The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (25 page)

Wishful thinking takes root very easily in football. For months there was a feeling around Madrid that the season was going to lead to something big. It suited very few people to believe that anything else should come to pass and the overwhelming majority of supporters had faith in the team’s recovery. But by the end of the second week in September, with eight months remaining before the end of the season, Pérez found himself on the edge of the abyss. He was about to lose the confidence of his principal player. His team were about to slip out of the title race, with his coach already mummified in a sarcophagus of constant and irreparable conflict with the senior players and indeed most of the squad.

Barça started playing almost as badly in the league as Madrid. They won comfortably against Real Sociedad (5–1), but struggled to beat Osasuna (0–1; Messi did not score until the 76th minute), they struggled to beat Valencia (1–0) and did not kill the game against Getafe until the last quarter of an hour (1–4). They were lucky to reach the fifth weekend of the season with 12 points. Madrid only had four points after a draw against Valencia (1–1), a defeat in Getafe (2–1), the win over Granada (3–0) and a defeat to Sevilla (1–0).

In some respects everything ended on 15 September just after 10 p.m. local time. Piotr Trochowski converted a Rakitić corner and put Sevilla 1–0 up in the first minute of a game that froze from that moment on. It was the fourth week of the season and Madrid were unable to respond to a set-piece goal, despite having 90 minutes in which to do so. For the players it was proof that their age-old problem of playing against closed-up opposition had not disappeared. But in the press conference after the game Mourinho only focused on what had taken place in the first minute, springing to his own defence and emphasising his professionalism while noting what seemed to be the inexplicable dereliction of duty by his players:

‘We cannot train any more or any better on set-pieces. Every player knows his position and his mission. Those who have individual responsibilities know who their opponents are and who’s in their zone, and what zone they have to occupy. We have the graphics in our own dressing room … My problem is that my team at this moment are not there … I’m worried that since the start of the season we competed in the Super Cup but have not done so in anything else.’

It was not just that he was criticising his players in public. It was that he denounced their lack of professionalism and lack of interest. After his tirade at Getafe the manager had set sail on his own ship. The communication strategies of 2010 that he exhibited to the squad as a sophisticated defence policy had, two years down the line, become a weapon that he would turn on them.

No one knew better than Mourinho that the only reason for renewing his contract until 2016 was financial. The president might have thought that it would make him more committed but Mourinho never believed he could continue in the role unless he was able to dismiss half the squad. That was impossible. The transfer of Ramos and Casillas, two of the pillars of the World Cup and European Championships team, was not even worth thinking about. Mourinho saw calamity around every corner, with Madrid itself seeming like a monstrous trap. Embarrassed by a sense of impending failure and afraid of destroying his prestige, propaganda was his last recourse: in order to maintain the idea of his own innocence in the public’s eyes, he insistently repeated that his players had given up, something that he had expected to happen when the league began. Now he would use his devious techniques as much as he could over the following nine months.

Concerned after the defeat to Sevilla, the Madrid senior players asked for a meeting. It was attended by Casillas, Ramos and Higuaín. The most impetuous of the three was Ramos, but all of them confronted Mourinho face-to-face. They berated the coach for trying to discredit his players as part of a method whose ultimate goal was to avoid publicly assuming any sort of responsibility himself – ‘like I said before and like I will say again,’ Casillas added. The players said that they had often swallowed their complaints, reminding him of the tie with Bayern:

‘In Munich we lost the game because – among other things – you played Coentrão, and nobody criticised you for it … And in the second leg, when Bayern were dead, you told the team to sit back … And no player said that we were going to miss out on the final because of you.’

Mourinho did not respond. He stayed silent and dismissed his players. On 18 September, in that season’s first Champions League game, he gave his reply. Manchester City visited the Bernabéu and in the home team line-up there was no Ramos. Instead, Varane played, an 18-year-old centre-back who had barely seen more than a few minutes’ action over the previous 12 months. Casillas was sure that he played that day because the coach did not trust Adán, the reserve goalkeeper. Despite City’s error-strewn play, Madrid almost lost the game. After 86 minutes Kolarov gave City a 1–2 lead. A minute later Benzema equalised, and Ronaldo scored in the 90th minute to make it 3–2, avoiding what could become a very difficult group stage.

Madrid’s advance through the Champions League group stages and beyond was rough from start to finish, much like the relationship between Ronaldo and Pérez from the gala in Monte Carlo onwards. The president admitted to his advisors that it had been a mistake not to go to Monaco. He was informed that too many ties were established between Mendes, Rosell, Messi and Ronaldo, and he was even told that Messi and Ronaldo had got along. He did not buy that. What he did admit to was that had he been present he would have cushioned the pernicious effect of all this on his team’s star. Monte Carlo laid the foundation of Ronaldo’s sense of abandonment. It also moved Pérez to worry seriously about making the offer that he had retracted since 2011.

Between 2011 and the start of the summer of 2012 Madrid had improved the contracts of Di María, Carvalho, Pepe and Mourinho, four of the six men represented by Jorge Mendes at the club, the other two being Coentrão and Ronaldo. If Di María’s took a year and a half to renew, Ronaldo’s deal had not been touched in the three years that he had marked him as the most prolific scorer in the history of the club with his 202 goals in 199 matches. The first person who struggled to believe the indifference with which his extraordinary performances were greeted was Ronaldo himself. Madrid could never get their money back on their investment in Pepe, Di María and Carvalho. As for Mourinho, the renewal of his contract was a financial burden for the club rather than the coach. With Ronaldo it was different. His market value in 2013 was well over the £80 million that Madrid had paid for him in 2009.

Rumours that Ronaldo and Messi were becoming increasingly friendly made Pérez stay ever more alert. There was one fact that troubled him more than any other. The Barcelona president was invited to give a lecture to the World Soccer Awards, the gala that Mendes co-ordinated. At the closing dinner, Capello, Mourinho and Maradona, among other guests, saw Mendes and Rosell break off from the group to go and chat in private. An acquaintance of Pérez who attended the meeting assured him that they had one topic of mutual interest: Ronaldo.

At first, Pérez completely ruled out the idea that Messi and Ronaldo could appear in the same team, given the degree of personal rivalry between them. Over time, however, he began to think that maybe it
was
possible, taking the idea so seriously that he proposed going to the FIFA Ballon d’Or gala to keep a very close eye on his star player. And so it was that the president could be found on 7 January 2013 in a secluded corner of the lobby of the Kongresshaus in Zurich watching Messi give a TV interview. Suddenly, Ronaldo appeared from the other side of the room. Then came what the president had feared. Messi called Ronaldo over and the two of them warmly embraced. Pérez told his friends that he was extremely upset, sensing the approaching danger and imagining exactly what was going to happen. Ronaldo would be free in January 2015 and then any club, including Barcelona, could move to sign him without first negotiating with Madrid. Friends say that the president imagined with horror the attacking line-up, player by player. On the left, where he loved to play, Ronaldo. In the middle, Messi. On the right, Neymar. An unforgettable forward line, a return to the
galácticos
concept in an alien city. Something to be avoided at all costs.

Obsessed with eliminating all risks, Pérez even ended up considering selling Ronaldo to another club in the summer. Imagining that Ronaldo might did not want to renew his contract, he set the balls rolling for his officials to scour the market in search of offers for the player. A price of €150 million looked possible – to whoever could afford him. But Barcelona were of course ruled out as a buyer.

The months from 30 August to the season’s end saw a role-reversal. Ronaldo regained his calm and the club’s directors were now the impatient ones. The club asked him three times to sit down and discuss his contract. Ronaldo ignored all of these invitations, saying publicly that he wanted to see out his current contract – in other words, until the end of the deal in 2015. At Gestifute, the company looking after Ronaldo, they assured him that if he went on a free he would be much richer and urged him not to accept Pérez’s conditions. In the spring he was offered a deal that guaranteed him €60 million. In May that rose to €80 million. But he just had to wait until January 2015, when he would be 29 and had clubs willing to pay that amount as a bonus, in addition to a salary that would be better than what he was on at Madrid.

From January onwards, and in the absence of any response from their star player, Madrid had made a late bid to sign Neymar. Their courting of the Brazilian ended when his transfer to Barcelona was made public on 26 May, compounding the growing sense of anxiety in Pérez’s presidential office at the construction firm ACS. He apologised to his circle of close advisors for having missed the opportunity of renewing Ronaldo’s contract in 2011, when the player was still interested. Then, they would have been able to raise his basic salary of €9 million to €11 million net, far less than it would eventually cost them in September 2013 when it became a matter of urgency.

Ronaldo went on holiday at the season’s end without having passed through Pérez’s office. It was Jorge Mendes who received the offer of a renewal of his contract. This consisted of an extension until 2017, with the option of a further year, and a salary of €14 million a year. With the recently introduced tax laws this would see Real Madrid pay Ronaldo an annual total of around €30 million, making him the best-paid player in the western world. But before Ronaldo responded he wanted to enjoy his holidays. Why worry when time is on your side? What did it matter that Pérez wanted to start things moving now when the initiative was with Mendes, his agent, his friend and the real winner in all these games.

‘All entrepreneurs claim to be realists. But the reality is that there is a strong sense of denial in many companies that prevents them from taking the right decisions. Why don’t people face reality? (…) And if you don’t then you cannot keep your company at the cutting edge.’

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan,
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

The warm, humid air of the Calblanque spilled serenely down towards the sea. Lying on a deckchair on the terrace, warming himself in the afternoon sun like a lizard, was Jürgen Klöpp.

‘The best thing about working in Spain would be the climate, that’s for sure,’ he said, smiling.

The Borussia Dortmund coach struggled to find any other advantages. In January 2013 he had taken his team to Murcia for the duration of the Bundesliga mid-winter break, as the air on the coast was balmy and clear. Klöpp said that he was concerned about the impoverishment of La Liga and the huge financial inequality between clubs. He had read that in polls he was the fans’ first choice to be the next Madrid coach; their support pleased him, but he made it clear he was happy in Dortmund for one fundamental reason:

‘Dortmund is exactly what a football club should be. We’re delighted that it carries on being a club and not a business where they say, “Today one thing, and tomorrow another.” We want to work as a team over a longer period of time. I’ve been here for four years and my contract runs out in 2016. That excites me because it means I can develop new things. I see players aged 10 or 13 years of age, and I know that in four years’ time I’ll be coaching them.’

The influence of the wildly successful English Premier League had led to a wave of reforms being made across most clubs on the continent. Players now trained in isolated environments far from the supporters, who were increasingly treated as ‘consumers’. Marketing technocrats, inspired by business models that held the old order in disdain, gained new and wider powers at these clubs. They spoke of professionalism, about ‘the industry’ and of science. The fact that Mourinho behaved more like a chief executive of a multinational than a coach was indicative of the spread of this tendency.

Dortmund had seen this obsession for the administrative ‘future’ during the previous managerial regime and had suffered when their debt bubble finally burst. Since 2008 they had reverted to being a more straightforward institution, with their legendary Westfalenstadion rising up from the middle of a wood close to the Rheinlanddamm. Less than 100 yards on the other side of the avenue are the club offices. The structure of the club is simple. Ninety per cent of shares in the club belong to its members. There is a council, split into four parts led by four people all with something in common. The president Hans-Joachim Watzke, the sporting director Michael Zorc, the youth academy director Lars Ricken and the coach Jürgen Klopp are all former players. Watzke boasts of having muddied his knees in the fourth division before becoming the man holding the Dortmund purse strings.

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 possession. 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?