Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner Read online

  In the mornings, Robson and Mourinho would drive into the city, to a training ground lying in the shadow of the Camp Nou, a massive stadium holding more than 100,000 spectators, to exercise Barcelona’s thoroughbred players. At first it was a trial for Mourinho, who, unlike Robson, had no standing in the game. ‘They didn’t know who he was – and made that quite plain. Also they questioned whether, not having been a player of any standard himself, he was entitled to be telling them what to do. But he won them over.’ Gradually, the key figures in the dressing room came to accept he had a lot to offer: skilfully edited videos, for instance, illustrating strengths or weaknesses of opponents, were especially appreciated by the more thoughtful players. Pep Guardiola, an elegant force on the field, a ringmaster or pivote stationed in front of the defence, who had emerged from the youth academy and become a key figure in the ‘Dream Team’ under Johan Cruyff that had brought the club its first European title in 1992, was a Catalan, which served to embed him in the supporters’ hearts. ‘He was a big fish,’ said Robson. ‘A good player too. He had his opinions on the game, Guardiola, and I didn’t mind that. He’d say we couldn’t play this way or we couldn’t do that – he had an opinion on everything. José saw that he was an important figure within the club and said to himself, “I’ve got to get to know him, I’ve got to get in with this guy.” And he did. José and Pep were quite friendly. They respected each other. And, of course, José could speak to Pep.’ In Spanish or, eventually, Catalan.

  In time, Guardiola and Mourinho were to become reacquainted through one of the game’s great rivalries: that between Barcelona and Real Madrid. Guardiola, having been placed in charge at Barcelona in 2008, guided the club to the Champions League title in his first season. Mourinho, after leading Inter to that honour the following season, joined Real. Robson did not live to see Guardiola’s Barcelona triumph 5–0 over Mourinho’s Real in the first Clasico of 2010–11; cancer had finally claimed the much-loved Englishman in 2009.

  He had been happy to reminisce about Mourinho and the formative times with the stars who trained by Camp Nou. ‘José gradually built up a rapport with the squad,’ Robson said. ‘The players liked him. He even joined in a bit of banter with them. He got close to Ronaldo, which helped.’ The young Brazilian was to become the biggest name in the game – world and European player of the year – after Barcelona took Robson’s insistent advice to buy him from PSV Eindhoven, a former club of Robson’s. ‘Ronaldo took to José quite quickly. José was in a good position with the players generally because he didn’t pick the side – I did. So, if a player was left out, he blamed me, not José. I had to keep a distance from the players, as a manager does. José could cross over that line and come back again.’ He did too. As at Sporting Lisbon and Porto, he would spy on not only the opposition’s players but, at Robson’s behest, his own team’s. Take the case of Hristo Stoichkov. ‘A strange one,’ said Robson. ‘I’d been worried about Stoichkov.’ The greatest Bulgarian footballer ever, Stoichkov had a reputation for living up to his dark and brooding appearance. ‘I’d heard he was a difficult character to have around the club. Yet I found him quite the opposite. He was a pro who didn’t muck about in training – he trained right and played right. I’d thought he’d be a surly, unsmiling, unsociable Iron Curtain type. He wasn’t. And José got very friendly with him. So did I in the end. But José knew him better because José would mix with the players. He and Stoichkov were very friendly. They used to talk about the team a lot. And José would pass it on to me. But I liked Stoichkov and I trusted him.’

  Just as Mourinho had overshadowed Manuel Fernandes at Sporting Lisbon, he was closer to Robson than the ostensible number two at Barcelona, José Ramón Alexanco, a former club captain. In Robson’s one season in charge of the team, 1996–97, Barcelona won the European Cup Winners’ Cup, beating Paris St Germain in the final through a Ronaldo penalty, and the Spanish Cup, but finished two points behind their arch-rivals Real Madrid in the championship. Robson nevertheless assumed this would be enough to persuade Núñez and the other directors to let him fulfil the second year of his contract. He was wrong. While the financial terms of the contract would be honoured, he was to give way to Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach who had guided Ajax to the European title two years earlier. Robson was to become ‘general manager’ and take other duties, such as travelling the world in search of suitable talent. Suddenly Barcelona had in Mourinho and Robson not only the most lavishly remunerated of interpreters but, as Robson himself ruefully put it, ‘the world’s highest-paid scout’.

  He went to a meeting – accompanied by Mourinho, naturally – with Núñez, Gaspart and Van Gaal and expressed his disappointment. But Van Gaal was assured by Robson that, if the president saw him as Barcelona’s future, there would be no further dispute between them, and Van Gaal said he appreciated that. Robson, already in his mid-sixties, was to have further coaching posts at PSV in Eindhoven, again, and Newcastle United. What, though, was to become of Mourinho? His first instinct, said Robson, was to quit, head home to Portugal – ‘José didn’t like what had happened to me’ – and ponder his future. But Robson went to Van Gaal and advised the Dutchman to keep Mourinho. ‘I told him, “Louis, he knows the city, he knows the club, he knows the players. He speaks fantastic Spanish and can do for you what he’s done for me. He’s an asset.” So he stayed with Louis. And he got to do a little more work. A bit of coaching. That’s because Louis is different from me. I have to be in full control, hands-on. Louis is one of those guys – the Sven-Göran Eriksson type – who like to stand back. Louis would even hand over the team to José for friendlies. That was great experience for him.’

  In the summer of 1998, Robson went to Eindhoven, where there was no job for Mourinho (it was a shortterm assignment). Robson rang to tell him so and advised Mourinho to keep learning under Van Gaal. Until the following September, when Newcastle sacked Ruud Gullit and brought Robson out of retirement. Again he rang Mourinho. ‘I said, “There could be a job for you here at Newcastle, but I’ll have to get my feet under the table first. In the meantime, work out what you want to do.”’ By the time Robson was ready to make him an offer, almost exactly a year later, Mourinho was on home soil, waiting for a suitable club and ready to be judged as a coach in his own right. ‘He asked me what I thought of the idea. “Give it a go,” I said.’ He did. He got the Benfica job. And lasted just three turbulent months. ‘When I heard he’d gone from Benfica,’ said Robson, ‘I thought maybe the job had been too much for him, that he wasn’t quite there yet. But there were reasons for his leaving which explained it.’ Club politics, essentially.

  I asked Robson what he had had in mind for Mourinho at Newcastle and he replied: ‘I just saw him as an important member of the staff. I saw him scouting, doing match appraisals, looking at players. But I also envisaged using him on the training pitch every day, giving him more responsibility on the coaching side and letting that develop.’ No doubt many Newcastle supporters have fantasised about what might have happened to their club had Robson groomed Mourinho as his successor, prepared him to command a stripe-shirted institution as passionately supported as Porto but with, at that time, more of the resources required to finance a Champions League campaign such as that which culminated gloriously for the Portuguese club in 2004.

  According to Mourinho, that is what Robson laid on the table, a vague notion of the succession, without even tempting him to take it seriously; Mourinho simply could not believe that Robson would ever stand back from the team until he retired from football completely, and told him so. Robson also recalled a less than clear-cut proposal: ‘Obviously it was understood that he’d be maturing all the time and I’d not be getting any younger. But I’m not sure that I saw that level of capability in him at that stage. I mean it. It wasn’t a question of doubting him. I knew he was bright. I knew he could handle players. I didn’t know he had enough technical knowledge to be his own man.’ Surely the thought had occurred, however fleetingly, when Mourinho handed in
those spot-on scouting reports, that here was a tip for the top? ‘One thing doesn’t necessarily follow the other. And, as far as being a principal coach is concerned, I didn’t know he had any ambition in that direction.’ Amazing. Such reticence from the young man we were to see, just a few short years later, relentlessly destroying all the giants of the profession strewn in his path – and boasting about it. ‘He had humility then,’ said Robson. ‘Throughout the time we were together, he showed me respect. He knew what my position was and where he stood. He never tried to rise above his station.’

  There was a story that, when they were at Barcelona, players who understood English formed an impression that Mourinho was not simply translating Robson’s instructions but amplifying them slightly. Did Robson ever suspect that? He grinned. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? No, I never had the feeling that the message was anything other than precisely as I’d intended. José did a great job and he was very loyal to me.’ Nor did Robson notice the cockiness, the contentiousness towards opponents or the propensity for getting up people’s noses. Not much anyway; there was a tunnel fracas after a match against Athletic Bilbao when the Basque club’s coach, Luis Fernández, was said to have pointed a disapproving finger at him. But the Mourinho who was to be presented to the sports fans of Portugal and with whom we, the English audience, were to grow familiar – the unpredictable, sometimes exasperating and almost always enthralling Mourinho – had yet to rise to the surface of his personality. As Robson said: he had humility then.

  A little bit of arrogance

  Louis van Gaal did not blame Mourinho for getting upset with Barcelona over their treatment of Bobby Robson. The Dutchman was speaking to me in Sitges, in the apartment he retained there; the Van Gaals, like the Robsons, were neighbours of the Mourinhos. ‘It was a strange situation when I arrived,’ said Van Gaal. ‘I had initially been engaged as director of youth development. Then suddenly the president changed his mind and wanted me to be coach with Robson in charge of scouting. Now Robson had won three trophies in the season just finished. But, being a gentleman, he didn’t show his anger. Mourinho showed anger! His position would be disappearing as well, of course, because as coach I would be bringing my assistants from Holland with me. But when we had this meeting with Núñez and Gaspart I was encountering Mourinho for the first time – and I was impressed with his personality. I knew I needed help with Spanish, having had only one week at a language school in the Netherlands, so I told the president it would be convenient if Mourinho, who also knew the players, would stay as my assistant, my third assistant [behind Gerard van der Lem and Frans Hoek, who had worked with Van Gaal at Ajax]. So he was kept on, initially for a year. To start with he was just a translator, but gradually he became as valued as my other assistants. He could read the game and he analysed the opposition so well that, after my first year, when we won the Spanish championship and Cup, I was happy for him to stay for three years.’

  In the second of those years, Mourinho worked with the first team. ‘I like to give responsibility to my assistants,’ said Van Gaal. ‘I like them to take all or part of a training session because, if the head coach trains the players all the time, in the end they stop listening to you. A coach has to observe and correct, but there is only so much correcting you can do before, psychologically, they switch off. So sometimes I like to stand back. But in order to do that you have to be confident in the quality of your assistants. In José’s case, I started with him by my side. Then, as is normal, we divided the players into three groups – Frans Hoek with the goalkeepers and the others split between Gerard van der Lem and José – and once I had seen how José handled it I knew I could trust him. I am a believer in ball possession and positional play. So we do a lot of positional play in a session. Then you can see if someone can really coach. And he could. He could see what the players had to do. Also there was the quality of his analyses. The players saw them and, if players get the feeling that the coach can read the game better than they themselves can, they listen. I decided he was good enough to take charge of the team in friendly matches. He did a lot of those, plus games in the Catalan Cup, which could be not so friendly because Barcelona’s local rivals, Espanyol, and the lower-division clubs took them seriously, as did the media.’ Van Gaal was always present, lest any of his players be tempted to doubt Mourinho’s authority. ‘This was my only reservation,’ said Van Gaal. ‘I’d seen enough to know he could really coach. I’d seen him give the talks to the players at half-time. If I had felt the need to intervene, I would have done. I just didn’t know if he could do it when I wasn’t there. To get to the very top, you must be able not only to organise players but handle a team, to find that chemistry. That’s the difference.’

  Van Gaal, like Robson, never noticed in Mourinho a burning ambition. ‘I never even noticed a restlessness. But then we were a team. We spoke about what he did – not what he wanted. Maybe he spoke about it to other people.’

  Although Van Gaal has a reputation for being stern and dour, he and his wife, Truus, enjoy their time off and they would get together with the Mourinhos for meals or children’s birthday parties. ‘I know the journalists think I don’t like to socialise,’ said Van Gaal, ‘but I do. José and Matilde, who became close friends with Truus, had an apartment in the same park as ours, so, if he was late in completing his analysis of our next opponents, he’d just bring it round and stay for a chat. I liked him. He was a little bit arrogant, not always a respecter of reputations, but I like that. I like people with a high opinion of themselves and like to surround myself with them. I don’t want yes-men, because you need people who will say, “No – there is another way.” He could do that. And he did. I encouraged it. I told him to include in his analyses how he would play against this opposition. I have always stimulated that sort of contribution but, because of José’s special qualities as an analyst, I paid a little more attention to him than my other assistants in this respect. And, OK, it’s always the head coach who decides how the team will play – but I certainly wanted to hear José’s point of view.’

  The truth, by Mourinho’s own account, is that he had become restless at Barcelona, impatient for the power to direct operations, beset by a curiosity to discover if he could follow in Van Gaal’s footsteps and be his own man. Van Gaal regards the football the team played in his third year with Mourinho as the best of his time in charge, even though they failed to complete a hat-trick of Spanish championships and lost to Valencia in the semifinals of the Champions League. ‘It was just that we had a lot of trouble with Rivaldo, who had been voted world player of the year and decided in the middle of the season that he didn’t want to play on the left side any more. Because he refused to play where he was asked to play – because, in effect, he withdrew his labour – I left him out of the team, and the disruption it caused meant we didn’t quite fulfil our potential. There was a lot of criticism of the president and he quit. Out of loyalty, I quit also. The assistants had to go too. Especially Mourinho.’ When I expressed surprise, Van Gaal chuckled. ‘I sometimes think I was the only guy who believed in José. Because, when Robson left and I insisted José had to stay, they weren’t pleased. He was known as El Traductor [The Translator]. The media called him that. When I first came to the club, even the president called him that, but I always spoke about José as a football man and gradually all the officials started to treat him with the respect due to one of my assistants. I took him more seriously than most people in the club, I think – because I was in a position to judge him.’

  Benfica’s loss is Porto’s gain

  When Mourinho returned to Portugal in June 2000, it was to a state of unemployment. Very much self-imposed, to judge from his version, which was that he had no wish to stay at Barcelona, being unimpressed by their choice of Llorenç Serra Ferrer as Van Gaal’s successor. Mourinho did not believe that the Majorcan, who had been working with the club’s youths, had much chance of success at the higher level (Ferrer was to be dismissed after eleven months) and wa
s reluctant to work under him. Van Gaal doubted that the new man would have wanted Mourinho around anyway: ‘I’d installed Serra Ferrer as head of youth education and I don’t recall he and Mourinho had a good relationship.’ What’s more, Mourinho had grown tired of the subordinate’s life. In the last of his three years at Barcelona, he had become increasingly frustrated and had often come home to his wife in a grumpy mood as he analysed Van Gaal’s decisions and compared them unfavourably with those he would have taken. His mind was made up: he had to be number one, even if it meant taking a big drop in pay.

  He had a reputation in Portugal. While in Barcelona, he had received the odd offer from his homeland, the most attractive from Sporting Braga the previous year, and he imagined some such middle-range club would suit him best. Mourinho was in no hurry – he had built up a respectable bank account while in Barcelona – and spent the rest of the summer either at his home in Setúbal or in the Algarve, where he had bought a holiday place near Portimao. There were football books and videos to study and there was time to start collating his thoughts on coaching in a computer document for strictly private use, which, presumably without a hint of irony or embarrassment, admirers have come to call his ‘bible’. There was a family to enjoy – his daughter was four and his son a baby – and the sun shone.

  September came and Mourinho, having spurned Robson’s offer to come to Newcastle, was in Setúbal when the phone rang. On the line was Eládio Paramés, a former football journalist who had become director of communications at Benfica. He told Mourinho that the club’s president, Joao Vale e Azevedo, had a proposition to put. Mourinho, aware that Benfica already had a coach, Jupp Heynckes, said he was no longer interested in being anyone’s assistant, but Paramés persuaded him to see the president, who confirmed that the job on offer was the German incumbent’s.