ours. Here, I’m the one who comes [out to speak] and I never ask a player to be part of a communication strategy in which the coach is protected. There are other clubs in which players participate very well in a communication strategy, where the coach is protected, calmly playing a different role. Not here. Here it’s me coming out to show my face. Not anymore.’

  On 4 March Madrid travelled to Santander, Ronaldo’s absence changing the mood of the trip. Mourinho usually set up the team to channel the attacks to Ronaldo and part of the squad felt that in the Sardinero they would be presented with the chance to prove that they could perform well without their star player.

  With all the travelling and the staying at hotels, forced to rest and remain in their rooms, taking siestas and not staying up too late, footballers belong to a profession with more dead time on their hands than any other. These great stretches of inertia lead them to watch reality shows, go on their PlayStations, come up with nicknames and imagine possible conspiracies: Jorge Mendes’s activities in Valdebebas, the fact that Mourinho treated his agent like an unofficial director of football and Ronaldo’s role as standard-bearer of the Gestifute group were a cocktail too obvious not to arouse suspicion.

  There was no doubt that Ronaldo enjoyed a unique level of protection, including tactical privileges. He was the only team member whom Mourinho had liberated from defensive duties and this allowed him to excel in attack. Most of the players came to the conclusion that this tactic, which increased the status of the Portuguese striker, had much to do with the common interests that linked Mendes to the coach. In these months, perhaps undeservedly, Ronaldo became a target for those alienated peers of his who felt marginalised by the Portuguese clan. Inspired by the constant frenzy to deify him, the Spanish gave him the satirical nickname Ansias, derived from the word ‘ansioso’ – anxious.

  Wary of Ronaldo’s status, his team-mates decided to put on a show of force in Santander. An official meeting was called in the team hotel the night before the game. The men closest to Mendes – people like Pepe, Di María and Carvalho – did not attend. The dressing-room heavyweights spoke and the majority nodded at the calls for them to be respected by a coach who they felt discriminated against them.

  ‘Tomorrow, we have to be clear. We have to go all out. If not, Mou will say in the press conference that without Ansias we cannot win,’ said one of the players.

  ‘What will his “dad” say if we win playing well without Ansias?’

  On the night of 4 to 5 March, eight months after Mourinho’s arrival at Madrid, the squad decided that enough was enough. The players were exhausted by a coach obsessed with political manoeuvring, a man seemingly intent on dividing the squad into tiers, which sometimes only followed lines drawn by loyalties and ties of kinship with his agent, someone who appeared to be just as concerned with making propaganda as with football. The ban on speaking in public – unless it was to parrot other people’s ideas, most of which were in praise of the coach’s leadership, or were complaints against referees or the broadcasters who had come up with the fixtures calendar – had exhausted the patience of more than a few players.

  There were those in the team who now wondered aloud whether a players’ boycott would lead to his dismissal; or perhaps it would be necessary for the team to allow themselves to be beaten, what is commonly known as ‘making the bed’ of the coach. The conclusion the leaders of the Madrid dressing room came to was that in Madrid this would be impossible. Not only because of the constant scrutiny of the media and fans, but also because when the requirement is to get trophies, failure is a stain on all those players who finish the season empty-handed. The only way to protect their contracts – and the privileged professional status they enjoyed in one of the world’s highest-paid squads – was to win. Winning always, and without hesitation. For them. For their families. For their insatiable followers. Never for the boss. As one Spanish player said that night:

  ‘If Mourinho were manager of Sevilla or Valencia they would have already made the bed for him.’

  Mourinho gave between two and four team-talks before every game, lasting 10 minutes to an hour. The first talk he gave at the team’s hotel in Santander lasted an hour. It was a monologue about his efforts to control the press. His voice was inflamed. He always spoke in the first person, without looking at the players. Club employees had never seen this kind of talk from a coach:

  ‘I’m sick of the press telling me we don’t win away from home … We have to win … We have to score more goals … We have to compensate for the stick the press are giving me … I’m sick of being criticised for us not scoring goals … I’m sure we’ll win, for the press …!’

  There were no references to Racing Santander, Madrid’s opponents, until the following morning. Because of Khedira’s absence, there was something new in Mourinho’s line-up: Alonso would play in front of the defence, with Granero, Özil and Di María behind Benzema and Adebayor in attack. A 4-1-3-2 scheme was an innovation. They had never practised it in training but the manager was convinced it
would organise itself spontaneously. All that he was worried about was that the players had understood what he had instilled in them defensively – everything else should come by itself. Following that way of thinking, in those months he spent many hours instructing his more attacking players how to play defensively. Before the team ran out onto the pitch in the Sardinero he spoke individually with Özil, Granero, Di María, Benzema and Adebayor. The subjects were the same for all of them: close down the space, pressurise and help the defence.

  Mourinho gave three team-talks to the group before the game, disparaging the opposition in one of them:

  ‘Racing are the most basic team I’ve seen in the league. They just get the ball out wide and then cross it … Also, I know that we’ll win here because we don’t have “Cris”. We’ll surprise them without “Cris”.’

  ‘Cris’, to his friends, was Cristiano Ronaldo. When the Portuguese striker was on the pitch Mourinho made the team sit deeper, allowing the opposition to advance, thereby generating gaps between their defence and the goal. In the absence of Ronaldo – and because neither Benzema nor Adebayor were as quick running into space – the coach moved the team further up the pitch to press higher. The effect was spectacular. The first part of the game saw probably the most comprehensive exhibition of football from Madrid in the 2010–11 season.

  The team could have gone in at half-time five goals up. This was not hit-and-run football, just 45 minutes of considered passing, woven from the midfield to attack, with timing, precision and class. Adebayor and Benzema both scored brilliant goals but Mourinho, contrary to his usual custom, celebrated neither. The substitutes watched him from the bench. With the first goal he limited himself to taking a drink of water. After the second goal he remained motionless. All of a sudden, and in front of what certainly seemed like a spectacle worthy of celebration, Mourinho became taciturn. He had very much disliked one move in which Marcelo, Ramos, Benzema, Adebayor, Özil and Granero all advanced into the attacking half. On entering the dressing room at half-time he delivered the sort of tirade that over the years would become standard fare. In front of players proud of what they were achieving, he told them not to press so high, adding that they could not afford to give the opposition the chance to counter-attack. He insisted that no one put on any virtuoso displays. To complete his diatribe, he stuck the sword in:

  ‘It’s impossible for Racing to play so badly in every way as they did in the first half. Now they’re going to attack us. They won’t take us by surprise because it’s impossible for a football team to play as badly as Racing did in the first half.’

  Seeing that that he was taking credit away from them, some players complained bitterly before going back out on to the pitch.

  ‘So what is it then? If there’s no Ronaldo, then we don’t know how to do anything? We’ve also played well.’

  Top players usually get excited about the idea of imposing themselves on the opposition. But it was a disconsolate Madrid that emerged for the second half, a team that played under the flag of a coach who suggested that the Racing forwards Giovani and Munitis posed a potential danger. Granero went back to play alongside Alonso in front of the defence, there was a general withdrawal to their own half, and Racing almost managed a draw after Kennedy pulled a goal back.

  Regulars on the Madrid bench say they have never before seen a coach display terror as obviously as Mourinho. The manager’s body language during games reflected his understanding of the game as a fierce struggle. He rarely seemed satisfied, and was unable to show happiness without an added dose of rage. For him, the essence of coaching was not to offer solutions and provide a nice product. For him, the essence was not to lose. Losing, for Mourinho, was to suffer an unbearable misfortune. It was like a plane crash. That is how one player who was on the bench when Giovani almost inspired the equaliser in the Sardinero described it:

  ‘Watching Giovani, Mourinho looked like a passenger with a fear of flying stuck in a small plane during turbulence.’

  For a moment, you could begin to see the vertigo in his eyes, standing, then suddenly swaying, gripped by the struggle to stay upright. Livid, making a fuss, waving his arms and hands to ask for concentration, for players to drop back, for assistance, for compact lines and defensive intensity – he seemed to be calling for protection from the bottom of his soul. The issue was not the team. It was not football. It was Mourinho himself who felt exposed.

  Benzema’s goal in the 76th minute made it 1–3 and ended the torment.

  As someone with a keen smell for danger, Mourinho felt that several players distrusted him. Alarmed at the approach of the season’s most decisive duels, he sought the help of Pérez, and set Mendes and Sánchez to work at aligning all available forces for the job of constructing just the right media story. More than a few journalists and media organisations reproduced the same prefabricated phrases they were fed: the team is united, everyone is happy with ‘Mou’, ‘Mou’ is the best coach there is, the team is playing very well, etc., etc. It was as if the use of the words ‘armoured’ and ‘united’ – repeated over and over again in different forums – had been medically prescribed, echoing like a rattling snare drum: ‘The dressing room is “blindado”.’ The word means bullet-proof or armoured. But armoured against what? That was never made clear.

  With the same totalitarian logic, a number of enemies were created. The Madrid mythology contained three fundamental demons: TV companies plotting to harm Madrid with adverse match scheduling that was favourable to Barcelona; referees who favoured Barcelona; and Barcelona themselves, subject to various slurs and innuendo from journalists based in Madrid.

  Mourinho believed that if players publicly warned of the existence of a hidden plot it would give his campaign the stamp of legitimacy. To do this, he insisted that he had to ‘co-ordinate’ the ‘communication strategy’, underlining the notion of a team cursed by the power of institutions and deeply attached to the eminence of the coach. Under the pretext of safeguarding them from pressure, he stopped players giving interviews and individual press conferences, unless they allowed the content to be drawn up beforehand. At the same time, players were required to help him after every game in the mixed zone in denouncing referees and the fixtures calendar, or saying they completely agreed with the coach regarding these issues.

  The Spanish contingent felt particularly ridiculous complaining about things they thought irrelevant. Whenever they could they avoided it. One day, gathered in the gym, they spoke about refusing to participate in the company’s propaganda. They were talking when Silvino Louro, the goalkeeping coach, happened to pass by, and, coincidentally, began complaining about how easy the TV operators were making things for Barcelona. When the goalkeeping coach was gone, Albiol said what everyone was thinking:

  ‘This is an embarrassment! They even believe it themselves!’

  Alerted to the squad’s scorn for Mourinho’s psychological-warfare methods, in March Pérez called Ramos and Casillas in and asked them to back down. ‘You must support the coach,’ he pleaded. The president conceded that Mourinho’s methods might be extravagant and difficult to follow but he asked them to stand behind their manager, whatever his instructions were, and to do so for the greater good of Madrid. Pérez reminded them that the fans – yearning for success, upset by the lack of trophies – deserved exceptional sacrifice. And, if they won the Champions League, the league or the cup, all of their efforts would have been worthwhile. He never said to the players that at the end of the season Mourinho would continue but he somehow led them to understand that the coach was not going to be an interim solution. Only once – and then through third parties – did word reach the dressing room that Mourinho would not still be there the following year. It is not known whether these messages were contrived or not, but the squad believed that Mourinho was not so important for the president.

  To finish reassuring Mourinho, Pérez suggested that Casillas publicly endorse him. The captain did this in an interview on the radio station Onda Ce
ro:

  ‘Mourinho’s a great coach. Today, he’s probably the best in the world. You can like what you see on TV or not. It used to be strange to see him on TV, but of course, now I see him every day and know him, and I can tell you that I’ll defend him and will give everything for him because I think as a person he’s a “10 out of 10” … and as a coach his record speaks for itself.’

  Thanks to Pérez’s intervention, the spirit and the routine of the team were moulded to fit the whims of the coach. Mourinho could not get Barcelona out of his head. He had them in mind when analysing every game against every opponent. The league derby against Atlético on Saturday 19 March 2011 served as a testing ground, the perfect occasion to put some of his ideas into practice. On the Friday the players gathered in the Valdebebas conference room for some instruction. As always, when what he had to say transcended the game itself, Mourinho spoke of himself. According to those in attendance, his team-talk went as follows. First, he addressed the issue of the TV schedules:

  ‘I’ll be honest with you. All this discussion about the TV companies, I’ve invented all of it. It’s a lie. It’s a lie I told you to distract the press. Because what difference does it make if we get two or three days’ rest [between games]? Between us, it makes no difference at all!’

  His audience remained silent, save for a few snorts of surprise. Mourinho continued, completely convinced by what he was saying:

  ‘Stay calm, because next year Florentino will terminate the contract with Mediapro and will sign with another operator. From then on, I’ll be deciding the schedule … Now I’m going out to the press room and I’m going to tell the journalists once again that we’re hurting because of the scheduling of our matches.’

  To conclude the session, Mourinho touched on the most personal topic imaginable, confessing that he had experienced a dreamlike trance. The players received this confidence in complete silence; there was not a single laugh, not even a murmur as the coach recounted his experience of the previous night: