The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

by Torres, Diego

  The journalist Santiago Segurola, match reporter for El País during the 1998 World Cup, coined the neologism ‘trivote’ to define the concept Cesare Maldini had introduced to the Italian midfield. Dino Baggio, Di Biagio and Pesotto constituted the trivote. The only thing different from the double pivot first seen in Spain in the 50s with Maguregui and Mauri was the addition of a third defensive midfielder. The result was a stiffening of the midfield – one that lessened creativity, tending to leave no room for players who operated just behind the striker – and a narrowing of the formation, all serving a single purpose: defending deep in numbers and attacking on the break. The term ‘trivote’ became part of everyday football-speak in Spain. The Madrid players used it every day to describe what Mourinho had implemented in April against Barcelona. In the summer of 2011, when they explained the tactics the manager had prepared at UCLA, they again referred to the trivote. The new version, it seemed, would feature Khedira, Alonso and Coentrão.

  Mourinho was so keen to have a strong, athletic and flexible holding midfielder in his team that he could not stop thinking about Lass. Even though he knew that the Frenchman had disowned him, he did not stop sending him texts asking him to stay at Madrid. The player returned one of the messages in front of his friends, one of whom read the exchange and related it in the following terms:

  ‘Get out of my life and leave me in peace …’

  ‘You should know that I’m not going to sell you for less than €20 million. Get back into the pre-season and you’ll play.’

  ‘Let your mother go to the pre-season.’

  ‘I’m going to send you to Castilla.’ [Castilla are the club’s second team, who play in the second division.]

  ‘OK, well, I’ll earn the €9 million that they owe me and wait in Castilla until I’m a free agent …’

  ‘You won’t be able to stand it in Castilla. After three months you’ll return with me to compete …’

  ‘I won’t be able to stand it? You forget that at Chelsea I didn’t play for so long that you had to transfer me to Arsenal. And I was 20 years old. Imagine what I am capable of doing now that I’m 26.’

  Mourinho’s bad mood accompanied him to the training ground. To his assistants he insisted that the squad were missing certain qualities. In front of the players he appeared more weighed down, more demanding, more inflexible in his principles. The idea that the only important thing in football was to win, and that taking the greatest defensive precautions, with fewer concessions than ever to attacking licence and elaboration, formed the core of his sermons.

  If in the summer of 2010 he practised on the basis of a 4-2-3-1 formation, 4-3-2-1 prevailed in 2011. To instruct his players in this new formation Mourinho forced natural wingers such as Di María and Coentrão to play as defensive midfielders, escorting Khedira and Alonso. During the friendlies he came up with trivotes and pivotes (two defensive midfielders) of all kinds: Khedira, Alonso and Coentrão; Coentrão, Alonso and Pepe; Alonso and Coentrão; Khedira and Coentrão; and Granero and Coentrão.

  Mourinho’s concern for picking Coentrão in any position other than at left-back, laid bare to the players his desire to justify a signing that had led to so many doubts. The fact that on the pre-season tour he had gone out of his way to show affection towards Pepe, Di Maria and Coentrao, did nothing to lessen suspicions. The majority of the squad believed that his favouritism towards these players was not based wholly on footballing reasons but also on his friendship with Jorge Mendes. These were not the only questions that arose among the squad. In the team-talks the players began to cast doubt on some of the technical observations of their manager.

  The first leg of the Super Cup was played in the Bernabéu on 14 August 2011. Considering both sides’ lack of preparation it turned out to be a great game. There were notable absentees in the team sent out by Guardiola. Barcelona started with Valdes, Alves, Mascherano, Abidal, Adriano, Thiago, Keita, Iniesta, Alexis, Messi and Villa. Madrid, who had had one more week of pre-season, were able to field their strongest side: Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Carvalho, Marcelo, Di María, Khedira, Alonso, Benzema, Özil and Ronaldo.

  A superb move involving Benzema and Özil gave Madrid a 1–0 lead after they had made an irrepressible start. The words that Mourinho had used in April remained the same in August. He had insisted on the word ‘hard’ to describe the way he wanted his players to go into challenges, reassuring them that Spanish referees did not dare give red cards to Madrid players. Sending them out to press using high-block for throw-ins and goal-kicks, he warned that if Barcelona played more than three passes then they had to get back quickly. As Barcelona were struggling to put even two passes together, Alonso and Khedira were able to move 20 yards forward, closer to the fully switched-on Madrid forward line. From the touchline Mourinho looked on with silent approval.

  Before the game he had told his players, regardless of where on the pitch they won possession from Barcelona, to finish off their attacking move as quickly as possible. This hurried Madrid’s play. No backward or sideways balls, and at the slightest hesitation the moves would be channelled to the wings and end in crosses. But Madrid’s vertigo suddenly went with the 1–0. Realising he should make the most of the advantage, Mourinho ordered the retreat, and Madrid went from chaotic attacks to sitting deep and waiting. Goals from Villa and Messi were the consequence. Only a shot from Alonso on the hour brought the scores back level at 2–2. Mourinho’s reaction was immediate. He put Coentrão on for Di María, forming what he had spent so much time practising in Los Angeles: the trivote. The measure at least served to protect Casillas’s goal. But Madrid no longer had control of the game.

  Every minute that Coentrão played in midfield revealed more and more of his ineptitude. If he did not receive the ball, he lost his position on the right wing; he was not able to lose his marker nor was he capable of making diagonal runs on goal. As a midfielder, and as part of the trivote, he had great difficulty making space for himself to receive the ball – or he was simply trying to hide every time that his team got possession of it – and the central defenders never found him in a position to give him the ball. Physically, he was best suited to the left wing. He was a willing marker, but what he was most happy doing was going past the full-back and crossing, or arriving in the area himself. He had vision and a good change of pace, but he was a long way from being able to replace Ronaldo in that position, at least not without anyone noticing the marked difference between the two.

  The return leg on 17 August was probably the most dramatic clásico of all these years. In his eagerness to play Coentrão, and persuaded that the team lacked stability in other areas, Mourinho did exactly what he had managed to avoid doing during the seven friendlies in the pre-season: he put him at left-back, the only position in the team where he could play to a certain level. This was Marcelo’s position; the Brazilian was dropped to the bench, humiliated, and spent the first half passing caustic comment on his boss. A substitute on the bench at the time summed up the feeling of an increasingly influential part of the dressing room with the following remark as he watched Pepe, Carvalho, Coentrão, Di María and Ronaldo:

  ‘Five Jorge Mendes players on the pitch. What he wants to do is play an “eleven” made up of Mendes players!’

  For the second half Mourinho reorganised his team to re-establish the trivote. He brought on Marcelo at left-back and moved Coentrão into midfield. The deciding goal, giving a 3–2 victory to Barcelona, started with a piece of skill from Messi in the zone that Coentrão should have been patrolling. Messi received the ball on the right side of midfield, played a pass out to Adriano and scored from the return pass. The Madrid players blamed Coentrão for the delay in closing down Messi and then for not cutting out the ball from Adriano.

  Just before the end of the game, Marcelo, still annoyed at not having started, kicked Cesc Fàbregas in front of the bench. There were protests from everyone: Madrid called for action to be taken against the alleged play-acting of Fàbregas, and Barcelona want
ed Marcelo to be punished for his violent play. In the middle of the melée, involving substitutes, employees and coaches from both clubs, Mourinho slipped into the Barcelona technical area. He was followed by his bodyguard, a young man, shaven-headed and well built, squeezed into a white shirt, who never left him before, during and immediately after games.

  On seeing Guardiola’s assistant Tito Vilanova with his back to him, the Madrid manager moved in from behind and poked his index finger into Vilanova’s eye before quickly retreating. When Vilanova turned he could only stretch out his arm and slap Mourinho in the back of the neck. The bodyguard stepped in, preventing Vilanova from advancing any further. The next day, Madrid’s lawyers sent videos of the incident to the Competition Committee in an attempt to show that the occupants of the Barcelona bench had provoked Madrid. In the video images it is difficult to distinguish anything out of the ordinary. The only judge, Alfredo Florez, a regular in the directors’ box at the Bernabéu, gave Mourinho a two-match ban and Vilanova a one-match suspension. As far as Guardiola was concerned, the evidence showed that Madrid had positioned themselves carefully with respect to the regulating body of Spanish football.

  Mourinho told his players that if Barça won the Super Cup they should not remain on the pitch for the presentation of the trophy, so they retired discreetly to the dressing room. Casillas got caught up in the collective hysteria, and told Fàbregas exactly what he thought about his ‘simulation’. Xavi could not persuade him that he was wrong, and both captains argued until they had to be separated. There were no congratulations. It was a turning point for the captain. When Casillas saw the footage later on at home, not only did he discover that Fàbregas had in fact been hit hard by Marcelo. He also suspected that he himself had crossed the line into the ridiculous, and that he was compromising his prestige in a crusade that was neither his nor his club’s, in a childish war that undermined the unity of the Spanish national side – those ties of complicity, those shared emotions, those friendships that had taken such a long time to forge. He felt his own identity as a player and as a person might be irreversibly stained if he did not act straight away.

  Casillas decided to call Xavi and Puyol to apologise for what had happened over the last few months. He asked for their forgiveness, admitting that he had made a mistake, and he did it publicly so that all the supporters were aware of his position. An act of unprecedented grandeur, it took great courage. How many times has one of the game’s giants apologised in front of the whole world? The initiative caught both Mourinho and Pérez by surprise. The coach saw it as a challenge to dressing-room unity and his principles. If until that point Casillas and Mourinho had maintained a civilised dialogue, from that moment on their relationship became one skirmish after another.

  Pérez’s, who as always had to manage a crisis with Mourinho in the middle of it, was ambivalent. He told his friends that Mourinho always did the opposite of whatever it was he asked him, and for that reason he had to be treated with extreme subtlety. As for the finger in the eye of Vilanova, he told the manager to do what he wanted but he recommended a public act of contrition. The response from Mourinho, one week after the events, was to issue a threat on Madrid’s headed note paper. The statement, with messianic overtones, included a new term: ‘pseudomadridistas’. In this way, the manager was positioning himself as the Grand Inquisitor of Real Madrid, pointing the finger at those who confessed to be Madridistas but who did not share his way of working:

  ‘I have a fantastic president, who is very intelligent and with whom I have a great friendship. I also have a director general who works 24 hours a day. Because of the way I feel, I believe that my motivation is enormous and my Madridismo is much larger than certain pseudomadridistas.

  ‘I want to directly address myself towards the Madrid family to apologise to it, and only to it, for my attitude in the last game. Some are better adapted to the hypocrisy of football, they do it with their faces hidden, with their mouths covered and in the depth of the tunnels.

  ‘I didn’t learn to be a hypocrite. I didn’t learn it and I don’t want learn it.

  ‘An embrace to everyone, and we’ll see each other tomorrow in the Santiago Bernabéu.’

  Madrid hosted Galatasaray for the Bernabéu Trophy on 24 August. More than an exhibition match and a friendly, this was a demonstration of extent of Mourinho’s power. The stadium was covered in banners of support. In the ring of the highest stand of the Castellana side of the ground, directly in front of the directors’ box, somebody had draped a significant banner: ‘Mou, tu dedo nos señala el camino’ (‘Mou, your finger shows us the way’). It was signed by the supporters’ club of La Clásica, it was 100 feet long and had clearly been factory made. The club saw no reason to take it down.

  In the 84th minute, Mourinho made a significant change: he took off Marcelo and put on Pedro Mendes. This young, right-sided central defender, an Under-21 with Portugal, had arrived on a free from Swiss team Servette to play for Castilla. His agent was Jorge Mendes and his new coach clearly thought highly of him, immediately inviting him to train with the first team. Mourinho then gave him his first-team debut in the Bernabéu Trophy and, finally, he included him in the club’s Champions League squad. It was a lot of hype for an unknown player whose qualities did not make him stand out from any of the other young players at the club. His team-mates in Castilla did not take very long to nickname him ‘El Enchufado’ (‘The Connected One’).

  On the bench sat Casillas. The goalkeeper did not play so much as a minute in an exhibition match in which all his team-mates played a part. He knew he was being punished. Inside the dressing room he put on a calm face; he was ready to embark on a long journey. He told the team-mates closest to him that he could no longer bear the situation, that he had never believed in the non-football practices of the coach but even so, for the sake of the club, he had done his best to carry them out. In time, he confessed, he had come to realise that this role was not for him. He felt like an impostor. Mourinho, Casillas said, aside from being a bad person, had generated an intolerable division in the squad by creating what appeared to be a group of protected players connected to Jorge Mendes. He added that he knew that the manager had been outraged because he had tried to restore some harmony with Barcelona by calling Puyol and Xavi, but that they had not exchanged so much as a word about it. To conclude, he argued that it did not serve the club’s interests to continue systematically reproducing what Mourinho called his ‘communication strategy’, and showed himself to be as decisive as former Spanish national team boss Camacho:

  ‘I’ve got the balls not to do it!’

  It is said in Valdebebas that it was Casillas who sought out Mourinho to clarify his position. He said he had to admit that they could not stand each other, that the feeling was one of mutual rejection, and that there was no need to pretend. Casillas told Mourinho that on the pitch he would give everything, but that off the pitch he wanted to avoid any complicity that went beyond what was absolutely necessary.

  Mourinho was not able to hide his displeasure in the team-talk before the first game of the season, at La Romareda. Profoundly frustrated, the coach said that the unity of the group was the supreme value. He said that everyone had to go in the same direction, and he launched a coded message against Casillas and those who felt dislocated from the group, accusing them of undermining the general interests of the team. When he had finished, Casillas took him to one side and asked him exactly what he had meant by ‘everyone going in the same direction’, and if perhaps it did not rather consist in working for the particular interests of Mourinho. Because, he pointed out, what interested Madrid was one thing, and what interested its coach was another. Casillas also invited him not to use what they had talked about in private to discredit him later in front of his team-mates. He said this as if it were a threat, because he was still prepared to support his team-mates. The one who he would no longer speak up for was him: Mourinho and his many interests.

  The contrast between the de
votion shown by Mourinho for providing security to Di María and his disdain for Özil and Kaká – as well as his dedication to Coentrão, his indifference towards Marcelo, and his penchant for praising Pepe and criticising Ramos – led to a feeling of discrimination descending over a significant part of the squad. The trouble was not that Mourinho chose one group over the other. The trouble was that there seemed no way to reverse the footballing status quo. The players who supported Mourinho were invariably represented by Mendes, all lived near each other in the suburb of La Finca and ate together. They formed a solid core. And, unlike the others, they had easy access to information from Mourinho. They heard of his strategies directly or through Mendes, telling them what lay behind his decisions and comforting them when they were not playing. No one explained to Marcelo his overall role in the plan, let alone encouraged him when he was dropped to the bench. This dramatically contrasted with his treatment of Coentrão, whom the manager took out of the first team for six matches, claiming physical problems that were, according to Valdebebas employees, non-existent. Mourinho took him away to protect him from the press and the suspicions of his own team-mates; at the same time, he promised him that he could rest assured he would play in the big games when the season reached its climax.

  In criminal law, rebellion is a crime against public order. In a football dressing room, a revolt is an attempt to force a change in the customs or the unwritten rules. There are coaches who listen to the players and avoid these conflicts, trying to establish common ground between the warring factions. During his first year in Madrid Mourinho did not listen. He talked so long and so vehemently, and accumulated so much power, that his players were scared to interrupt, hoping that, in exchange for silence and obedience, their coach would give them the security he had promised. When they began to suspect that they would not enjoy that security, and realising that the obedience and silence of all only meant more arbitrary powers being given the boss, the nuts of the Madrid machine began to loosen. The revolt began in September 2011, almost a year before Madrid won the league. For some employees of the club, and for many players, if the squad had not raised its voice, if it had not made demands, if it had not tried to limit the autocratic behaviour of the coach, winning the league would have been impossible. Nevertheless, Mourinho’s virtue was that, like many other successful coaches, he had it in him to be able to listen and compromise. At least for a few months, Mourinho did not do everything he would have liked to have done. At the same time the team competed at a very high level.