Mourinho spent £400m and created an XI of hungover strangers…
For a man whose every career move is usually steeped in drama, the manner of Jose Mourinho’s departure on Tuesday morning felt oddly subdued. There were no fan protests after the Liverpool game, no spiteful press conferences, no rumours of impending doom. Mourinho just skulked away, sacked after leading Manchester United to its worst start in 28 years.
But his dismissal fits perfectly with the wider pattern of this bizarre, hypnotically dull United season. Mourinho’s suffocating tenure at Old Trafford had invited such apathy that even the unfolding catastrophe became boring; the mundane itself became mundane, and with nothing new to say the media failed to write with passion about Mourinho’s astonishing, cataclysmic failure. It wasn’t an explosive campaign, but a quiet drowning in quicksand. It gets the meagre ending it deserves.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of the details. Mourinho might bemoan the club’s unwillingness to sign a new centre-back over the summer – and yes, he wasn’t the only failing employee at the club – but in two-and-a-half years Mourinho built the third most expensive squad in the world. He signed plenty of defenders, they just didn’t work out – perhaps couldn’t work out under a manager who seemed to suck the energy out of everyone associated with the club.
It is difficult to recall any team in Premier League history that is so utterly undefinable as Mourinho’s United, that is so entirely without tactical direction or self-belief. The wealth gap between the top few clubs and the rest means there is a limit to the possibility of failure in the modern game –the sheer individual willpower of players like Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial will win you the odd game – but within these parameters it is fair to argue that, relatively speaking, Mourinho is the single biggest underachiever in the club’s history.
That might seem harsh given United finished second last year and won the Europa League the season before, but this is about more than just results. Pogba’s capitulation is viewed by some as an example of the egotism that Mourinho had to battle against, but this interpretation wrongly buys into the outgoing manager’s narrative of self-preservation. It is categorically a coaching failure to oversee your talismanic World Cup winner’s self-confidence crumble with such alarming speed. It is categorically a coaching failure to see everyone from Luke Shaw to Romelu Lukaku to Marcus Rashford diminish in stature despite the resources available to United. It is categorically a coaching failure to spend £400million and end up with a group stuck in existential crisis, playing the most boring, meaningless football in the division.
The total absence of a tactical direction has most obviously affected their defensive record. United have conceded the fifth most goals in the Premier League, and if a Mourinho team isn’t defensively stable then what on earth is its raison d’etre? They amble from game to game in zig-zag formation lines, wafting about the pitch like hungover strangers, occasionally engaging in the contest but generally too nervous to intervene. Again, for such a talented group of players this is a scarcely believable failure – and yet it never quite made the headlines it should have.
And then there’s the psychological side of things, the poisonous atmopshere created by Mourinho’s constant whinging and deflecting; watching him throw players under the bus over the last few months has destroyed the myth that Mourinho is a good man-manager. In many cases, most notably the reported bullying of Luke Shaw, Mourinho has failed unforgivably, not just stunting technical development but damaging the confidence of a group of young adults. The contrast to the nurturing instincts of Mauricio Pochettino or Jurgen Klopp is stark. And damning.
Mourinho never seemed the right fit, brought in – reluctantly – as the desperate, Machiavellian option to win the title. For the first time since arriving at Porto in 2002, Mourinho has failed to do so, spending £400million and sending the red half of Manchester into a stupor in the process. It is no exaggeration to suggest that when United awake from this post-Fergie coma they will look back on Mourinho’s time – the money spent, the dreadful football, the bitter atmosphere – as among the biggest failures in their history.
Alex Keble
