The making of the master manipulator: Why Jose Mourinho is Jurgen Klopp’s antithesis

“God, and after God, me.”

– Jose Mourinho, 2004, post UEFA Champions League win with an unfancied Porto.

A moment of silence fell on Gelsenkirshen as the unproviding ball was rudely slapped into the net from the black and blue boots of Porto’s No. 15, Dimitri Alenichev. Little did anyone know that that moment of silence, in awe of Porto’s emphatic 3-0 Champions League final showing over a hapless AS Monaco, served only as a prelude to accentuate the noise that followed, accompanied by muffled drums, raising the curtain on Jose Mourinho’s clamorous career. Football would never be the same. (Cue: The full-blown operatic rendition of the ever-dramatic and a tad overused O Fortuna to set the mood to.)

Humble beginnings

Before success corrupted the man-child’s sense of identity, he was a boy from a humble stock until he wasn’t. Jose had a great deal to owe to the fact that the legendary Bobby Robson, unlike most English managers, had a thing for sunny climes, and like most Englishmen couldn’t bother himself to learn how to order his drinks in a foreign language. So, when the hierarchy at Sporting Clube de Portugal figured he couldn’t ask for a refill, let alone pass on tactical directives to his new squad, Jose was recruited to serve as a personal assistant/translator/errand boy. Before long, Robson found out that the boy-who-would-be-king was adding his own titbits of tactical insights and passing it along to his charges, complementing the instructions of his mentor. Sir Bobby knew it then, and before anyone else, that his young upstart was destined for greatness.

Mourinho set out to build an almost unsettling aura around him, empowered with the practical knowledge he drew upon, as if he were privy to an alternate dimension of observation. Knowledge, like a coat of mail, sheathing his growing sense of invulnerability – an armour which he would use to shield his superego for years to come. Soon enough, the globetrotting Englishman took him to Barca and made him his right-hand man, his totem of realism, sending him off to scout opponents. “He’d come back and hand me a dossier that was absolutely first class,” Robson recollected in his memoirs. “As good as anything I’d received. Here he was, in his early-30s, never been a player or a coach to speak of, giving me reports as good as anything I ever got.” The devil was in the details, and Jose was its high priest.

On the 14th of May, 1997, Feijenoord Stadion, Barcelona won the Cup Winners’ Cup against Paris Saint Germain. During the trophy presentation ceremony, Bobby Robson is seen in official match photographs, hanging in the background as Jose Mourinho took centre-stage, leading the procession. In that moment captured in film, the transformation was complete, the wheel came full-circle, and the ringmaster’s fixation with the spotlight began in earnest.

The Prelude

“Fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent, well-being is vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too now through the game.”

– O Fortuna, Carl Orff.

To fully comprehend the neurosis of one of football’s ultimate antagonists, one would need to weigh the words of a medieval Latin Goliardic poem, set in the 13th century, by German composer Carl Orff. The diatribe levelled at Fortuna, the indiscriminate fate that wields its careless sword over God and men – for all we know it could just be Jose’s snooze alarm.

Mourinho fought the odds for as long as he could remember. Like with the best football coming-of-age stories, his genealogy had shown very little indication for greatness, with his father garnering a solitary cap for Portugal. Spending his teens in the Portuguese second-tier with a nondescript playing career, he ended up putting in shifts as a PE trainer in Lisbon. Jose’s first foray into management at Estrela da Amadora, too, was rather anti-climactic, with the little-known club going into liquidation.

In fact, Jose resented fate, and did everything is his power to oppose it. He thought even less of Christmas and the faux spirit it supposedly imbues. “I was nine or 10 years old and my father was sacked on Christmas Day. He was a manager, the results had not been good, he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day, the telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch,” he had said, publicly recounting his father, José Manuel Mourinho Félix, being asked to quit his dreams of management, cold turkey. Mourinho became the football equivalent of Dr Seuss’ titular Grinch from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. This disillusioning episode from his childhood set the precedent for his adulthood. It was always going to be him against the world.

The Master of Puppets

“My players did not get the respect they deserved from day one to the last day. These are words that I really feel, but now… let’s try to enjoy it.”

– Jose Mourinho’s opening lines at the Chelsea awards dinner party, 2015.

There is a thin line between realism and cynicism. In the life of a top-level manager, that line is a high-wire, with no safety net when your stock falls. Football is yet to see a better acrobat than Jose Mourinho. He swings from one end of the marquee to the other, juggling his words and philosophies like flaming chainsaws on a unicycle, assuming an air of vulnerability that projects his invulnerability. All the while, his showmanship draws censure away from his players (who peek from behind the curtains). By playing the part of the sacrificial figure, he rallies the participants of this wonderfully perishable circus.

It’s a classic diversionary tactic in media manipulation that’s worked for Jose for the better part of eight years, from 2002 till his much-maligned stint at Real Madrid in 2010, where, for once, he wasn’t a big enough ringmaster to tame the superego of Cristiano Ronaldo and Co. “Cristiano didn’t take [my instructions] very well because maybe he thinks he knows everything and the coach cannot help him develop more,” he conceded in 2013.

The Portuguese invites conflict; where others would wilt under pressure, he relishes it. The procedure is almost surgical in its precision: it starts with Mourinho insinuating a sense of victimisation, hinting at forces at work against him and his troops. Planting the seed of doubt among his players and fans, with carefully-worded press snippets, alleging that pundits, officials, the Football Association, broadcast media, broadsheets in collusion, conspiring against the antagonists. The fines and the touchline bans are perceived as acrimonious acts of attrition and play right into his hands when his teams are in a lull, like clockwork; in fact, if it were more methodical, one could be able to set their watch to it.

At Porto, Jose appealed to the sense of pride of the players and the very real possibility of escaping obscurity, thereby, getting the best out of the likes of Deco, Maniche, Nuno Valente, Ricardo Carvalho, Paulo Ferreira, Costinha, and Benni McCarthy – they achieved escape velocity in two years flat, without as much as a strain on Jose’s veneer. He shot himself out of a cannon and into the footballing stratosphere.

At Chelsea and, subsequently, Inter Milan, he found himself amidst better players, masterfully tailoring his agenda to fit their characteristics: William Gallas, John Terry, Arjen Robben, Didier Drogba, Michael Essien, Khalid Boulahrouz, Ashley Cole, Michael Ballack, Diego Costa, Branislav Ivanovic, David Luiz, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marco Materazzi, Lucio, Thiago Motta and Mario Balotelli, politely put, were the perfect lightning rods for his experiments of cynicism. His teams became the Frankenstein monsters of football, individualistic footballers became the sum of their mismatched, sewn-up parts, playing the occasional ugly football, lurching towards a common goal. The imaginary angry mobs, pitchforks, torches, tar and feathers along the way were very much the products of his own creation, and a necessary motivational tool. “It’s not important how we play,” said Jose, defiantly, when at Inter. “If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car, to beat you in a race I have to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank.” Players who singularly courted controversy by the virtue of who they were, finally had the chance to redeem themselves through the collective cause, in spite of themselves – these flawed characters became his generals in waging mock wars war against faceless enemies.

The “us against them” motivational technique, evidently, has a sell-by date, if his past sojourns have proved anything. It’s not long before the illusion of control fades, the ploy becomes repetitive, and the puppet master gets wrangled in his own set of strings. The Eva Carneiro incident, his handling of Cesc Fabregas, Segio Ramos, Iker Casillas, Ronaldo, Diego Costa, Eden Hazard, press and club executives undermined his sense of authority, creating animosity and causing factions in his own set up. Jose, in his final stay at Chelsea, showed the effects of the tremendous psychological toll this tactic demands, as his rants grew progressively self-consuming. “It’s hard,” Jose confessed in 2015, “All last season I did phenomenal work and brought them to a level that’s not their level, which is more than they really are.”

There is historical precedence to this effect: The Ouroboros is an ancient Greek serpent eating its own tail. And of course, The Siege of Leningrad, where siege mentality drove the residents to a state of cannibalism.

The song remains the same?

Jose Mourinho is getting a second chance at Manchester United. There have been multiple attempts of rebranding. Lessons, supposedly, have been learnt. In 2013, the United board of directors unwittingly opted to snub Jose to sign on a less controversial manager in David Moyes, in an attempt to safeguard brand value.

This Sunday, the 15th of January, 2017, Jose Mourinho finds himself managing Manchester United, as they host Jurgen Klopp’s gallivanting Liverpool side at Old Trafford. The gregarious German is, in most ways, the complete antithesis of Jose Mourinho, and it’s set up to be a battle of footballing philosophies from the opposite ends of the spectrum. The matches you win count, but how you win it counts for more at Old Trafford than most places, none more so than this fixture. If Jose strays, the Stretford End will be sure to remind him, as they had duly done with Moyes and Louis van Gaal.

The highs and lows of O Fortuna, you’ll find, chart a course akin to Mourinho’s career so far: it starts with booming drums and choir heralding the coming of something sacrilegious, dwindling into a whisper – and then, by its sheer presence, steady and slow, the crescendo builds. A redeeming flurry of short strings and horn notes peak, finally, on one last long-lasting cheerful note. At Manchester United, fans will hope that would be the case.