Mourinho fired: Man United’s troubles run much deeper than one manager
José Mourinho is many things but he is not and never will be a bad manager.
What he is, perhaps, is the great lothario of modern football management; the dimple-chinned looker in the well-cut Italian suit, full of swagger, aware of his own attractiveness, and, in turn, attracted to the glamorous clubs that covet him. They know what they’re getting for their considerable money and so does he. They just require a little seduction with silverware before he’s gone in the morning. He is the lounge lizard of the galácticos, offering good times, a little bubble and fizz, but never there for a long-term stable relationship.
None of that is meant to demean his unique career, which just took another twist with his sacking by Manchester United after this time he failed to deliver. He told us in one infamous press conference that he demands “respect, respect, respect” and that’s only right for a manager who has also won, won, won.
Yet it’s always a certain kind of winning which involves his brand of psychological warfare applied to already established teams. He delivers wild and crazy nights with only a few regrets in the morning. His failure at another club is not indicative, then, of his being poor at his job but, merely, how the relationships formed between Mourinho and his suitors start unhealthy and deteriorate from there.
That is why the fault lies not entirely with Mourinho. While United’s defeat against Liverpool on Sunday was not unexpected, too much can and has been read into it.
Viewed more soberly, it was always going to be a tough fixture against a team playing almost at the height of their powers. Mourinho, in turn, was the manager holding together a team that should rightly be in transition just as, a few years ago, Liverpool were in a state of change. Much, indeed, is said about the current league leaders and most of that has to do with Jurgen Klopp, whose personality ensures that he dominates headlines.
Yet Liverpool’s return to the top of the league was started long before Klopp. Fenway Sports Group took over the club in 2010. Their arrival was timely. The years before Fenway were the darkest for LFC. The end of the Hicks/Gillett era saw the club’s controversial owners sack a manager for being too loyal to club and fans, speaking truths the owners didn’t want to hear. With Rafa Benitez gone, they brought in the ultimate “yes” man in the form of Roy Hodgson, the club’s most unpopular manager, who was soon signing players that were the stuff of the Kop’s nightmare: Christian Poulsen, Joe Cole (then in his injury years), and Paul Konchesky.
Where Liverpool were then, United appear to be now. Nothing illustrates the plight of the club more than the sight on Sunday of Marouane Fellaini shooting from just outside the box and slicing a shot that eventually hit a steward sitting next to the opposite corner flag. Think about that for a moment. That’s Marouane ‘Elbows’ Fellaini, the plodding midfield mauler, who, since 2013, has been at the heart of a midfield that once boasted the likes of Cantona and Best.
Critics would, of course, point to Paul Pogba on the bench at Liverpool. Surely, the World Cup winner is the kind of player that any manager should build a team around? Well, yes but Mourinho clearly had different ideas and it’s hard to say that he was wrong.
Talented but ego-laden Pogba is a different symptom of the illness afflicting a club which has, again, rejected the bitter medicine that might have cured it.
Mourinho arrived at United at the right time. They clearly needed an experienced manager able to give shape to players whose price tags (105 million Euros for Pogba alone) belie the fact the club doesn’t seem to have a coherent recruitment strategy. This was his chance to make roots, instead of lasting the two or three seasons that have become his norm. This should have been his chance to prove himself capable of rebuilding a club from the ground up. This should have been his chance to mirror and perhaps eclipse the job that Klopp has done at Liverpool.
And if he had been accepted on those terms, the story might have been different. He was certainly never as poorly suited to the task as Hodgson was to Liverpool. Since the retirement of Sir Alex Fergusson, United have hired four managers (three if you include Ryan Giggs’s brief caretaker role). David Moyes was everything they perhaps needed. He was the hardworking grafter who’d learned his craft at Everton and understood how to build a team over successive seasons. United was meant to be his chance to show what he could do at the top. More experienced heads demanded that he be given time. He left the club after 51 games because a single Community Shield simply wasn’t enough for a team that had won the league 13 times since 1986.
United traded up in the form of Louis van Gaal, the hugely experienced manager who had previously enjoyed success with Ajax and Barcelona and then the Netherland’s national team. His arrival did nothing to improve United. His winning statistic was eventually lower than that of Moyes, being 52.43% against the younger man’s 52.94%. Under Mourinho, the team demonstrably improved. His win percentage was 58.33 against Fergusson’s record 59.67. He might well feel unfairly treated give that statistic makes him the second most successful manager in United’s history, better even than that of Sir Matt Busby (50.45). Yet if Mourinho’s single UEFA League win, League Cup, and Community Shield pale, somewhat, compared to Busby’s haul, it’s also to be remembered that Busby was manager for 1,120 games. Mourinho only had 144 to turn things around.
It’s increasingly difficult in the modern game for any manager to improve a top-flight team given the pressure of the media and, more importantly, the fans who succumb to the pressure of the media. Clubs are incapable of accepting short-term pain in order to achieve long-term gains. Liverpool are riding high but almost overlooked is the reality that it is the culmination of a root and branch refit of the club undertaken by the club’s owners.
Victory on the pitch isn’t simply down to a big-name manager who knows where to put the world’s most expensive players on the field every Saturday afternoon. It is down to recruitment, coaching, fitness, strategy, nutrition, and, somewhere in there, of course, leadership.
And that, ultimately, is the bottom line. It’s not on the pitch that United have been failing but in the boardroom. Until that is fixed, nothing about the club will work as well as it did in the past. United will merely move on to the next short-term fix: another lothario who will whisper sweet nothings that sound good in the glare of a press conference but are ultimately meaningless on a rainy winter’s afternoon at Anfield.