What are they going to say about him? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he sneakily jabbed an opposition coach in the eye during an unseemly touchline melee (that no one wants to see, but also really, really wants to see)?
The faint whisper this week that José Mourinho may be a step closer to managing Paris Saint-Germain has already inspired a wildly overblown response across the many diverse platforms of the overblown football response industry.
Mourinho was quick to deny there has been contact with PSG, at the same time looking delighted just to be back in this kind of José-centred conversation. But it isn’t hard to see why a little standard-issue chatter should have caused such excitement.
Because it takes an act of will to remember that this hasn’t actually happened yet, that European football’s gaudiest empire of dust hasn’t already landed on Mourinho as a solution to its own basic lack of heart, purpose, method, traction. It feels like a bizarre cultural oversight, like Joni Mitchell not performing at Woodstock but the evil version.
Mainly José in Paris is just a mouthwatering prospect, from the basic comedy of Mourinho and Neymar, together at last, lost in hallucinogenic incomprehension to Mourinho striding around the out-grounds of Troyes and Ajaccio like an angry fallen earl, to the terrifying truths you can already hear him spitting into the nearest TV lens when he’s finally sacked.
Who wouldn’t want to see this at PSG after all those doomed experiments with pretending to be nice, or serious, or interested in building something? Here we have an institution taking a last lingering look in the mirror, Joker makeup smeared, and just giving in. This is who we are. Hire the dark lord. Voldemort is finally in charge of the Death Star.
In reality it would, of course, be a terrible idea. Mourinho may be a very famous coach, but he hasn’t done anything of real note since 2017. His career arc shows very clearly that his own reductive style, always trying to win by the final scrape of the final sharpened fingernail, is poorly suited to this kind of overlord employer.
Indeed it is the tragedy of Mourinho’s career to have got so good so quickly that he found himself unable to manage at the kind of club – smaller, punchier, more biddable – where he had the best chance of doing his best work, a super-coach version of the Peter Principle.
It was still a thrilling spectacle watching Mourinho’s Roma take on Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League semi-finals on Thursday. Aged 60 now, he has gone thrillingly white and wild, looming on the touchline like a charismatic shark boat captain.
There is a familiar fury to this Roma team. At one point Tammy Abraham was berated by his teammates for failing to go down and barter a booking from a foul. Even the game’s only goal was a long ball flicked on, the same old spirit of waiting, spoiling, then going straight for the eyes, the throat, the position of maximum opportunity.
And at this point the wider trajectory of Mourinho’s career still feels a little underexamined. His fall from the elite rank is generally taken as evidence of a man out of time, overly reliant on his stock of personal magnetism, pragmatism masked with celebrity gloss.
The paradox here is that Mourinho’s greatest achievements are authentic works of hard, detailed coaching. Not to mention a little overlooked now. By any objective standard the Champions League wins with Porto and Internazionale are still the greatest individual coaching feats at the top end of European club football in the last 25 years.
There have been only two surprise, small-budget champions of Europe in that period. Both were managed by Mourinho. Some have suggested Porto 2004 was a little random and lucky. But the facts say otherwise because nobody has done it since except for Mourinho himself, six years later with an Inter team of limited resources and a style that was, if you don’t see this sport as a kind of video game, utterly gripping.
His greatest result is still the 1-0 semi-final defeat at the Camp Nou in April 2010 that meant Inter eliminated Barcelona. Inter had one shot to Barça’s 20. Mourinho set his team up in a 4-5-0 after the sending-off of Thiago Motta (also now on PSG’s to-do list) and watched his players deliberately kick the ball away for an hour because possession only distracts from the real business of disrupting one of the great possession machines.
Inter completed 74 passes to Barcelona’s 691, the greatest, most engrossing textural contrast at this level in the modern era. But it was a personal high from which Mourinho, and indeed the game itself, has receded ever since.
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This stuff was basically unsustainable as a product, or as something superstar players are willing to do. Again, the paradox of Mourinho. A manager who seemed so modern in his early years, all extreme attention to detail and handsome alpha warlord vibes, has turned out to be the last of a line, last of the big personality types, the Easter Island Heads.
It is tempting to suggest it was the Premier League that spoiled Mourinho by playing to his vices, lingering on his cartoonish persona as opposed to forcing any real tactical development. Real Madrid was also a doomed alliance. Mourinho played his part in the greatest two-hander in modern club football, the Pep-Messi, José-CR7 duopoly, which was operatic and beautiful, but demanded also that he fully assume the role of the imperial bad guy.
There are two things worth saying about that. First the idea Mourinho is somehow the enemy of football, as declaimed by the likes of Johan Cruyff – look at us, here, the light side of the force – seems increasingly silly given where the game is now.
Football has many actual enemies, mainly asset strippers, hedge funds and PR-hungry nation states. Mourinho at least made you want to watch this thing, to lose yourself in its feverish details. Personally I really like his style, the fact it doesn’t fit into easy highlights clips, that it demands work and patience and gruelling internal engagement, the polar opposite of the packaging of sport as a homogenised fun-product.
To win a game against peak, grizzled Mourinho validates and ennobles every other way of playing. The best of that great Barcelona team, its light and beauty, was framed by the contrast.
From here Mourinho can enjoy his own late bloom. Perhaps he can take Roma to another final, can make the pitch for a trip back into the inner circle. But it seems likely now that what he did in those years will not be repeated, not to the same extent.
The gap at the top has got wider. This process is only going one way. Those twin Mourinho highs are still a gold standard in modern-day club football – not to mention surprisingly precious, a mark, for all his own stasis, of just how much this game has changed around him.
