The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho (9 page)

Pardeza maintained his composure and denied that what Mourinho had just said was true. The coach seemed beside himself as he headed off to the press room, holding a piece of paper.

‘They’ve given me a list with 13 serious mistakes,’ he said, taking out a folder with the supposed errors of referee Carlos Clos Gómez. ‘Today. They asked me in the last press conference if I was tired of the pressure. I’m not tired of the pressure because I don’t feel pressured doing the things that I like to do. And I like to coach and I like very much to play matches. What I’m a little bit tired of is this, for example. That they give me a list of 13 serious mistakes from the referee and I defend my team. My team has to be defended because my team deserves to be defended. Not just today but many times over. And if I go ahead with this list, the story will be the same. I will be on the front pages: “Mourinho suspended”. We have a club, a structure, an organisation. And I want people to stand up for my team, as it’s not always going to be about me. I just want to say that I have an out-of-this-world team, with an out-of-this-world character. We have achieved what seemed impossible … I prefer not to talk about it anymore. I prefer to request a meeting with the president. I would rather talk to the president.’

Speaking about referees has always been one of Mourinho’s favoured tactics over the course of his career. In December 2010 he spoke about them for two reasons: they were the perfect alibi when his team played poorly and they enabled him to question the role of Valdano at the club. Annoyed that Valdano was opposed to the signing of Hugo Almeida, Mourinho sought ways to attack him, suggesting that Valdano would do well to spend more time criticising referees.

That night Pérez went to bed in the early hours with some unpleasant things on his mind. According to a close associate, it occurred to him that if he sacked the coach he would not have to pay any compensation: the contract stipulated that in case of termination, no one had a duty to compensate anyone. But he also asked himself the fateful question: If not Mourinho, then who? Who else can lead Madrid if we bid farewell to the man I myself have described as the best coach in the world? Without Mourinho – and even with him – a deserted landscape dominated by Barcelona lay before him. More unprecedented failure – with nobody to blame but the president, the author of the signing, one that would mark his mandate for better or for worse. A president who ought to have taken more care of his image, his aura of being a solid leader, solvent, with convictions. He could not turn his back, after just six months, on the biggest gamble of his presidential career since the signing of Beckham. The following day he would be playing host at the club’s traditional Christmas dinner with both the football and basketball squads. A director explained away the previous night’s nightmare with some soothing words: ‘Mou’s soul is still wounded by the 5–0 …’

Mourinho appeared calm as he sat at the table with captain Casillas, the honorary president Alfredo Di Stéfano and Pérez. As if nothing had happened, he smiled and tucked in to the pheasant served with caramelised onions. Pérez took the microphone and, before starting on the congratulations, entered into a dialogue with Di Stéfano, by way of digression:

‘There are people who think that they’re qualified to work in any business, but not everyone is. Real Madrid is the biggest company and represents the biggest challenge. You, Alfredo, you came with me when FIFA gave us the trophy for being the best club of the twentieth century. There’s the trophy … It’s not easy to cope with this pressure. You have to live under the pressure within the club to really know it. I understand that some find it impossible and end up going crazy. Because this is not a pressure for everyone …’

Di Stéfano nodded his head: ‘Of course …’ Casillas blushed with embarrassment. The basketball players followed the speech without really understanding what was happening. Mourinho stared into the distance.

The private meeting – a dinner – between Mourinho and Pérez was held in late January. The president told his friends that the coach was insistent on renewing Pepe’s contract and the need to sign Hugo Almeida to replace Higuaín, and explained his wish to coach Portugal’s national team, something he considered feasible only if his sole responsibility was training Madrid’s first team. But none of the issues that the coach touched on made the president very excited. The coldness of the meeting prompted Mourinho to come up with one of those statements that would circulate through the offices of the Bernabéu that winter:

‘I’m not the coach you thought I was, and you’re not the president I expected.’

Pérez realised that his coach did not just want to coach. ‘He’s not happy just training,’ he said after the dinner. The defeat at the Camp Nou had helped remove the mask successfully worn Mourinho up until that point. Mourinho required the complete transformation of the club, saying that the need to resist Barça was a compelling reason for this. He argued that to win a trophy against them, whether it be the league, the Copa del Rey or the Champions League, he would have to beat a team that had just inflicted the worst defeat of his career on him. There was no way to avoid the confrontation. For the first time in many years he felt seriously threatened by a failure that had the potential to haunt his path for ever. Distraught and unable to focus, his reaction was unsurprising: put pressure on his players, pressurise the club and come up with excuses later to explain away the predictable outcome.

The need to counter Barça coloured all his requests to Madrid. He asked for powers to direct sports strategy, co-ordinate the ins and outs at the club, and reform the chain of command. He wanted to be the one who chose which players joined the club and which were transferred. Without interference. There were to be no more lists imposed by the club. He argued that Valdano was expendable and he continued to suggest signings from the portfolio of his agent Jorge Mendes. And he remained insistent on the need to buy Hugo Almeida.

Pérez, however, dealt with the situation in his customary way. He did not say yes or no, but promised to give all these things some consideration. He did not rule out Hugo Almeida, nor did he defend Valdano. Moreover, he won time for himself, trying not to show any of his cards until the end of the hand. Every time he needed to justify a delay he said that Madrid belonged to its members and that there was a process that needed to be followed. Mourinho, shrewd like few others at detecting weaknesses in his counterparts during face-to-face exchanges, found these arguments hard to rebuff. Whether at Porto, Chelsea or Inter, he had never encountered such administrative obstacles – for him the club’s presidential system was a useless extravagance.

Pérez consulted his advisors as he mulled over a decision. The people the president listened to most were Valdano; José Angel Sanchez, the corporate director general; Enrique Pérez, director and his own brother; Manuel Redondo, the director general of the presidency; and Fernando Fernández Tapias, the vice president. Another name may be added to the list, a friend who ended up influencing Pérez far more than the others over the years: Antonio García Ferreras, head of the TV channel laSexta, and one of the most influential men in Spanish political journalism.

The 5–0 defeat, an abject failure from a coaching point of view, was transformed by Mourinho into a political triumph. Something that had originated in serious tactical errors ended up strengthening Mourinho’s position, extending his powers to a level that had only ever been previously enjoyed by Madrid’s president. Sensing that any gesture of taking responsibility for the defeat would weaken him, he acted with unusual political skill to transform a momentous defeat into an opportunity for personal empowerment. Here he employed public mockery, veiled threats, propaganda and – in no short measure – audacity. He used the 5–0 as a lever to remove everything that seemed inconvenient to him within the club. The uproar that began after 29 November lasted until the spring. It was a sustained crisis, with not a moment’s rest. As one player said, ‘There’s trouble here every day.’

In the midst of the conflict over signing another number nine, Valdano said he was banned from Valdebebas and from official flights. The signing of a centre-forward, Emmanuel Adebayor, on loan until June, failed to bring an end to the skirmishes. Tensions continued into January, February and March, and news was leaked from the dressing room that favouritism, capriciousness and division between the privileged and the not so privileged – all according to their proximity to Jorge Mendes – were rife. Every time a player’s agent called the club to bemoan the influence of Mendes over the decisions of the coach, the answer from Pérez’s entourage was the same: everyone knew that Mourinho would bring confrontations with the press and the referees; what no one foresaw was ‘the other’. ‘The other’ was the code name for all matters linked to Mourinho’s tendency to direct operations towards outcomes that apparently favoured the interests of the Mendes group, to which he himself belonged.

In early March 2011 news spread in the president’s inner circle that Pérez was preparing a back-up plan, just in case Mourinho did not win a trophy and he was forced to fire him. ‘There’s a 90 per cent chance that the coach will not continue next season,’ Pérez told a friend. The factors against the coach included his mismanagement of people, the damage he inflicted on the club’s image, the poor football played by the team and, above all, the limited chances of winning a trophy that would justify the extravagance of the project.

‘This way of playing does not guarantee trophies,’ the directors told each other in the corridors of the stadium. They let slip to Valdano that they would never allow Mourinho to take over all managerial duties and that sports policy would remain the exclusive responsibility of the club. Valdano and Pérez began searching for a possible emergency coach. Juan Carlos Garrido, at the time having a good season with Villarreal in the Europa League, Rafa Benítez, who maintained frequent contact with Pérez, and Alberto Toril, coach of Real Madrid Castilla, were considered as alternatives.

The relationship between the players and the coach deteriorated. Pérez said many players called him complaining that Mourinho was unjust in his decisions. And it was not only the players who complained. The president said that the coach had serious problems even with the doctors and cooks.

Every time Mourinho felt threatened he responded with propaganda and agitation. He used his presentations in the press room like a surgical instrument, a case in point being when he took advantage of the visit of Manuel Pellegrini’s Málaga on 3 March. Pellegrini, who had been his predecessor in the Madrid dugout, provided the combustible material. Asked if his situation was comparable to the Chilean’s in the previous year, Mourinho blazed, ‘No, because if Madrid get rid of me I’ll not end up coaching Málaga. If Madrid get rid of me, I’ll go to a big club in England or Italy. I’ll have no problem in ending up back at a big club.’

Fernando Fernández Tapias was one of the directors most offended by these words. The shipping magnate requested his immediate dismissal as the only way to restore the club’s institutional image. More than just offending Málaga, what upset several members of the Madrid board was the lack of respect shown to Madrid. It was the coldness with which he had said that it was all the same to him whichever ‘big club’ chose to hire him. Pérez believed the words to be ‘inadmissible’, telling a close friend that if Madrid were knocked out of the Champions League against Lyon he would start a campaign to bring down Mourinho and replace him at the end of the season. The next day, during the pre-match meet-up in the Sheraton Mirasierra hotel, Pérez made the coach aware of how badly the board had taken his comments and asked him to retract them in the post-match press conference.

There are moments that determine the mood of an entire era. The meet-up on 2 and 3 March was the first time that the players had observed the coach adopt an attitude that mixed melancholy, a generalised resentment, suspicion and indolence. Suddenly, he was not even acknowledging people. He treated as strangers those he had previously treated as friends. There were no more jokes. He did not talk with people who not so long ago he had playfully teased. He felt he could be betrayed by the people around him. In the dressing room a rumour started that over the years would become recurrent, periodically spoken, like a litany: ‘He wants to leave.’

The 0–0 draw in the Riazor on 26 February left Mourinho contemplating a distressing idea: that the team was being swamped in the early parts of matches, and was then not able to come back and win games. In the team-talk before the match against Málaga he emphasised this point: ‘We’re not going to give away the first half.’ This kind of team meeting usually lasted 45 minutes but now it was cut drastically short, being over in less than 10 minutes. It seemed scandalous to many of the players to suggest that they were starting games with reduced intensity, especially taking into account the fact that it was the coach himself who insisted on inviting the opposition forward by using the medium-block.

Most of the dressing room began to feel a crippling fatigue. Players used the word ‘burnout’ to describe the permanent state of mental exhaustion brought on by the complaints of a coach who not only never seemed satisfied, but also hinted that he did not appear to believe in the honesty of the group. Ricardo Carvalho, who had worked under Mourinho for a decade, reassured his team-mates, explaining that Mourinho had done the same at Chelsea. He summoned trouble up out of nothing just to introduce more pressure.

Madrid beat Málaga 7–0. But, rather than being a joyful occasion, Mourinho’s post-match press conference was loaded with bitter irony. There was no end to the caustic messages aimed at the directors who had earlier rebuked him, begging him to offer up a public excuse. He began by complaining about the conspiracy mounted by TV schedulers, who in his opinion designed a deliberately difficult calendar that had been meekly accepted by the club:

‘News reaches me that we’ll probably have to play against Lyon on Wednesday and then against Atlético Madrid on Saturday, which will be just fantastic after the others [Barcelona] play on Tuesday and Sunday. But, of course, for the sake of the club’s image we should not report this type of thing. So we keep quiet and pretend everyone’s very happy, and on we go.’