Jose Mourinho isn't done yet — The Special One thinks he still has another top job

Photo: Getty Images/Giuseppe Bellini

This week we're back with an in-depth interview with Jose Mourinho and when it came to his tenure in English football, he seemed to pick it up again mid-conversation. Mock Ed Woodward wondering out loud if the Premier League allegations against Manchester City could win him the 2017-18 title and all the jobs he could have had but decided to turn down due to his great handicap. Mourinho, according to Mourinho, is damn loyal.

Of course, Jose plays the role of Jose. The character he transforms into when necessary, especially between jobs when he feels the need to remind the world of his record and bury his enemies.

The Manchester United period, which was the focus of his interview with Rio Ferdinand, was a case in point. Woodward? A smart man, Mourinho shrugged, but “not prepared for the sporting side of things.” Compare, he told Ferdinand, the mediocre team he, Mourinho, led to Europa League triumph in 2017, with the great United team of the late 2000s in which Ferdinand played. “If you want to make a joke,” Mourinho suggested, “make a joke.”

This is Mourinho's main principle: protect the brand at all costs. While the decade following Sir Alex Ferguson was indeed deeply dysfunctional for United, it is unlikely that Mourinho would admit to any errors in his judgment. The man plows and wants to find a new job as soon as possible. According to him, when he was at Roma, he refused the Portuguese national team and something in Saudi Arabia.

Manager Mourinho doesn't come cheap. He also uses breaks from his management career to enhance his considerable commercial power. The interview with Ferdinand was part of a sponsorship deal, and sports card company Topps' latest ad shows that he remains a reliable asset for advertisers. In short, cash flow is not an issue.

The problem is that Mourinho is addicted to management — not to mention the status and wealth it brings, although it can hardly be argued that he always acted as if he enjoyed the game. He sees no life other than his work, which has supported him for 24 years. “I cannot spend a single day without work,” he told Ferdinand. “I don’t understand people who talk about a sabbatical, because a sabbatical gives me only one thing: depression.”

When Mourinho speaks, football is great. a problem solving tool appears

So what next?

At 61, Roma was the lowest in the pecking order he had led since Porto. Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of his famous touchline strike at Old Trafford as Porto equalized and eliminated United on their way to Champions League triumph. He was already a rising star by then, having won the UEFA Cup the previous year, but March 2004 and subsequent events set him on a different trajectory.

The answer to the above is that he believes he can go again. He wants to re-manage one of the biggest clubs in Europe. He's seen it in the career of Carlo Ancelotti, another man who seems incapable of leaving. Ancelotti spent three years in charge of Napoli and Everton, below the usual standard for jobs a serial Champions League winner might receive, but neither proved the limit of greater ambition. Ancelotti then won his fourth Champions League as manager at Mourinho's age.

When Mourinho talks about himself, he is completely predictable: he is Jose's biggest fan. Under the thin layer of humility he imposes, the blame for any shortcomings never lies with him. But when he talks about football, you see a great problem solver emerge. How you can organize a team with limited capabilities to beat one of the best players on any given day is also the essence of Mourinho.

In the case of Ferdinand, he only avoided this topic, but Mourinho is offended by this. His career followed this path. The Chelsea of ​​2004 were very well resourced but were still trying to break the monopoly of the two biggest players in the Premier League at the time. His Inter Milan was an outsider in the Champions League, but nevertheless won it. His 2010 Real Madrid had to face the best team of that time, and perhaps of any era, in Barcelona. His Chelsea 2 and United have restored jobs with varying degrees of success.

So it goes at Tottenham after Pochettino and then at Roma, Mourinho returning to a club approaching his Porto's second or third European status after more than 20 years. This victory in 2004 was truly the last miracle in the Champions League. Since then, no team from countries outside the big four European leagues has won this tournament.

Mourinho was right about a lot of players — he was the one who identified potential problems with Paul Pogba and then Dele Alli early on that ultimately turned out to be true. He may have been wrong about Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah. He remains an amazingly talented conversationalist — in four different languages.

Of course, he also habitually considers himself a victim of events. Roma's dismissal after two UEFA finals in two seasons was implicitly presented as yet another injustice. He is also an astute networker. He knows how to talk to people who own football clubs. In a conversation with Ferdinand, he casually mentioned that he was an old acquaintance of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and showered the Ineos billionaire with praise.

It is the genius of renewal that has supported Mourinho throughout all these years in the team. vertex. All in all, this is a remarkable achievement for a man who came from nowhere — translator Bobby Robson, who worked his way up from coaching youth teams at his hometown club Vitoria Setubal. A former PE teacher whose progress in football was painfully slow and then amazingly fast. This is another fascinating part of Mourinho's story, but since it doesn't fit the image he's trying to project, he simply won't talk about it.