Why can’t Jose Mourinho find his own Eriksen?

I know I’m not about to tell you anything you do not already know, but I think it is worth stating that being manager of a successful football team is not all about just buying the best players, sitting back and letting them do their stuff. Yes, it is about acquiring good or even great players, but that is obviously only part of the job. There’s also this ancient art that used to be common in the game, even at the biggest clubs…it’s called training, coaching and developing.

When you look at what the coaches at Spurs, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Everton are doing to their teams, you can at least see what they are trying to achieve. They may not always be successful, but there’s clearly a direction of travel. You can see how they’re being drilled. You can see how players are developing. So why has Jose Mourinho so obviously abandoned any idea of developing and coaching his players to improve them? Why has he so completely tied himself to the mast of transfers being the only way to improve his side? Last week he expounded on this.

“You have no chance in the market unless you go to crazy numbers or instead you go to what you call the second level players and still have crazy numbers. But that second level is the level people say, and I agree, that’s not what Manchester United is.”

You can see from those words how he’s totally ruled out the possibility that you could buy a ‘second level’ player and then train and coach them into being a first level player. It no longer seems to even be considered an option. Surely this is highly unsatisfactory for all.

Look at the next quote from the same press conference. It is almost as if he is excusing the side not being very good because he can’t buy the best players, even despite his stellar, expensive squad.

“It’s more difficult to buy players of a high, high, high level. The clubs are more powerful. The clubs don’t want to sell, and to sell is to go to absolutely incredible levels. Before, the smaller clubs were almost begging the big clubs: ‘Get my best players. I need to sell. Please, you are powerful. Buy my best player.’ At this moment, they don’t want to sell.”

His sadness that clubs are not prostrate in front of United begging them to buy their players seems very misplaced and a little bit odd. Why not just get players with a lot of potential and make them into really good players instead? What’s wrong with doing that? Others have done it. What exactly is he even doing from day to day? What are United paying him to do? What are they getting out of him other than shopping lists of players? Has he mistook real life for a computer game?

When Spurs bought Christian Eriksen in 2013 as a 21-year-old they were not buying the top midfielder of 2013, they were buying someone super talented but who needed to develop more. Now in 2018 he’s a much more consistent and improved player. That’s because of how he’s been coached at Spurs. He was bought for £11 million and must be now worth ten times that or more.

Doesn’t Mourinho want to do something great like that? No, he doesn’t. He just wants others to do that work and then buy the new improved player at whatever cost. It is as though to do otherwise is beneath him. Well it’s simply not working. And why would it?

Football shouldn’t just be an arms race to buy the best players. It should be more than that. Much, much more. But wait, Jose is not done yet.

“Can you buy Tottenham’s best players? No, because they don’t sell. Of course, they are so powerful that they can say no. A few years ago, who was Tottenham’s best player? Michael Carrick. And a few years later, who was the best player? (Dimitar) Berbatov. Can we go there now and bring Harry Kane?”

The implication is clear. If he could buy Kane, then they’d be a better side because Kane is a great player and the fact he can’t is being suggested as a reason why they’re not that good, or at least why his job is so hard these days. But surely that just isn’t how football works and Mourinho has the evidence of this at Old Trafford in the muscular and moody shape of Alexis Sanchez to name but one example. Is that all you’ve got? Buying players? Is that it? Really?

It has said by many this season that Mourinho suddenly looks old-fashioned because from his own words and deeds, all he seems interested in doing is trying to buy the fastest car to win the race and not to build it himself from high-quality parts. He appears to have both emotionally and mentally shackled himself to this as a philosophy, United’s seemingly infinite resources have allowed him to indulge it as a notion and many fans have been indoctrinated into the same vision, forever looking for another big signing to solve the problems, and when they make one and it doesn’t, simply reverting to demanding another. It is almost pitiful that it has come to this.

How long is this going to go on for? It is clearly a philosophy that is out of step with all other big sides in England and most of the smaller ones too, big sides that are doing and playing much better than United. It would be naive in the extreme to deny that the preeminence of United’s rivals isn’t down to huge financial investment. Of course it is. But that isn’t simply what they are relying on to achieve success.

But Jose is.

That’s why he’s been left behind. He’s unable or unwilling to make the sum of the club’s parts greater than the individuals. United’s failure is a failure of coaching, of management and of philosophy and maybe the only one who can’t see that is the man at the centre of the vortex of mediocrity.

John Nicholson