The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

by Torres, Diego

  Chapter 8

  Rebellion

  ‘What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called if I would submit to you and all your orders.’

  Homer, The Iliad, Book 1

  One day during the 2010–11 season Madrid were staying in a hotel ahead of a match when some supporters gave Iker Casillas a photograph in which he was shown lifting the World Cup in Johannesburg. A team-mate came up to him to look at the image with admiration.

  ‘How cool …’

  ‘Six and a half kilos. It weighs six and a half kilos.’

  Casillas mentioned the weight when talking about the solid-gold trophy that Silvio Gazzaniga had designed for FIFA and that he had held aloft as captain of the Spanish national team. Although, according to some, the weight of the trophy is eight kilos, the goalkeeper thought differently. For him it was six and a half kilos. When he remembered this moment, his team-mates saw how he got excited as only small boys and extremely happy men can. If there were two things that he felt deeply proud of, they were the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2008 European Championships in Austria and Switzerland. To have represented one of the greatest national football teams of all time filled him with total satisfaction. The team-mates who helped him to achieve it occupied a special place in his heart. Especially Xavi Hernández, who had been his accomplice in the national team since the time they were both teenagers.

  Casillas was not picked by Mourinho to play the last game of the 2010–11 season against Almería at the Bernabéu on 21 May. Mourinho, seemingly content with Casillas’s work, had given him the day off. He was not in the dressing room when, after the referee blew the half-time whistle, his team-mates found Mourinho at his most challenging. They were winning 3–0, but, before they went back out on to the pitch and then went on their holidays, he wanted to send them off with a message that was both cryptic and threatening, according to certain witnesses:

  ‘Let’s be clear. You’re the first to know … I’m going to tell you the truth … Apart from the fact that we’ve lost the league because the titulares [first-team regulars] surrendered, the year has been fucking shit. A disaster. Why? Because of the titulares. Because they haven’t shown their faces. Between ourselves, let’s not kid anybody. The titulares haven’t been up to it. I’m sure that next year, with new recruits, we’re going to win everything.’

  One player tells of a dressing room full of pent-up physical violence. Another thought that the absence of Casillas had encouraged the coach to come out and say things in a tone that he would not have been bold enough to have used if the captain had been present. Ronaldo tapped his boots insistently on the floor. Ramos looked disapprovingly at Mourinho. Albiol puffed out his cheeks and blew. But nobody opened their mouth to interrupt the boss. Mourinho finished his team-talk with a brief coda in which he attributed the team’s salvation in the public’s eyes to the distraction that his campaign of systematic denouncements of the referees, the TV companies and UEFA had generated.

  ‘It’s a good job that, thanks to me, we’ve come out of this looking OK. Thanks to me, people haven’t realised how bad the season has been.’

  They went back out on to the pitch so motivated – or so afraid of losing their places ahead of the squad overhaul that had just been announced – that Almeria were to concede another five goals. It meant an 8–1 scoreline against a team that had already been relegated. Some fans celebrated as if this spectacle of humiliation had some sporting value, and the home team, with the backing of the crowd, went about their work with enthusiasm. But the magnitude of the result did nothing to diminish the sense of impending threat that accompanied them on their holidays. Many began to realise that the excuses that they had given Mourinho throughout the season came at a considerable price.

  The 2010–11 season ended with Madrid winning the cup, and Barcelona the league and the Champions League. A modest return, but lauded by the club. Before the final match, Casillas and Karanka held press conferences to broadcast Mourinho’s version of Madrid’s year:

  ‘I would give this season 8 out of 10.’

  If there was one player who deserved his season to be rated at 8 out of 10 it was Casillas. But the captain has never stood out for his ability to sell himself. Introverted and not particularly hot-blooded, he lacked the gift of self-promotion. The more famous he became, the more uncomfortable the resulting social commitments made him. He liked the fact that he was still treated as if he were some kid from the suburb of Móstoles, but what he most longed for was the contact he had with the residents of Navalacruz, the village of his grandparents. In this small bastion of the Sierra Avila he was able to enjoy some isolation, in the company of people who believed that parish-life routines provide a person with everything they need. He lacked the ambition for power and the desire to control others that distinguish many great football leaders. Lazy when it came to official matters, he was someone who avoided disputes until there was no other alternative. He was ‘Cachazudo’: calm, easy-going, phlegmatic.

  In the summer of 2011 Casillas celebrated his 30th birthday. He had made his début in the first team in 1999 and had stood out when Madrid won the Champions League, although he was still practically a youth-team player. He was more experienced than any of his team-mates, and even though he found Mourinho unbearable he was prepared to travel along the same road with him for as long as that was what the club wanted. Mourinho had put Casillas up for the Ballon d’Or in 2010, knowing that it was to Casillas that he owed his continuity and his consolidation at the club. He was convinced that not even Pérez would have been able to justify backing Mourinho if he had not won the Copa del Rey, the cup secured by Casillas with some unforgettable saves.

  The goalkeeping coach, Silvino Louro, said many times that he had never in his life seen a save like the one produced by Casillas to deny Iniesta in the final at the Mestalla. The Barcelona midfielder popped up in the number 10 position and hit a shot that looked to be curving perfectly into the far corner. But Casillas reacted incredibly quickly. His legs propelled him like two springs and his elastic body stretched, floating in mid-air as he reached for the ball, turning it away with the tips of his fingers for a corner. Mourinho admired the save so much he stressed its importance to Louro, Faria, Karanka and Chendo on the bench. They heard him say that the reason his time at Chamartín had not ended miserably in June 2011 was because of Iker’s saves at the Mestalla. But the manager would never recognise this outside of his inner circle.

  After a year of insisting that the club needed modernising urgently, the sacking of Jorge Valdano, his immediate superior in the organisation, had given Mourinho control of all the levers necessary to remodel the institution from its centre: the squad. The coach had dreamed all his life of such a scenario – counting on the support of a club with worldwide influence, working shoulder to shoulder with Jorge Mendes, financially backing him to pick up players in the global market, with control over who was brought into the club and who left, whose contracts were improved and whose renewed. It was the kind of control that would give him influence in the market, prestige in the media and an impressive image in the eyes of his players. Until then not even Pinto da Costa, the Porto president, nor Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea, nor Massimo Moratti at Inter, had offered him such a wealth of resources. In the summer of 2011, after a career as first-team coach spanning 12 years, Mourinho reached the summit of his power.

  Alarmed by what they had learned on the last day of the season, the Madrid players imagined a wave of intimidating new signings capable of challenging them for their places in the team. The dressing room never expected the list of new players that was eventually announced: Varane, Altintop, Sahin, Callejón, Coentrão, Pedro Mendes. Neither had it foreseen that the most expensive and most requested new recruit from that group would be Fabio Coentrão, a left-back signed to replace Marcelo, the best left-back on the planet, whose progression had seemed unstoppable.

  Coentrão had been a winger for most of his career, but had not fou
nd recognition until he established himself at left-back at Benfica. A tenacious player, strong and daring, he stood out less for his ability, more for his motivation. As soon as his enthusiasm waned he struggled to lift himself much above average. The supporters at La Romareda only vaguely remembered him for his spell at Real Zaragoza – where Benfica sent him on loan during the 2008–09 season – because he rarely played. Marcelino García Toral, his coach at the time, tried to get him back on track following several visits by the police to Coentrão’s house after calls by neighbours complaining of noise in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘He didn’t take his football very seriously,’ said Marcelino. ‘He was 20 and lived alone with some friends whose appearance suggested they weren’t perhaps the best influence on him. He never really got involved in games and maybe for that reason I let him go. As the years passed he transformed himself. At the time I didn’t really look at him as a potential full-back. He wasn’t lazy, and he was obedient, but he was soft, flimsy in the challenge, and didn’t offer a great deal defensively. He was a forward player, a little winger.’

  Madrid paid €30 million for Coentrão. The left-sided player became the fifth-most expensive signing of the summer, after Falcao to Atletico (€47 million), Agüero to Manchester City (€45 million), Pastore to PSG (€42 million) and Fàbregas to Barça (€34 million). Below him in the transfer rankings that summer were Nasri to Manchester City (€28 million), Alexis to Barcelona (€26 million), Mata to Chelsea (€26 million), Ibrahimović to Milan (€24 million) and Cazorla to Arsenal (€23 million).

  Bayern were on the brink of signing Coentrão in 2010 for €15 million but Benfica did not close the deal. Jorge Mendes, according to Gestifute sources, offered Benfica the chance to wait a year when they would be able to sell him for double that. Benfica only took 50 per cent of the transfer. The other half was for the investment fund Benfica Stars, the private capital group that shared players’ rights with the club.

  At first, even though Mourinho said that Coentrão had not come to play as a left-back, Marcelo felt that a competitor had been signed. At 23, Marcelo Vieira was a Brazil international, had played for Madrid since the 2006–07 season, and enjoyed the friendship and respect of his team-mates. There are some players that have the kind of sensibility in their feet that most people only have in their hands. Maradona belonged to that category. At Madrid the only player with those juggler’s qualities was Marcelo. Quick, skilful and brave, over the years he improved his level of defensive concentration. He was a marvellous footballer. Both Mourinho and Mendes saw it immediately.

  Marcelo struck up a friendship with Pepe and Ronaldo, the three of them soon spending every day together. That is until they starting to propose to him that he put his affairs in the hands of Mendes. The Brazilian pretended not to pay too much attention until one day at the start of 2011, during a lunch in the presence of Mendes himself, they put the question to him directly: ‘Are you going to sign with Jorge?’ Marcelo explained that his agent had been with him since the beginning, was like a member of the family to him and that he did not want to leave him. From that point, according to the full-back, strange things started to happen. Pepe distanced himself. On one occasion, Mourinho criticised him in a press conference without mentioning him, saying that he preferred full-backs like Arbeloa because they never surprised him with moments of carelessness. And then he saw in a magazine that Ronaldo had said that he would be pleased if Madrid signed Coentrão.

  For the Spanish contingent the influence of Mendes had become oppressive. The agent intervened in almost everything that happened at Madrid, either directly or indirectly, offering his mediation services or sharing work with other agents. One of his most regular partners was Reza Fazeli. The company director of the ISM agency based in Düsseldorf, Fazeli represented Altintop, Sahin and Özil. According to sources at Gestifute, Fazeli tried to convince Özil that the best thing for him was to let Mendes become his advisor, moving on to his payroll. Persuaded that in Gestifute there were very well-defined hierarchies, and suspecting that, for example, he would be attended to with less care than Ronaldo, the German took a step that few footballers dared: he told Fazeli that he would be leaving him, that he was Mesut Özil and did not need any professional agent to promote him. Since then he has been represented by his father Mustafa.

  Unpredictable with the players whom he brought in, Mourinho was ruthless with the footballers he no longer wanted. The list of those discarded included Drenthe, Gago, Canales and Pedro León. First of all he arranged one-to-one dates for them with José Ángel Sánchez so that he could tell them that the club would take care of the business of finding them new clubs that suited Madrid’s interests. When Sánchez mentioned German, Italian and Turkish clubs the players believed he was acting in concert with Mendes, whose relationships in Germany and Turkey were well known. The players refused to sanction the deals and as a result were not taken on the pre-season tour, being left out of the squad and left to train alone at Valdebebas while their team-mates went to California. According to one interpretation of the sports labour law, their severance from the heart of the team was a footballer’s equivalent of being expelled from the workplace. It was the first time in the history of Madrid that a coach had separated players from the team without having disciplinary reasons for doing so.

  Lass was a case apart. His team-mates nicknamed him ‘antisistema’, as he combined an indomitable spirit with the defiant republicanism taught in the French schools he attended. Mourinho wanted to take him to Los Angeles because he appreciated him as a player; Lass refused to go, saying that he did not want to spend any more time under Mourinho’s charge, and that he had warned him months earlier that he hoped he would be allowed to leave. When Mourinho continued to insist that he join up with the squad and did not stop calling him, Lass told him where to go with a string of insults, turned off his mobile, ordered his agent to do the same and disappeared for a few days, presumably to Paris.

  Lass loved football. It is not known what he did during this time; the only thing he told his friends was that he did not get much sleep. He stayed up late to watch all the games of the Copa América that was being played in Argentina. He remained unreachable until one day he turned up at Valdebebas. It was midsummer and he found the training complex deserted; the only people around were some maintenance staff, and Pedro León and Drenthe doing laps of the training pitches without the ball. The balls, they said, were under lock and key by order of Mourinho.

  Mourinho knows better than any coach that there is nothing that annoys a player more than being denied contact with the ball. Indeed, in his own training programmes there are no exercises that don’t involve the ball. What he had done upset Lass so much that he called the club and told them exactly what he thought. His insistence was so great that the staff at Valdebebas eventually gave the balls to the players. What had happened was so unusual that the Sports Association of Spain sent an inspection team to the club to look into it.

  If those who stayed behind had a miserable time, those who went on the trip to California did not fare much better. Madrid’s pre-season at the UCLA campus did not go smoothly. The support employees accompanying the team claimed the atmosphere was ‘suffocating’. Mourinho was obsessed with the idea of starting the season by defeating Barcelona in the Super Cup and had brought his squad together a week before Guardiola’s team came back from their holidays. He was convinced that if Madrid won the Super Cup he could renew the protest he had made in the semi-finals of the Champions League. His first step was announcing that if his players beat Barça they would thereby demonstrate to the world the truth of everything he had said about the conspiracy hatched by UEFA and its referees to destroy Madrid; and that if they were capable of beating the best club in Europe they would make it manifestly clear that nobody other than Madrid should have won the Champions League at Wembley.

  Mourinho was constantly agitated. He did not like the pitches at the UCLA. He said that the colour of the grass w
as not right and ordered the pitches to be returfed, costing Madrid thousands of dollars. He did not like the food, either. At the beginning of the previous pre-season, relying on his famously critical palate, he had tasted each dish the chefs served then sacked the lot of them. He behaved as if he were a gourmet. The food seemed delicious to the players, but Mourinho found fault with everything and suggested changes to the way it was cooked.

  He focused his attention on the hot-plates, on the grass, on the politics of agitation and propaganda, and finally on the captaincy. He began to seriously consider taking the captaincy away from Casillas and giving it to an outfield player, although doing so would go against the club’s tradition that the armband should go to the most senior member of the team. Among his assistants, Mourinho defended his position with sporting arguments, saying that there were certain decisive moments when a goalkeeper could not act like an outfield player, such as communicating with the strikers or complaining to the referee. For the role of captain Mourinho first considered Ramos, Ronaldo and, above all, Pepe. Ramos was Pérez’s favourite. Ronaldo treated the idea with contempt and refused the offer. Pepe was Mourinho’s preferred choice because of his docility. Neither Casillas nor Ramos had shown themselves to be very flexible in terms of taking on board Mourinho’s suggestions, and the coach wanted someone who would act as his mouthpiece. Someone completely loyal, who would never question him. And, if possible, someone who was not a Spanish international. Since his arrival at Madrid he explained to his assistants that he did not trust those players who had just won the World Cup because he found them lacking in ambition and the requisite nervous tension. The commotion over the captaincy did not result in anything more than a growing climate of mistrust between Casillas and the coach, who began treating his goalkeeper with indifference, dealing instead with Alonso, Pepe and Ramos.