The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (10 page)

He was asked if he had considered apologising to Málaga, but he apologised to himself instead:

‘If you ask those who work in the top clubs if they’d go to Málaga, they’d answer you: “Why not?” But it would not be true. They would not go! If I have to apologise I will, but the truth is I responded without hypocrisy. In a hypocritical world, not being a hypocrite is seen as a defect … Obviously, I’ve nothing against Málaga, neither the club nor the professionals who work there; I simply responded honestly without hypocrisy. It’s not a problem for me. I’ve said from the start that the day that people are not happy with me I will go. It’s not a problem. The fact that they don’t want me is not any pressure for me.’

Pérez saw the press conference as a direct confrontation. Even José Ángel Sánchez moderated his defence of the coach. The corporate director general had previously argued that Spanish society was not mature enough to assimilate the pioneering vision of Mourinho. Now, however, he admitted that if Mourinho did not win a trophy he would become an unbearable burden for the club.

Mourinho has never looked so suffocated as he did in the first week of March. It was then, however, that he began to gain the full support of Pérez – for reasons that even those closest to the president have not been able to clarify.

Mourinho thus began his advance towards the power that had until then been the exclusive prerogative of the man chosen every four years at the polls. The president was careful not to reveal what was said, and from the directors’ box it was whispered that only the two people involved knew of the reasons for the great change. Suddenly, Pérez, previously so reluctant to support the coach in his attempts to wrestle more power – and such a jealous guardian of the club’s institutional image – became docile. Gradually, he began to allow the club itself to allow such allegations, both formal and informal, against the integrity of Barça’s players, against referees, against UEFA and against TV schedulers. At this point Valdano was being moved back into the shadows without knowing it. His head was soon to be served up on a platter.

The speech that sealed the deal was given by Pérez during a ceremony to award medals to some of the club’s oldest members. There, the Madrid president formally reformed the scope of the notion
‘Madridismo’
by reclassifying a phrase that had until now had not applied to Mourinho: the ‘
señorio
’ of Real Madrid. Until then this word, meaning nobility or dignity, had summed up an ideal of sportsmanship that was treated as an unshakeable and distinctive principle of the club. The old hymn reflected this ethos in the verse, ‘If you lose, shake hands’.
Señorio
necessarily implied a self-control that went against the coach’s desire to operate without restrictions. Sánchez, together with Antonio García Ferreras, head of the TV channel La Sexta, a close friend and advisor to Pérez, applauded the initiative. But it was Pérez himself who put his face to the change, reading the following words:

‘This institution is proud of what we call
señorio
.
Señorio
is recognising the merits of the adversary, but it is also defending what we believe is right and denouncing irregular conduct, whether inside or outside the institution. Defending Real Madrid from what we think is unfair, irregular and arbitrary is also
Madridismo
. And that is precisely what our coach José Mourinho does. What José Mourinho says is also
Madridismo
.’

The final reconciliation between the two men was staged before the workforce. On 15 March Mourinho invited Pérez to dinner with the team on the eve of the second leg of the second-round Champions League match against Lyon at the Bernabéu. The point was to win something. Winning a trophy. Any trophy. This was the message to Mourinho, a condition of granting him those ultimate powers that he had requested. The coach realised immediately that his fate rested in the hands of the players. To persuade them to offer him their support he conceived of a surprise encounter. During the pre-match meet-up ahead of the game against Atlético at the Calderón on 19 March, he called everyone to attend what they thought would be a tactics talk but was instead 20 unforgettable minutes. Mourinho, said one of the directors, is ‘a speaker who binds his players up with his talk’. That is exactly what he did in a monologue that an assistant recalled as follows:

‘I’m going to tell you something. I think you should know. I hate to be hypocritical. I’m honest. I’m not a liar. At the end of the season, either Valdano goes or I go. I cannot bear him and it’s been that way from day one. If I stay the only thing I’ll not be taking care of is the basketball and the financial side of things. But if I stay then I’ll have maximum responsibility for everything related to the football. And the people who have the key to all this are you. If we win, I’ll stay and he [Valdano] will be got rid of. If you lose, he stays and I go. And so, from here on in I’ll be observing who’s with the team and who’s thinking about other things.’

The players were stunned. Most felt as if they were being put in an impossible situation. There was a makeshift parliament. According to one of those present, Alonso and Lass took the lead. ‘We’ve got into a very strange situation,’ they said. ‘This is not professional. What’s happening? Do they want us to be accomplices? Do they want us to be the judges of Valdano? If he goes it’s because we’ve got rid of him, and if not, we’re the motherfuckers [who have got rid of Mourinho].’

They soon realised that they were trapped. Anyone who had a bad day – in any game – would automatically become a suspect. If the team won, Mourinho would use the fact to show the president that the dressing room was with him and not with Valdano. There was no honourable way out.

‘If I were to judge the worth of emotions by their intensity, none would be more valuable than fear.’

Horacio Quiroga

The Madrid players said that the meat they ate every day at Valdebebas was good. But Mourinho, a man with a discerning palate, disagreed.

Beef shank or sirloin, chuck steak or hump meat, loin or shoulder top – each cut required its own special preparation. According to Mourinho, this was not being carried out with the necessary skill. Hump meat in the pan, sirloin on the grill, shoulder top in the oven. The chefs had to work with dedication to cook it properly. Otherwise the meat would toughen, and one’s teeth would encounter an unpleasant resistance, followed by cartilage with the consistency of rubber and nerve tissue whose elasticity required a lot of tedious chewing. If this was what was served up, there were two possible explanations: the chefs did not know how to prepare the beef or the suppliers were cheating the club.

As the winter of 2011 passed without his complaints being resolved, the manager ordered Madrid to sack their chefs and change their butchers. He said the meat had a ‘very high percentage of nerve tissue’.

Mourinho was living days of prolonged and convoluted pain. Everything spoke to him to him of an unavoidable destiny. At the end of the season, Barcelona awaited – the team that had provoked Madrid into hiring him, the team that would later call into question his competence in the job with the 5–0 and even his status as a visionary. Who knew which nerve, which muscle, which minor occurrence would alter for ever the course of history?

The way a team plays is determined by the quality of the squad and the message of its coach. The worse the quality in the squad, the more important the message. This message comes in the form of a flow of daily information from the coach, a combination of thousands of notes, images, reactions, suggestions, orders, jokes, rewards and punishments, and acts of rejection, disdain or approval. The first conclusions the Madrid players drew after the first few months of living with Mourinho was that they had to remain in a permanent state of alert, in constant tension, just like the chefs at Valdebebas.

The nervous system of an elite footballer is a marvellous composite. It is capable of resisting environmental and social pressures that would be unbearable for most people, and it can achieve levels of abstraction and co-ordination inaccessible to the average professional athlete. In psychomotor terms it is capable of offering a more highly tuned response than the nervous system of any other team-sports player. The unnatural essence of football leads to the exceptional. Adapting an organism designed to use its hands to manipulate things rather than its feet implies, in itself, a selection. Those who have stuck it out after passing through the filter of the local neighbourhood, the school, the youth academy and the professional system are frankly extraordinary cases.

This privileged organism is sensitive to one thing above all others: the threat of inactivity. The absence of offers of work, a serious injury or a coach who has other plans constitute every player’s damned trilogy. The brevity of a footballer’s career and the anxiety of youth magnify the drama. Mourinho knew how to master these psychological anxieties to the extent that he made them his main instrument of government.

To what extent is it traumatic for a professional not to play for a long time because of the coach’s decision? Patricia Ramírez, an expert in professional sports psychology who worked with the staff at Real Betis, says the real trigger for anxiety is uncertainty.

‘Not playing can generate a lack of confidence and insecurity,’ she says, ‘but if a player knows the reason why he’s not playing, it allows him to make a change or look for a way out. The greatest insecurity comes from a lack of information, when the player is left to contemplate possible reasons … when the player doesn’t know why the coach has not picked him.’

If information provides security, its absence can create doubts, fear or panic. Players are usually enclosed in a small universe that tends to magnify even the most mundane issues. They are also incapable of expressing their identity if they do not feel that they are integrated in the team. Mourinho knew perfectly well that the fear of marginalisation was the most flammable fuel in his players’ psychic engines. To manage his players, he turned the control of information into a fine art. Not only inside the dressing room; in addition, he demanded exclusive control of the club’s communication policy, of what each player said when facing the press, and the selection of the club’s spokesmen. Inside the dressing room his behaviour oscillated between two extremes: friendship and indifference. With some players he behaved like a friend you could talk to every day. With others he was distant, even treating them with disdain. There were players such as Kaká to whom he was warm and friendly for months and then suddenly, overnight, would not even acknowledge. No more ‘Good morning’, no more niceties. Kaká never understood the reason. His team-mates realised that if it could happen to Kaká, it could happen to any of them.

The punishments began in the autumn of 2010. At the same time as the media was optimistically exalting the marvellous qualities of the new coaching staff, the players began receiving threatening signals from Mourinho. These came without any apparent cause; there was never any act of misconduct that justified them, nor anything in the code of conduct that suggested to those targeted that they needed to swallow their pride. The surprise was part of the method, which would culminate in an invitation to go up to the coach’s office. There, the uninitiated sat at a table on which the trophy for FIFA Best Coach of the 2009–10 season sat. Behind the table was a magnetic board and something approaching a shrine. A photo of Mourinho lifting the Champions League trophy with Inter and a black and white portrait print in a heroic pose stood out among a panoply of trophies, memorabilia and souvenirs.

The players’ attention was most drawn by the portrait print. They used to comment on it. That smouldering gaze, chin up, as in the famous Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara, provoked comment.

‘He’s posing like a model,’ they said.

One young player who went up to see the coach spoke of his unusual body language. Sitting behind the desk, the manager remained motionless like a sphinx or a yogi, showing off his prodigious ability to disengage his facial muscles, fix his gaze on his guest without blinking, and just move his lips – and evidently his tongue – to express his opinion in a metallic voice. Threats of total marginalisation, straightforward tickings-off or confessions of disappointment were given in the straight monotone of a robot. Whatever they were, his revelations were usually preceded by a formula of powerful resonance: ‘I am José Mourinho …’

Xenophon tells how, when King Croesus went to consult the oracle of Delphi, the god’s answer was final: ‘If you are human, try to think of human things.’

Ubaldo Martínez is Professor of Social Anthropology at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid. Over the course of his long career he has taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid, at Columbia University, in Baltimore and at the London School of Economics. He lives 200 yards from the Bernabéu in one of those streets leading to the stadium that is filled with fans on match days. Mourinho’s reliance on the most primitive ways of influencing other people struck him immediately.

‘We’re convinced that we’ve become rational but we’re still more persuaded by magic than by reason,’ he comments. ‘Everything that Mourinho says, that sort of austerity he imposes on players, that continuous punishment thing, that takes you down a certain path – it’s what the shamans do. Here, fear plays a tremendous part. Fear is everything. In this case, fear that they’ll throw you out of the club, that they won’t let you play … everything. Fear is a way of imposing discipline on people. The theoretical problem that we encounter is that these guys, these players, are untameable. They’re cocky. How do you dominate that?’

Football coaches seek to unite the individual into the collective. To want to create a new entity from many wills suggests a certain desire for omnipotence. Mourinho set out on an extreme path. On 23 January 2011, after a match against Mallorca at the Bernabéu, he proclaimed his absolutism:

‘I am the team.’

Mourinho designed a three-level programme of indoctrination – football, psychology and propaganda – with each of these requiring a different type of language and role from the coach. The programme’s main audience, but not its only one, were the players. To understand Mourinho’s work it’s impossible to dissociate the tactical from the technical, the purely footballing from the attempt – through suggestion – to permanently involve people. The multitude of areas in which he attempted to extend his influence turned the whole thing into a sort of play. Gradually he devised character roles for himself, each with their own script and voice. He was inspired by the work of Anthony Hopkins in
The Silence of the Lambs
, the actor and the role that, according to those close to him, he most admired.

The style of Madrid’s play between 2010 and 2013 will leave fewer recognisable traces in the future than the multifarious character assumed by the team’s coach to extend his power over the staff, board and fans. The tactics that Mourinho preached were not nearly as original as his theatrical mode of power management that owed as much to Neolithic sorcerers as to Dr Hannibal Lecter and reality TV shows.

‘Mourinho became the master of putting on a show,’ says the semiotician Jorge Lozano, Professor of the General Theory of Information at the Complutense University of Madrid. ‘He’s an exceptional expert in strategies of space. He has it perfectly organised. He’s very disciplined. Always maintaining the same antagonisms is difficult. It’s over-acting. But he’s a faithful disciple of Stanislavski, he breaks the fourth wall. He puts himself up there and acts for different audiences. And the performance differs according to the situation. First, in front of journalists, he wears a mask behind which there’s always mystery. Always the same. The mask emphasises an exaggerated solemnity. It makes no concession to communication. He’s there because it’s his only option. If he could leave, he would. He presents himself as afflicted. Bored. Full of disdain. Ignoring everyone else. In front of the public he’s Coryphaeus, the leader of the chorus in Ancient Greek drama, the cheerleader of the most radical supporters, emphatic, celebrating goals to the limit, running through and past everything. He acts for the referee, but the referee is always the villain, whatever he does he’s on the side of the opposition, he’s bought, he’s bad, he didn’t see it, he’s the evil fool. Mourinho is delighted when the referee orders him out of the dugout, gloriously proving that he, Mourinho, exists.

‘Mourinho,’ he continues, ‘turns up and puts on a performance: when there’s the need for emotion, he applies the emotion, but when it’s time for zero emotion [that is what he delivers] … He puts on all kinds of shows. “Now I’ll show you that I love this kid who’s come up through the youth team, or this Portuguese player, but I don’t want anything to do with this guy who I don’t care about and who I’m offended by.” And he has to be offended because he’s the one who controls everything. He’s very good at being able to pretend that he’s experiencing feelings. This, like his performances, he does admirably. As to whether these feelings are sincere or not, I’ve no idea. But they do seem plausible. He could be on the big stage with a very narrow range of interpretation. Like Humphrey Bogart. It’s admirable.’

Ubadlo Martínez was also struck by the similarity of his behaviour to that of a tribal leader. ‘Madrid,’ says the anthropologist, ‘is something that many people have access to. It’s influential, it’s fun, it distracts and dazzles. And a man appears with all these self-same qualities, a man with a certain dimension of mystery. Because Mourinho, with his way of saying things, always comes out with something cryptic. It’s not always clear what he wants to say. That much is obvious. He uses an arcane system of language, of religious mystery, of shamans. He doesn’t say, “The player doesn’t know how to take a corner.” No. He comes up with something enigmatic that makes people think he knows more. He plants riddles. People say, “What the hell does he want to say?” He lets slip, “Something has happened here …” And he lets it hang in the air … so that people can think about it. This is typical of pseudo-religious, pseudo-mythical language. I find it fascinating.’

Mourinho represented the figure of the ambivalent legislator-rebel. He obeyed nobody. He created the rules. He broke them. Only he knew why, and from the confusion and bewilderment he always extracted benefits. It is commonplace for primitive religious figures to speak only through intermediaries. The god remains hidden, manifested in the priest. One way of interpreting his sudden absence from public events he should have presided over was that he was upset and wanted his assistant to talk. The process was calculated to have an impact, Mourinho remaining the remote, mythical figure and Karanka – like a priest – reproducing his words. Mourinho put across the idea that the team was more important than the individuals, as if the team were some sort of vaporous soul existing above all of them, as if he himself were not expressing his own desires and concerns but was speaking in the name of one unintelligible guiding spirit.

The manager assigned the same multidisciplinary functions to his assistants as he did to himself. Silvino Louro was goalkeeping coach and Casillas-watcher; fitness coach Rui Faria was counsellor to Ronaldo; José Morais, besides analysing rivals, had to establish friendly ties with the Portuguese contingent. Aitor Karanka’s mission was not limited to overseeing Mourinho’s programmed training sessions; he was also to gain the confidence of the Spanish players and the club’s veteran employees. The entire back-room staff formed a well-ordered network of data collection that was fed back to the boss so that he could make decisions. Some of them made it their business, at Mourinho’s explicit request, to maintain contact with certain journalists in order to give them prepared information. Karanka, furthermore, took on the task of representing the coach in the press room. His first appearance was on 18 December 2010 on the eve of the game against Sevilla. His press conferences were so devoid of content that they could be summed up in one solitary phrase: ‘As the manager has already said.’