The Special One: The Dark Side of Jose Mourinho

In his book The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance, published in 2010, Soriano details the principles that led the club to choose Guardiola: 1. Respects the sports-management model and the role of the technical director; 2. Playing style; 3. Values to promote in the first team, with special attention to the development of young players; 4. Training and performance; 5. Proactive management of the dressing room; 6. Other responsibilities with, and commitments to, the club, including maintaining a conservative profile and avoiding overuse of the media; 7. Has experience as a player and coach at the highest level; 8. Supports the good governance of the club; 9. Knowledge of the Spanish league, the club and European competition.

Guardiola did not meet the seventh criterion, but then neither did Mourinho. What is more it was very unlikely, given past behaviour, that Mourinho could do the job without violating the second, third, sixth and eighth criteria.

The naming of Pep Guardiola as the Barça coach on 29 May 2008 marked Spanish football’s drift towards politicisation. This was paradoxical because Guardiola, one of the coaches most obsessed with the technical details of the game, an empiricist whose strength lay in his work on the pitch, began to be perceived by a certain section of Madrid supporters as an agitator, a manipulative communicator whose propaganda needed to be countered off the pitch. Distracted by this misconception, Madrid would expend much of its institutional energy on taking the necessary steps to wage war in the media.

While Guardiola started an epic landslide that would transform football across half the planet and contribute to reinforcing Spain’s national team as it conquered the world in 2010, institutional and social peace at Madrid became ever more scarce. Calderón, who hired Bernd Schuster, resigned a year and a half later amid accusations of corruption. Florentino Pérez, returning to the presidency in 2009, prompted a criminal investigation that led only to a ruling that Calderón had been the victim of slander and that he was not corrupt.

The return of Pérez to the Bernabéu signalled major changes. The president of the multinational construction firm ACS possessed an incomparable combination of determination and influence. In 2010 Forbes classified his fortune as the tenth largest in Spain. His origins, however, conform more to the petty bourgeoisie. A graduate of Madrid’s School of Civil Engineering, he formed part of a line of technocrats who have nurtured Spanish administration over the last two centuries. Affiliated to the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), he entered politics in 1979, becoming a Madrid councillor, director general of the Ministry for Transport and Tourism, and undersecretary at the Ministry of Agriculture between 1979 and 1982. In 1986 he abandoned politics to begin a career in the private sector.

Unorthodox and adventurous in the management of sporting affairs, Pérez’s reputation was being increasingly challenged by his followers. Madrid had followed a downward trajectory under his direction between 2000 and 2006. From the initial peak of winning two league titles and a Champions League, the club had stagnated. After three years of failing to win a trophy, he handed in his resignation in February 2006, claiming that he had indulged his players like spoiled children and that it was necessary to install another helmsman, who, without the same sentimental attachment, would be capable of purging the dressing room. Never before in Madrid’s history had a president resigned in the middle of his mandate. But with a stubbornness to regain control of the directors’ box, and an avowed sense of mission, he returned to the club in 2009, although he was not chosen by members because the absence of any other candidates meant there was no election. He was 62 years old and assured supporters that, thanks to his intervention, Madrid had been saved from administrative crisis and financial ruin.

Back in power, Pérez set about hiring a new coach. He began the selection process advised by his right-hand man, the sporting director Jorge Valdano. After failed attempts to sign first Arsène Wenger and then Carlo Ancelotti, Pérez signed Manuel Pellegrini. The Chilean’s switch to Chamartín was preceded by suspicion and disaffection. He had still not completed half a season as first-team coach, and the idea of signing Mourinho was occupying Sánchez’s mind more than ever. The operation had been thought through over a period of several years and he was now close to convincing the president to take the plunge. In meetings with friends the director general sighed: ‘I love him!’

Valdano, however, insisted on protecting Pellegrini. The coach had been the subject of a smear campaign in the press, encouraged from within the club. During internal debates Sánchez identified Pellegrini as being inherently weak and too fragile to resist the rigours of the Madrid job. To convince Pérez, the director general reasoned, ‘Pellegrini needs protection because he’s weak. A strong man would not need protection.’

Sánchez took a two-pronged approach. He maintained contact with Mendes and he established a direct line of communication between the Inter coach and Pérez. When some raised suspicions over the suitability of Mourinho’s technical footballing knowledge to the Madrid team, Sánchez confessed that he believed Mourinho’s personality alone would make him worthy of a blockbuster production, while producing statistics to support his technical expertise.

‘I don’t know how much he knows about football,’ he said, ‘but a man who’s not lost a home game in six years must have something. Six years without losing in his own stadium! If he doesn’t know anything about football then he must know a lot about human beings. In his last game for Chelsea both Terry and Lampard ran to embrace him. That’s just not normal. Both of the team’s leaders!’

Sánchez is the mastermind behind the project that, between 2000 and 2007, turned Madrid into the richest football institution on the planet. His keen sense of humour co-exists with his zeal for his position. On one occasion in 2010 he presented himself in the following written terms: ‘I have been an executive director general for the last five years. Before that I was marketing director general for five years. My responsibility is corporate: the administration, the management, the resources, the facilities and infrastructure of the club, the general services, the purchasing, the information systems and technology, the human resources, the commercial and marketing department, areas of content, internal media, use of facilities, sponsors, etc. I am responsible for 141 of the 190 employees at the club. I am responsible for the economic results, the accounts, etc. I direct the club in these areas and take a certain pride that for six years we have topped the income ranking, including in the bad years or through periods of institutional crisis. I have negotiated the signings and the sales made by the club over the last 10 years … maybe 70 transactions in total. I negotiate the players’ contracts, the tours, the TV rights. I represent the club in the LFP (Professional Football League) and in the relevant international bodies. I have a certain disregard for the role of protagonist; I would even say I resent it … I have worked with different presidents, something that is significant in itself. In this transition (certainly an unusual experience in football) you make many friends, from Platini to Rummenigge, from Galliani to Raúl, from the president of Volkswagen to Tebas through to Roures, or a government minister, many businessmen, and football agents … That expanse of contacts just a phone call away is one of the strengths of the club.’

A philosophy graduate who cut his teeth in business administration with Sega, the electronic games company, serving as head of operations in Southern Europe, Sánchez is the most influential executive in Spanish football. When Pérez hired him for the club in the spring of 2000 he was 32 years old. Nobody imagined then that Pérez was preparing the ground for the development of someone who would dominate the Spanish league with an iron fist from 2006 onwards, contributing to the rapid enrichment of Madrid – and Barça – and, as a consequence, putting the finances of the other clubs in the Spanish league at serious risk. If the unequal distribution of TV income in Spain is something unique in Europe then that is in large part thanks to Sánchez’s ability to take advantage of the entanglement of delay, carelessness and incompetence spun by the three institutions that should be ensuring football’s economic health: the Ministry for Sport, the Spanish Football Federation and the Professional Football League.

Madrid’s chief executive since 2006, Sánchez radiated all the enthusiasm of a young lover as he considered Madrid’s future: the possibility of fusing the economic power of the world’s most popular club with the taste for propaganda of a coach capable of surpassing the publicity extravaganzas of any of the companies with which he had previously been involved. His spirit of curiosity was intrigued. Enthusiastic by nature, this master of marketing understood that he had uncovered possibilities hitherto untapped in the world of sport. It would be a pioneering experiment.

Sánchez needed to finish convincing Pérez when events took an intimidating turn. The elimination of Madrid from the Champions League last-16 against Lyon in March 2010 began to erode the president’s normally serene spirit. Barcelona were still on their way to a final that this year would be played at the Bernabéu. The possibility of an arch-rival – and Guardiola – winning their fourth Champions League in Chamartín was an outrage for Madrid’s more closed-minded supporters and an unbearable affront to Pérez.

Barcelona’s advance shifted the balance of power in Spanish football away from the capital. For the first time in 50 years Real Madrid, the club with the greatest number of European trophies, were no longer the reference point. This change in dominance, just when the Spanish national team was enjoying a golden era at all levels, led to inevitable political consequences. In many sectors of Spanish society, heavily influenced by nationalist sentiment, the presence of a Catalan club at the vanguard of the most popular sport in the country inspired a dark malaise.

UEFA had given the 2010 final to Madrid as a reward for Calderón’s efforts to improve the institutional relations between the Spanish Football Federation and the officials of European football’s governing body, headed by Michel Platini. For Pérez, since taking over as president, the organisation of the event – an uncomfortable inheritance from his predecessor – had become an unpleasant obligation and, ultimately, a trap.

The Madrid president’s overriding concern that Barcelona would end up playing in the final meant Mourinho became an object of veneration as soon as the draw had been made. If Barça wanted to get past the semi-finals they would have to overcome Inter, the team managed by the director general’s favourite. At this point, disappointed with Valdano after Pellegrini’s failings in domestic cup competition and in Europe, Sánchez and Pérez began to share the same technocratic feeling. A type of force-field united them in one vision in which football as a business was far too important to be left in the hands of mere football people such as Valdano, the sporting director and principal sporting authority at the club.

Valdano had an extensive CV. A world champion with Argentina in 1986, a league champion and UEFA Cup winner as a player, and a league winner as a coach, he knew all the mechanisms that moved Madrid. He used to say – and his opinion was shared by those agents who knew all concerned parties – that neither Pérez nor Sánchez had any deep analytical understanding of the game. Both marvelled at the stand-out players, the most elegant or the most skilful ones, but they struggled to understand why things happened the way they did during a match. In a crisis, under pressure, they would end up rejecting anything that didn’t dazzle and simply rely on their intuition. The models, the formulas and the sixth sense that had made them renowned executives fused with the historical necessity of stopping Barça. Mourinho, the man with the wistful gaze, was seen as the providential hero.

The repetitive discussions about Mendes and Mourinho had hit their target. There is no doubt that Pérez met with his future coach when Mourinho was still working at Inter. And even more certain is that the president had to listen to his director general explain why Mourinho was a great coach. ‘He has an intelligence for football that I’ve never seen in anyone else,’ said Sánchez at the time. He insisted that Mourinho knew exactly what each player could give and that he was able to anticipate what was going to happen in a game – that he was able to predict what would take place after half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half of play. He was ‘amazing’. Sánchez’s awe for a man he described as an omniscient magician always seemed genuine. Mourinho never went into too much detail, at least not in public. He never talked about what the training sessions were like or what his principles were, or what exactly was to be expected of his teams when planning matches. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had won a lot. Why ask so many questions when the trophies speak for themselves?

The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in the south of Iceland on 20 March 2010 was an unexpected stroke of good fortune. The ash ejected into the atmosphere meant European air space was closed and Barcelona had to travel to Milan by bus. The team took a day getting there and spent two nights sleeping in hotels before the match. That would be significant in terms of performance levels in a competition decided by the smallest details. The 3–1 win from the first leg and the 1–0 defeat in the return gave Inter victory over 180 minutes of football in which they rarely dominated Barça. The fact that Inter finished the second leg with 10 men, hemmed into their own area, desperate, saved by the incorrect ruling-out of a Bojan goal, was not enough to make Pérez and Sánchez suspect that luck had played an important part. Barcelona’s defeat was such a relief to the president that he immediately closed the deal with Mourinho, convinced he was acquiring two magic spells for the price of one: the universal antidote to failure, and the ‘know how’ that would destroy Guardiola’s team.

‘Ilusión’ is the key word in all of Pérez’s public addresses since first becoming president. It means ‘excitement’, ‘hopeful anticipation’, ‘enthusiasm’. In his speech after winning the election on 17 July 2000 he said, ‘We have in front of us, just as we said in our election campaign, an exciting job full of ilusión.’ On 13 May 2009, when he presented his candidacy for the presidency, he spoke beneath a poster that displayed the project’s slogan, ‘The Ilusión Returns’, as if everything that had occurred since he had been away had been turgid and sterile. In his speech at the Salón Real at the Ritz Hotel he confided that he felt capable of ‘almost everything’, and warned he had ‘spectacular’ plans. The word ‘spectacular’ appeared five times in his speech. The day he announced the signing of Mourinho he insisted, ‘What I love about Mourinho are the same things that you are going to love: ilusión, effort, professionalism, motivation, aptitude … everything that makes him the best coach.’

Pérez’s communications advisors understood from the outset that he set great store in the concept of fantasy. Ilusión and the spectacular are connected concepts. The dictionary defines the word ‘spectacular’ as an adjective applied to things that, because of the ‘apparatus’ that accompanies them, impress whosoever is in their presence. The meaning can even be extended to imply ‘gimmicky’. The first definition of ‘ilusión’ in the Royal Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language is emphatic: ‘concept, image or representation without an actual reality, suggested by the imagination or caused by a delusion of the senses’.

José Luis Nueno, professor of commercial management at the IESE (Institute of Higher Business Studies) and author of a study of Madrid’s business model for Harvard Business School in 2004, questioned the logic of the choice of Mourinho and considered that in a traditional enterprise his signing would at the very least be seen as unorthodox. It would be an error, says Nueno, ‘for a company to imitate another in terms of who its leader is: to believe that one person is responsible for everything is like believing that the carrying out of one task is responsible for everything. It’s like saying: if I buy the shop-window displays of Zara I am Zara. Or even, if I copy everything that Zara does I am Zara. You miss the relationships between all the bits and pieces in the system. And you lose the acquired experience of developing that system.’

Traditional industry is less sensitive to the mythology that fills the minds of football fans. Inter’s defeat of Bayern to win the Champions League gave Mourinho another trophy, but, more importantly, it gave him a magical glow in the eyes of many Madrid supporters and the feeling that they had finally found their essential authoritarian patriarch for these difficult times. Somebody who could part the Red Sea. Is there anything more exciting, more full of ilusión, than beautiful superstition?

Nobody knew how to exploit this better than Mourinho, ever more conscious of the fact that his collection of trophies gave him an incalculable capacity to influence the minds of fans and directors: two Portuguese leagues, two English leagues, two Italian leagues, a Portuguese Cup, an English Cup, an Italian Cup, a UEFA Cup, two Champions Leagues … Success is exciting. Continual success, skilfully promoted, is persuasion’s most seductive calling card. It is then that ‘magical thinking’ comes in to play.

In The Golden Bough, the anthropological classic published in 1890, James Frazer writes that primitive societies linked themselves to a ‘magical man-god’ who exercised ‘public magic’, primarily to provide food and control the rain. We don’t expect anything less from the director generals who control the big multinationals, nor of certain football managers. Frazer argues that magic works by imitation: what appears to be, influences what appears to be. Like causes like. If you want more muscle, eat more meat; if you want to fly, eat birds; if you want success, attach yourself to someone successful, touch him, ask for his autograph. Magic works through symbols and symbols work by metonymy and metaphor – Mourinho is a symbol of the social leader and a metaphor for triumph.

Magical thinking establishes a mystical relationship that very few people in the world of football are capable of resisting, as nobody is wholly free from superstition. Players can’t stop themselves, always taking their first step onto the pitch with their right foot. Roman Abramovich cannot suppress it, trying to import the Guardiola model to Chelsea, but without the ‘Masia’, without the culture of youth development, without the Camp Nou, and to an environment completely different to that of Spanish football. Neither could Pérez restrain himself when he coupled his desire to win the Champions League to a coach who had won it twice.

Champions League statistics brought Mourinho closer to Madrid. But those same numbers made it mathematically less likely that he would win it again. Bob Paisley is the only coach to have won three European Cups, and he did it from within a very stable club: the Liverpool of the seventies and eighties, a club that had been built on the firm foundations laid by Bill Shankly with a continuity that went back to 1959.

Mourinho himself must have noted a degree of rage from within the club when two months after arriving in Spain, after an unexpected 0–0 draw on his league debut in Mallorca, he felt obliged to clarify that he was not a magician.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m a coach. I’m not Harry Potter. He’s magic but in reality magic doesn’t exist. Magic is fiction and I live in the football world, which is the real world.’

Mourinho wanted to lower the levels of expectation. But he always knew that his signing was intimately related to marketing, a science that studies how to take advantage of expectations for economic ends. Harry Potter is not just a fictional character. He is a commercial system learned in the business schools well known to José Ángel Sánchez. When Madrid signed the Brazilian forward Ronaldo in 2002 the director general compared his impact on the economy of the club to the bespectacled boy wizard, saying that ‘Ronaldo is Harry Potter’.

The commercial model of the Madrid brand that Sánchez inspired when he joined the club is the same that Disney used to promote The Lion King. Following a sequence outlined by the concept’s inventor, Professor Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist and a specialist in the economics of information, Disney developed an exploitation chain that multiplied the number of times a product could be offered to the public. The way a product was presented was expected to evolve, generating new expectations and new demand. Varian called these ‘windows’. The first window of a film is at the cinema. The second is the showing of the film on passenger airlines; then, the release of the DVD; next, the barrage of articles with the image of the characters on patented toys, games, electronics, textiles, furniture, etc. And finally, the musical, or any other commodity that the imagination is capable of conceiving.

‘Disney is a content producer, and we’re another content producer,’ Sánchez explained during the galáticos era, as he maximised profits from Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo and Beckham as if they were characters in a cartoon series. The director general glimpsed a universe in which supporters were transformed into ‘audiences’ and became consumers of legend. During a game, these excited customers could be divided into three blocks, according to how they consumed the product. In the stadium are those who have paid at the turnstiles; the people who have bought a private box, the companies that hire out their boxes; or private individuals who have hired VIP areas, everyone in their consumer ‘window’. In the second block outside the stadium are companies paying broadcasting rights for live and subsequent transmission on TV and the internet.

But the spectacle does not finish at the end of the game: the club’s in-house media, Real Madrid TV, the official web page and the various club shops go on drawing in a third wave of customers. In this last block are the sponsors. The players lend their image for the promotion of companies who have contracts with the club, such as Audi, Telefónica, Coca-Cola, adidas, Babybel, Nivea, Samsung, Bwin and Fly Emirates. And then comes the film, a climax promising to break through the final frontier. Real: The Movie, released in 2005, was the ultimate example of putting Varian’s theory into practice. At this point Real Madrid were more like Disney than Disney could ever be like Real Madrid.

More than creating new icons capable of raising the market value of the product, from 2000 Sánchez and Pérez were looking for people who were already famous, established celebrities prepared to incorporate their own mythology into the club. Before signing for Paris Saint-Germain, a Brazilian international was offered to the club, his name Ronaldinho Gaúcho. A high-ranking Madrid official, however, dismissed the idea after passing judgement on the player’s prominent teeth. Ronaldinho was – within Disney parameters – an absolute unknown and the casting was not being done by a football expert. As a result, David Beckham was the only signing of the 2003–04 season. The Englishman possessed an image that had, in the words of the president, ‘universal projection’.

Along with the sale of the land on the Avenida Castellana to build skyscrapers where the old training ground had stood – a real-estate operation that transformed Madrid’s horizons dramatically – Sánchez and Pérez’s formula helped the club make a great deal of money. In the financial year ending in 2005 Madrid became the highest-grossing club in the world. The sum of €276 million entered the Bernabéu coffers, €30 million more than that earned by Manchester United, until this point the world’s most financially powerful club. Negotiation of TV rights in 2006 concluded with an unequal distribution of funds, to the detriment of all first and second division clubs apart from Barcelona and Madrid, who were blessed with the biggest contracts in Europe.