Dortmund’s income stood at €189 million for the 2011–12 season, according to Deloitte. The same report put Madrid at the top of the revenue list, the first team to go past the €500 million mark, making as much as €513 million at the close of 2012. This money was spent on the squad. Between 2008 and 2012 Madrid invested close to €550 million on signing players, while Dortmund had spent €80 million, €10 million less than Madrid had spent on Ronaldo alone. The gap was also well demonstrated by what the two coaches had achieved just prior to joining their new clubs: Klopp came to Dortmund after getting Mainz 05 promoted in 2008, while Mourinho had just won the Champions League with Inter when he signed for Madrid.
The evening of 24 October 2012 in Dortmund was cool and damp, and the pitch was playing fast after all the drizzle. In the 34th minute Pepe, under pressure from Reus and Lewandowski, lost possession. From the centre-circle Kehl lofted the ball back in behind Pepe; Lewandowski ran on to it, shooting past Casillas to open the scoring. Dortmund won the game 2–1 in this, the first group match between the two sides. Mourinho, dressed appropriately in black, appeared at the post-match press conference to mourn the fact that he had warned his players of their fate in the pre-match team-talk:
‘I said to the players that this would be the game of the lost ball. Possession given up by Madrid, counter-attack from Borussia. The ball given away by Borussia, counter-attack from Madrid. I didn’t see any other way for the teams to score goals. It would either be from set-plays or on the break.’
The Portuguese coach went on to say that Dortmund were a mirror-image of his team. But instead of praising this meeting of two like-minded teams, there was a surprising note of frustration in his description of the game:
‘It was evenly contested. What little space there was only appeared on the break. If we’d scored first we’d have closed up as much as they did when it was 2–1. They scored and closed the game down – and we had no chance of finding any space. There was nothing. Counter-attack. Only counter-attack.’
Mourinho puffed out his cheeks then slowly exhaled, as if blowing out his exasperation, his powerlessness. His players remembered the Peking Manual. They commented that they had suffered the same old fate, only instead of it being at the hands of Celta Vigo or Betis, this time it had been against players of the very highest quality. Their opponents had surrendered the ball and much of the pitch, and Madrid had been obliged to mount static attacks, just as their opponents wanted. Forced to move the ball about in an attempt to disorientate Dortmund, they managed only to disorientate themselves as this was something that they had not practised on the training ground. What is more, without the injured Marcelo and with Alonso being patrolled by the attentive Götze, they had no one who could get the ball moving easily from one half of the pitch to the other, either with a cross-field run or a pass.
‘Mourinho doesn’t offer us any ideas for how we should move when we have possession,’ the players repeated among themselves. ‘Pre-match simulations can’t always be translated to the real thing. We don’t find the space because we all move into the same areas and get in each other’s way.’
The Spanish internationals pointed out the difference between Mourinho and coaches such as Luis Aragonés, who, despite having made his name with a counter-attacking team, knew how to work on the more elaborate forms of attack necessary against teams that defended deep. Aragonés had coached the Spanish national team in the 2008 Euros with a tenacity and an ability that surprised even Xavi Hernández, the master of positional play. Arbeloa, Ramos and Alonso recalled that even though they won the first game of the Euros against Russia in Innsbruck 4–1, they found that Aragonés was less than pleased in the dressing room because they had played so many long balls:
‘I’m happy with the result but not with the football we played,’ he said, ‘because you cannot play like that. That’s not the style that we’ve decided to use. If you get the ball down and play out from the back more, then you’re going to be champions.’
Aragonés believed that there were things that went above and beyond his method. As far as he was concerned, a 4–1 win was not enough, even though his team had played a style of football that had long been associated with him. He understood that ultimate success did not have to be linked to any personal brand of football. But Mourinho raised his own flag above all other considerations, and anyway had more faith in goading his players’ competitive nature than in any one particular style of play.
‘The good player is the one who thinks about winning,’ he proclaimed.
Mourinho had a great number of attributes but, as his own players observed, he was incapable of being flexible in certain situations. The passing of time had reinforced his conviction in the methods he preached, and doubts were not permitted. The series of four games that Madrid played against Dortmund between October 2012 and 2013, two in the group stage and two in the semi-finals, exposed his unusual approach. The message he gave his players before the first game at the Westfalenstadion encapsulated his approach to football: ‘This will be the game of the lost ball.’
‘Don’t lose the ball’ was Mourinho’s order of the day, a four-word summary of his strategy. And so, to ensure that they did not lose the ball, the central defenders were told that they must avoid coming out of the area in possession, as Pepe had tried to do with a pass to the central midfielders. Instead, he should have played a longer pass, bypassing the lines of pressure established by the opposition. This message, repeated with such insistence during Mourinho’s three years at Madrid, ended up in the collective conscience of the team. The team associated short passing moves with problems and long balls forward with convenient solutions; one-touch football created fear, but the long ball brought calm.
‘This match will be the match of the lost ball’ should be seen as part of a code: 1. The game is won by the team who commits fewer errors; 2. Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition; 3. Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it’s better to encourage their mistakes; 4. Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake; 5. Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake; 6. Whoever has the ball has fear; 7. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger. The doctrine was the exact opposite of the one that had helped Spain become double European and World Champions, and was the opposite of what was being practised by the majority of teams in La Liga. It also went against what many of the Madrid players believed in.
Arbeloa, Casillas, Ramos, Alonso, Higuaín, Benzema, Özil and Marcelo all asked themselves the same question after the defeat in Germany: apart from the Copa del Rey, which is played on a neutral ground, how many games had Madrid won away from the Bernabéu with Mourinho? The list of matches against potent rivals away from home was a brief one: in the 2010–11 season, the San Siro (2–2) and the Camp Nou (5–0 and 1–1); in the 2011–12 season, the Camp Nou (3–2, 2–2 and 1–2) and Munich (2–1); and in the 2012–13 season, until Christmas, the Camp Nou (2–2 and 3–2), Dortmund (2–1) and Manchester City (1–1). Eleven games in total and only one victory. For the most expensive group of players on the planet it raised some major issues, at the very least.
Jürgen Klopp had realised that Madrid showed signs of rigidity when forced to have the ball. He worked out that the direct football played by Mourinho’s team could be neutralised by employing exactly the same tactics, telling his players that they should let Madrid have possession and the space on the pitch to force them to take the initiative. At the end of the night the statistics offered up one bit of information that generally reflects well on the footballing health of a team, but which created a considerable problem for Madrid: they had 56 per cent of possession.
‘Madrid,’ said Klopp, ‘had more possession – but that’s not a bad thing. It’s only bad if the opposition has more of the ball and has the better idea of what to do with it. I think on the day of the 2–1 we had the better idea because we knew who’d have more problems if they dominated possess
ion. We knew where they would send their passes, how they would look for Ronaldo. Our plan was to cover Alonso because if he plays as he wants to it’s impossible to defend against Madrid. But if you block him you force Pepe to have the ball. And, of course, that’s quite a different thing.’
Mourinho said that Dortmund had played like Madrid, but that was an oversimplification. Both teams were highly effective at counter-attacking and both sides placed a lot of emphasis on pressing. But thereafter there were differences. Klopp concentrates much of his work on the first pass out of defence. The centre-backs Subotić and Hummels, the midfielders Kehl and Gündoğan, and the full-backs Piszczek and Schmelzer offer plenty of movement to help the ball come out from defence. And the ball usually remains on the ground. Dortmund would not hit a long ball, except for when it was really needed. Klopp was so concerned with the pass from the back that his players had to perfect the technique involved. The coach even made the club spend €2 million on a capsule called the ‘footbonaut’, where players were subjected to mechanical training procedures that improved passing and control to a volume and speed that took them beyond the limits of conventional training. The players who struggled most with the technique, such as Kehl or Subotić, would have to spend extra hours in the capsule, not to improve their long balls but to perfect the 10-yard pass.
As far as pressure was concerned, the German coach designed a model that converted this into a vehicle of attack. Klopp’s coaching of pressing was based on what he called ‘impulse’. With enough training the players learned to recognise tell-tale signs in the opposition’s movement, so that they could choose exactly the right moment to start pressing any given player, normally a central defender or a midfielder. Klopp gave the name ‘impulse’ to this collective intuition. The manager coached it in such a way that it became a game for the players, as much in an attacking sense as a defensive one.
The analogy that Klopp used to explain the synchronised movement of the ‘impulse’ was a pack of wolves. These predators instinctively know how to sniff out the most vulnerable individual of the herd and, from various directions, pursue them as a single pack. When practising ‘impulse’, they ensured that the claws of the system dislodged the opposition’s central defenders and, as soon as possession had been regained, the move would be finished in or around the area by three or four players. Defenders tended to freeze, knowing that any foul would result in a penalty. In this way Dortmund became the team who scored most goals from shots inside the area in the Bundesliga.
Before the return leg in the Bernabéu on 6 November the Dortmund squad picked out their ideal target. Pepe was to be the weak link. They called him the ‘pressing victim’.
At the end of January 2013 there was still something about Mourinho that surprised Klopp. When remembering the matches against Madrid, one question arose about his colleague. Considering he managed the team with the biggest budget in the world, why did Mourinho not sign better defenders?
The commitment to Arbeloa instead of Carvajal, to Pepe and Carvalho instead of Ramos, and to Coentrão instead of Marcelo was something that anyone unfamiliar with Mourinho’s strategies would struggle to understand. In footballing terms it made no sense, unless it was thought that defenders should never participate in the preparation of an attacking move. When adding other criteria, however, such as psychology, using intimidation as a means of persuasion, and building a shield of loyal players who might not be at the highest technical level, the reasons behind Mourinho’s selections become more understandable.
On 3 December an extraordinary episode took place in a press conference given by Mourinho. After two and a half years in his position as the most powerful sporting figure at Madrid since the death of Santiago Bernabéu in 1978, Mourinho came up with the best definition to date for his style of play:
‘We need to play every game with the same amount of concentration, with the same personality, the same ambition. We need to be at the limits of our potential and with the objective of winning clearly in our minds, even when we have difficulties. We lack emotional continuity. That is the first thing. Then the football questions come on their own. We have a perfectly designed style, but sometimes when we’re not mentally right it makes us lose that identity. In order to have continuity of identity the emotional aspect is very important.’
The previous week Mourinho had given up on the league, after the 1–0 defeat against Betis. Madrid were 11 points behind Barça. In the 2012–13 season the questions would come thick and fast, but there were other puzzles where the lack of solutions worried fans. How had the team that had won the league while breaking records and scoring so many goals disappeared so fast? What were they playing at, after their model had been so rigorously monitored for two and a half years? The speed, the strength, the goals, the competitiveness already existed. So what were the positive things that the manager had brought to the club?
Reluctant to talk about football when there was nothing concrete at stake – and far less to give details about his most intimate football convictions – suddenly on 3 December, during those few seconds, Mourinho had suggested something completely taboo. The model did not exist. The rage, the ambition, the fear that each player projected; the storm of energy, channelled to a particular goal – that all existed. But when all of these were extinguished the team had nothing left beyond a collection of individual wills and a few obedient people waiting for orders.
What most exasperated Mourinho in the autumn of 2012 was the discovery that his players were no longer afraid of him. He would have preferred to be surrounded by enemies who hated him. But they treated him like anyone else. They ignored him. And the less they responded to him, the more anxious he became. He was restless when watching games from the bench. One of his most quoted comments was when, testing his team’s mental state, he said something that would usually be anaethema to him: ‘Go out and enjoy yourselves!’
Speaking at a conference on chaos, the philosopher Jorge Wagensberg, scientific director of La Caixa, warned that shamans are ‘masters of chaos’ and that primitive societies need these individuals for evolutionary reasons. Wagensberg found some logic in the behavior of Mourinho:
‘If not for crisis we would all be just bacteria,’ said the philosopher. ‘Uncertainty is the engine of innovation. The chaos forces you to decide between persisting or disappearing. Nothing ever comes from balance and tranquillity. The second law of thermodynamics says that when a system is isolated thermal death occurs. Canned sardines are in a state of perfect equilibrium. Living beings flee that balance. Since the environment sometimes fails to cause sufficient doses of uncertainty, the shaman offers the solution by instilling fear.’
The second law of thermodynamics also warns that the amount of chaos in the universe tends to increase over time. In other words, destiny is irreversible, dark and quiet. No matter how rabid their grappling, shamans are ultimately consumed by the cosmos’s own chaos.
The players could no longer stand to live in this state of continual upheaval without the compensation of enjoying the game. But Mourinho had failed to explain in his 3 December speech how to maintain this continual upheaval. The misunderstanding was mutual, leading to all sorts of assumptions or simply to bad faith. The manager told his aides that he believed the players were capable of bringing forth his destruction by no longer performing at their best on the pitch. Disoriented, he began calling José Ángel Sánchez and Pérez, warning them of this while at the same time asking for more power. He made it known to Pérez that if he did not get what he wanted, then he would leave the club.
The list Mourinho presented to the president in mid-November 2012 was half ultimatum, half desideratum. His first demand was that senior players should be reprimanded, with the warning that Casillas and Ramos now possessed intolerable levels of power. He complained that Casillas had belittled him by publicly saying that he was inspired by Guardiola and that the club had not officially corrected him. He highlighted similar incidents in relation to Ramos, calling
him subversive. The club as an institution, in his opinion, had to apply exemplary punishment to those who dared to question his authority.
His second demand was for the signing of a goalkeeper to compete with Casillas. He clarified that it should not just be a regular goalkeeper but a young one, about 24 or 25, who was an international in a world-class team. Casillas, he added, was getting older.
Next he demanded that Madrid hire a spokesman, someone respected by everyone connected to the club, such as a former player with an untainted record. This person should say whatever he was asked to say by Mourinho and, if necessary, publicly criticise the players.
The fourth requirement was that the club get rid of those players whose names he had included in a list, and that it was the institution that took care of this so any comeback in the media was not directed at him. Of the names included in the list there were five that circulated through the offices of the club: Higuaín, Albiol, Kaká, Marcelo and Özil.
Pérez responded that if he won the Champions League then he would give him what he wanted, but that without the credit afforded him by a Champions League title he did not feel he could bow down to Mourinho’s demands. He repeated that Madrid belonged to its members and that he would need their backing for such measures. At the moment such backing seemed unlikely because support for the manager had declined since 2010. Put a Champions League trophy on the table and, in the new presidential cycle that was due to start in 2013, the landscape would change. As far as Mourinho’s request for a spokesman was concerned, the president promised to search for someone who fitted the profile requested.
The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho Page 23
