The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (3 page)

Madrid’s chief executive since 2006, Sánchez radiated all the enthusiasm of a young lover as he considered Madrid’s future: the possibility of fusing the economic power of the world’s most popular club with the taste for propaganda of a coach capable of surpassing the publicity extravaganzas of any of the companies with which he had previously been involved. His spirit of curiosity was intrigued. Enthusiastic by nature, this master of marketing understood that he had uncovered possibilities hitherto untapped in the world of sport. It would be a pioneering experiment.

Sánchez needed to finish convincing Pérez when events took an intimidating turn. The elimination of Madrid from the Champions League last-16 against Lyon in March 2010 began to erode the president’s normally serene spirit. Barcelona were still on their way to a final that this year would be played at the Bernabéu. The possibility of an arch-rival – and Guardiola – winning their fourth Champions League in Chamartín was an outrage for Madrid’s more closed-minded supporters and an unbearable affront to Pérez.

Barcelona’s advance shifted the balance of power in Spanish football away from the capital. For the first time in 50 years Real Madrid, the club with the greatest number of European trophies, were no longer the reference point. This change in dominance, just when the Spanish national team was enjoying a golden era at all levels, led to inevitable political consequences. In many sectors of Spanish society, heavily influenced by nationalist sentiment, the presence of a Catalan club at the vanguard of the most popular sport in the country inspired a dark malaise.

UEFA had given the 2010 final to Madrid as a reward for Calderón’s efforts to improve the institutional relations between the Spanish Football Federation and the officials of European football’s governing body, headed by Michel Platini. For Pérez, since taking over as president, the organisation of the event – an uncomfortable inheritance from his predecessor – had become an unpleasant obligation and, ultimately, a trap.

The Madrid president’s overriding concern that Barcelona would end up playing in the final meant Mourinho became an object of veneration as soon as the draw had been made. If Barça wanted to get past the semi-finals they would have to overcome Inter, the team managed by the director general’s favourite. At this point, disappointed with Valdano after Pellegrini’s failings in domestic cup competition and in Europe, Sánchez and Pérez began to share the same technocratic feeling. A type of force-field united them in one vision in which football as a business was far too important to be left in the hands of mere football people such as Valdano, the sporting director and principal sporting authority at the club.

Valdano had an extensive CV. A world champion with Argentina in 1986, a league champion and UEFA Cup winner as a player, and a league winner as a coach, he knew all the mechanisms that moved Madrid. He used to say – and his opinion was shared by those agents who knew all concerned parties – that neither Pérez nor Sánchez had any deep analytical understanding of the game. Both marvelled at the stand-out players, the most elegant or the most skilful ones, but they struggled to understand why things happened the way they did during a match. In a crisis, under pressure, they would end up rejecting anything that didn’t dazzle and simply rely on their intuition. The models, the formulas and the sixth sense that had made them renowned executives fused with the historical necessity of stopping Barça. Mourinho, the man with the wistful gaze, was seen as the providential hero.

The repetitive discussions about Mendes and Mourinho had hit their target. There is no doubt that Pérez met with his future coach when Mourinho was still working at Inter. And even more certain is that the president had to listen to his director general explain why Mourinho was a great coach. ‘He has an intelligence for football that I’ve never seen in anyone else,’ said Sánchez at the time. He insisted that Mourinho knew exactly what each player could give and that he was able to anticipate what was going to happen in a game – that he was able to predict what would take place after half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half of play. He was ‘amazing’. Sánchez’s awe for a man he described as an omniscient magician always seemed genuine. Mourinho never went into too much detail, at least not in public. He never talked about what the training sessions were like or what his principles were, or what exactly was to be expected of his teams when planning matches. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had won a lot. Why ask so many questions when the trophies speak for themselves?

The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in the south of Iceland on 20 March 2010 was an unexpected stroke of good fortune. The ash ejected into the atmosphere meant European air space was closed and Barcelona had to travel to Milan by bus. The team took a day getting there and spent two nights sleeping in hotels before the match. That would be significant in terms of performance levels in a competition decided by the smallest details. The 3–1 win from the first leg and the 1–0 defeat in the return gave Inter victory over 180 minutes of football in which they rarely dominated Barça. The fact that Inter finished the second leg with 10 men, hemmed into their own area, desperate, saved by the incorrect ruling-out of a Bojan goal, was not enough to make Pérez and Sánchez suspect that luck had played an important part. Barcelona’s defeat was such a relief to the president that he immediately closed the deal with Mourinho, convinced he was acquiring two magic spells for the price of one: the universal antidote to failure, and the ‘know how’ that would destroy Guardiola’s team.

‘
Ilusión
’ is the key word in all of Pérez’s public addresses since first becoming president. It means ‘excitement’, ‘hopeful anticipation’, ‘enthusiasm’. In his speech after winning the election on 17 July 2000 he said, ‘We have in front of us, just as we said in our election campaign, an exciting job full of
ilusión
.’ On 13 May 2009, when he presented his candidacy for the presidency, he spoke beneath a poster that displayed the project’s slogan, ‘The Ilusión Returns’, as if everything that had occurred since he had been away had been turgid and sterile. In his speech at the Salón Real at the Ritz Hotel he confided that he felt capable of ‘almost everything’, and warned he had ‘spectacular’ plans. The word ‘spectacular’ appeared five times in his speech. The day he announced the signing of Mourinho he insisted, ‘What I love about Mourinho are the same things that you are going to love:
ilusión
, effort, professionalism, motivation, aptitude … everything that makes him the best coach.’

Pérez’s communications advisors understood from the outset that he set great store in the concept of fantasy.
Ilusión
and the spectacular are connected concepts. The dictionary defines the word ‘spectacular’ as an adjective applied to things that, because of the ‘apparatus’ that accompanies them, impress whosoever is in their presence. The meaning can even be extended to imply ‘gimmicky’. The first definition of ‘
ilusión
’ in the Royal Academy’s
Dictionary of the Spanish Language
is emphatic: ‘concept, image or representation without an actual reality, suggested by the imagination or caused by a delusion of the senses’.

José Luis Nueno, professor of commercial management at the IESE (Institute of Higher Business Studies) and author of a study of Madrid’s business model for Harvard Business School in 2004, questioned the logic of the choice of Mourinho and considered that in a traditional enterprise his signing would at the very least be seen as unorthodox. It would be an error, says Nueno, ‘for a company to imitate another in terms of who its leader is: to believe that one person is responsible for everything is like believing that the carrying out of one task is responsible for everything. It’s like saying: if I buy the shop-window displays of Zara I am Zara. Or even, if I copy everything that Zara does I am Zara. You miss the relationships between all the bits and pieces in the system. And you lose the acquired experience of developing that system.’

Traditional industry is less sensitive to the mythology that fills the minds of football fans. Inter’s defeat of Bayern to win the Champions League gave Mourinho another trophy, but, more importantly, it gave him a magical glow in the eyes of many Madrid supporters and the feeling that they had finally found their essential authoritarian patriarch for these difficult times. Somebody who could part the Red Sea. Is there anything more exciting, more full of
ilusión
, than beautiful superstition?

Nobody knew how to exploit this better than Mourinho, ever more conscious of the fact that his collection of trophies gave him an incalculable capacity to influence the minds of fans and directors: two Portuguese leagues, two English leagues, two Italian leagues, a Portuguese Cup, an English Cup, an Italian Cup, a UEFA Cup, two Champions Leagues … Success is exciting. Continual success, skilfully promoted, is persuasion’s most seductive calling card. It is then that ‘magical thinking’ comes in to play.

In
The Golden Bough
, the anthropological classic published in 1890, James Frazer writes that primitive societies linked themselves to a ‘magical man-god’ who exercised ‘public magic’, primarily to provide food and control the rain. We don’t expect anything less from the director generals who control the big multinationals, nor of certain football managers. Frazer argues that magic works by imitation: what appears to be, influences what appears to be. Like causes like. If you want more muscle, eat more meat; if you want to fly, eat birds; if you want success, attach yourself to someone successful, touch him, ask for his autograph. Magic works through symbols and symbols work by metonymy and metaphor – Mourinho is a symbol of the social leader and a metaphor for triumph.

Magical thinking establishes a mystical relationship that very few people in the world of football are capable of resisting, as nobody is wholly free from superstition. Players can’t stop themselves, always taking their first step onto the pitch with their right foot. Roman Abramovich cannot suppress it, trying to import the Guardiola model to Chelsea, but without the ‘Masia’, without the culture of youth development, without the Camp Nou, and to an environment completely different to that of Spanish football. Neither could Pérez restrain himself when he coupled his desire to win the Champions League to a coach who had won it twice.

Champions League statistics brought Mourinho closer to Madrid. But those same numbers made it mathematically less likely that he would win it again. Bob Paisley is the only coach to have won three European Cups, and he did it from within a very stable club: the Liverpool of the seventies and eighties, a club that had been built on the firm foundations laid by Bill Shankly with a continuity that went back to 1959.

Mourinho himself must have noted a degree of rage from within the club when two months after arriving in Spain, after an unexpected 0–0 draw on his league debut in Mallorca, he felt obliged to clarify that he was not a magician.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m a coach. I’m not Harry Potter. He’s magic but in reality magic doesn’t exist. Magic is fiction and I live in the football world, which is the real world.’

Mourinho wanted to lower the levels of expectation. But he always knew that his signing was intimately related to marketing, a science that studies how to take advantage of expectations for economic ends. Harry Potter is not just a fictional character. He is a commercial system learned in the business schools well known to José Ángel Sánchez. When Madrid signed the Brazilian forward Ronaldo in 2002 the director general compared his impact on the economy of the club to the bespectacled boy wizard, saying that ‘Ronaldo is Harry Potter’.

The commercial model of the Madrid brand that Sánchez inspired when he joined the club is the same that Disney used to promote
The Lion King
. Following a sequence outlined by the concept’s inventor, Professor Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist and a specialist in the economics of information, Disney developed an exploitation chain that multiplied the number of times a product could be offered to the public. The way a product was presented was expected to evolve, generating new expectations and new demand. Varian called these ‘windows’. The first window of a film is at the cinema. The second is the showing of the film on passenger airlines; then, the release of the DVD; next, the barrage of articles with the image of the characters on patented toys, games, electronics, textiles, furniture, etc. And finally, the musical, or any other commodity that the imagination is capable of conceiving.

‘Disney is a content producer, and we’re another content producer,’ Sánchez explained during the
galáticos
era, as he maximised profits from Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo and Beckham as if they were characters in a cartoon series. The director general glimpsed a universe in which supporters were transformed into ‘audiences’ and became consumers of legend. During a game, these excited customers could be divided into three blocks, according to how they consumed the product. In the stadium are those who have paid at the turnstiles; the people who have bought a private box, the companies that hire out their boxes; or private individuals who have hired VIP areas, everyone in their consumer ‘window’. In the second block outside the stadium are companies paying broadcasting rights for live and subsequent transmission on TV and the internet.

But the spectacle does not finish at the end of the game: the club’s in-house media, Real Madrid TV, the official web page and the various club shops go on drawing in a third wave of customers. In this last block are the sponsors. The players lend their image for the promotion of companies who have contracts with the club, such as Audi, Telefónica, Coca-Cola, adidas, Babybel, Nivea, Samsung, Bwin and Fly Emirates. And then comes the film, a climax promising to break through the final frontier.
Real: The Movie
, released in 2005, was the ultimate example of putting Varian’s theory into practice. At this point Real Madrid were more like Disney than Disney could ever be like Real Madrid.

More than creating new icons capable of raising the market value of the product, from 2000 Sánchez and Pérez were looking for people who were already famous, established celebrities prepared to incorporate their own mythology into the club. Before signing for Paris Saint-Germain, a Brazilian international was offered to the club, his name Ronaldinho Gaúcho. A high-ranking Madrid official, however, dismissed the idea after passing judgement on the player’s prominent teeth. Ronaldinho was – within Disney parameters – an absolute unknown and the casting was not being done by a football expert. As a result, David Beckham was the only signing of the 2003–04 season. The Englishman possessed an image that had, in the words of the president, ‘universal projection’.