Jose Mourinho is going to be bad news for Manchester United.
Oh, I’m sure he’ll win matches. He’s widely regarded as one of the best managers in the world, speaks five languages, and knows his onions.
But in every other respect he’s going to make the most irritating football club on the planet even worse.
1. Image rights
This is a man who in 2013 sold his autograph. Not an example of his signature, but his actual autograph.
The thing he squiggles on cheques, in birthday cards, on his passport. For 10 years. Along with his face. To Roman Abramovich.
Lots of footballers do the same in deals about their image rights, but what good has the sale of image rights done for the game?
It’s made it more expensive, the stars more arrogant, and the fans a little poorer.
Someone who was good for football would try to make it less avaricious, and resist the lure of Lucifer’s lucre which has arguably made football a mor*lity vacuum.
Not Jose. He’s more than happy to make cash flogging bath sponges, toothbrushes and shin pads, to such an extent his image right negotiations held up the Man Utd deal.
And remember who insists on Mourinho novelty party hats: children all over the world who look up to him as a hero.
2. Violence
Yet this is a hero who not only gouged the eyeball of Barcelona’s assistant coach at the end of a match, not only refused to apologise and called the man a slang word for “pen*s”, but carried out the serious assault with the same calm facial expression you might wear while waiting for a bus.
The thought of that same face glaring dead-eyed at half of the world’s children from a bathroom sponge is frankly terrifying.
3. The Eva business
When a player appeared to be injured on the pitch, the referee called on Chelsea’s team doctor.
Eva Carneiro and Jose Mourinho
Jose tried to stop her, apparently thinking it more important it would mean his team had only nine functioning players left chasing the ball.
Dr Eva Carneiro and a male physio disagreed and felt it was their duty to attend a player who appeared to be in pain.
Mourinho not only seemed to clench his fist to her in front of thousands of fans, he banished them both from the bench and called them “naive”.
Her offence was to place the Hippocratic oath above a football manager’s game plan; she later resigned and her constructive dismissal tribunal is due to begin in a fortnight. She’s also suing Mourinho personally.
We await a legal decision but it’s indisputable the whole ugly incident harmed the reputation of the game and the manager.
And I shudder to think how many fans went home thinking a clenched fist was a reasonable addition to an argument.
4. Gaming the game
Rules exist to stop people doing things, often for good reason. Jose treats them not like barriers but more of a roundabout.
In 2005 he was fined £200,000, later reduced to £75,000, for tapping up Ashley Cole in a secret meeting his club should, but didn’t, know about.
Five years later he was fined £35,000 and got a one-match Champions League ban after UEFA decided he’d ordered two Real Madrid players to waste time.
Without rules, football is just 22 twats in a field.
5. Foaming madness
It’s not just football. He was arrested for – and admitted – obstructing police in 2007 when his Yorkshire terrier Leya was brought into Britain without going through quarantine.
He set the dog loose in his garden so animal welfare officials couldn’t seize it, and later accepted a police caution and sent the animal back to Portugal.
He didn’t seem to be too bothered he’d potentially exposed the entire British Isles to rabies.
6. Dress sense
It may seem minor, and there’s many a booby middle-aged man that can’t be separated from a polo shirt, but football has enough problems with its image.
There’s a lot of sweatsuits, worryingly eccentric hairdos and the usual wardrobe madness caused by combining young men, vaguely p*rnographic girlfriends and £100,000 a week.
But a grown man of 53 with a stable home life who walks out the front door thinking he’s a god among men because he’s flicked his collar up needs taking outside for a stern word.
Football – and Manchester, from what I’ve seen – already does awful things to clothes. We don’t need this forced on our eyes too.
7. Incredibly uncomfortable things
Everything about Mourinho makes me uncomfortable. The death threats from fans received by referees he argues with; his inability to accept criticism; the arrogance. That clenched fist.
He is the Special One in the same way as the devil himself – almost everything he does destroys the already-shaky integrity of football, and because he can win the fans who should be angry aren’t.
But The Beautiful Game is supposed to be about more than just winning. It’s about your tribe.
UEFA’s referre chief Volker Roth called him an “enemy of football” and he was right. Man Utd are paying Mourinho £12m a year to make them, and the game, a little worse.
How many cups do you need to win to make that acceptable?
Written by Susie Boniface/Mirror UK
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