Jose says he's England bound, but when? Only he knows.
Judging from recent reports, Jose Mourinho has signalled to the world of football that his next job will be in England. He wants to return to the country that he feels is special, the country that he says feels like home. It’s a great thing to hear, he was an absolutely fantastic character to have in the English game, and he’ll be welcomed back by fans and the media with open arms. But the way the media have been going on about it, they make it seem as though his return is imminent, something I don’t agree with.
For a start, the man’s only 48 years old, for a football manager, especially one that has achieved what Mourinho has, he is unbelievably young. If he wants to he could quite easily go on for at least another 20 years, he’s got a long time left in football, so rushing back into the Premier League this soon probably wouldn’t be the best idea. I say this because Jose Mourinho doesn’t seem like the kind of manager that will stick around for years on end at one club, like Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger have done.
Whenever Jose Mourinho has managed a club he doesn’t tend to stick around for too long, he’ll build one team, win a lot of trophies, and then instead of re-building a new team at his current club, will move on somewhere else for a different challenge, it always seems as if he’s looking out for a better job. Porto was where he made his name, rather unbelievably managing to win the Champions League at the Portuguese side, he then moved on, upgrading to Chelsea where Abramovich was waiting for him with bags of money to spend. He left Chelsea in rather acrimonious circumstances, eventually landing in the Inter Milan hot seat, and once he’d won everything he could at Inter, he moved onto one of the biggest, definitely most challenging jobs in football, Real Madrid.
The main reason I think he won’t be coming back to England so soon is that Mourinho has always won a major honour at every club he’s been at since he was Porto manager. There’s no chance that he’ll walk away from Madrid without any trophies to his name, the only way this will happen is if he gets sacked by the rather ruthless Real Madrid board, and from their previous record, I wouldn’t put it past them. I’m just hoping that the Real Madrid president can see that if Mourinho can’t win anything at Real Madrid, then nobody can.
This is no doubt Mourinho’s biggest task as a manager in his career, he’s got to try and keep the Madrid fans happy, they like winning but they want to do it playing free-flowing football, something Mourinho isn’t too bothered about, he just wants to win. He also has the task of beating, what a lot of people are calling the best club team to have ever played football, in order to win anything at all this year. It’s predictably a two horse race between Real Madrid and Barcelona this season for the Primera Liga title, they’ll face each other in the final of the Copa Del Rey and the chances are Madrid will have to go through Barca if they want to reach the final of the Champions League.
So basically, Mourinho has it all to do this season, and you couldn’t blame him one bit if he was to come away with nothing at the end of the season. This might not be the view of the Madrid board though, at the point at which they appointed Mourinho in May of last year, Madrid have had 11 different managers in the past 7 years. This stat might come as a bit of an eye-opener to any doubters he has, so far in 44 games in charge of Real Madrid, Jose Mourinho has won 77% of them, and this is more than any manager in Real Madrid’s history, phenomenal. I hope he gets given the chance to see out his four year contract at Madrid, because I want to see this man succeed in what might be one of his toughest jobs he’ll ever have in management. It’d be beautiful to see a man walk away from Madrid for a change, instead of getting the sack.
But what if Mourinho and Real Madrid did part ways at the end of this season? Realistically where is there for him to go? At this point in time Manchester United and Arsenal can be ruled out, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger seem to be untouchable. Tottenham would be interested in his services, but it seems like Harry Redknapp will be in charge for another season and then move onto the England job in 2012 once Fabio Capello has seen out his contract. So ideally if Tottenham want him, the best case scenario for them would be that he stayed on for one more year at Real Madrid and then parted ways, Tottenham would be a very good challenge for Mourinho, probably the manager that could take them to the next level.
That leaves us with Chelsea and Manchester City. Chelsea were a lot of people’s tip to win the league this year, on paper they look to be the strongest in the league, and after their strong start to the season, it seemed as though they would run away with it. The short of it is that Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea have underperformed this season, they still have a chance of winning the title this season, but it’s an outside chance, Chelsea should not be this far back with 9 games of the season left to go. This will mean that Ancelotti’s job is far from safe this year, so it could open the door for the much awaited return of ‘The Special One’ to Chelsea Football Club.
The one problem with this return is how Roman Abramovich feels about Mourinho, it’s well known that Mourinho and Abramovich had a falling out which led to Mourinho’s departure back in 2007. Abramovich seems like a very stubborn man, and if he sticks to his stubborn ways, he may not want Mourinho back and could go for Guus Hiddink instead, a man who did a very good job for Abramovich on a short term contract in 2009, losing only one of the 22 games he was in charge.
After seeing them perform this season, the Chelsea squad clearly needs a re-shuffle, and it would be fitting if the man who performed the first ‘re-shuffle’ of the Abramovich era, were to come back and sort the squad out for a second time. If you look at Chelsea’s current squad now, you’ll notice that at its core, this is still very much Mourinho’s team, Drogba, Essien, Lampard, Malouda, Terry, Cole and Cech all remain from the Mourinho era, not much has changed since Mourinho left, for a little while that would have been considered a good thing, but it does seem like there needs to be a bit of a shake up at Stamford Bridge.
As for Manchester City, Roberto Mancini hasn’t exactly set the world alight since becoming the Manchester City boss back in December 2009. Personally he frustrates me with his tactics, playing three defensive minded central midfielders is just plain stupid. He does this despite having the choice of a more attacking, logical squad selection. Nigel De Jong holding, with Yaya Toure and James Milner sitting in front of him, it was in the middle of the park that Milner blossomed for Aston Villa, so his decision to play him out wide when he’s got the likes of David Silva and Adam Johnson in his team is beyond me.
Mancini has made progress with City, but it’s been very slow, when Mark Hughes was sacked, City were sitting in 6th place in the table, they ended up finishing 5th last year, missing out on the final Champions League spot to Tottenham. They now sit 4th in the league, if Tottenham win their game in hand there’ll be 1 point between the two teams, so they’re by no-means guaranteed to finish in the top four. With the amount of money that was injected into Manchester City in the summer, you would have expected them to have been challenging closer to the top of the league, but whilst Mancini’s in charge, deploying negative tactics against the top teams, the game at The Emirates that finished 0-0 this season is a perfect example, Manchester City will never challenge for top spot.
This is where Jose comes in, Chelsea were in a similar situation when Mourinho waltzed into Stamford Bridge. They were a good team, but they weren’t complete, Mourinho made a few excellent signings, got the correct tactics on the white board and managed to win title after title with Chelsea for the three years he was at the club. Manchester City will always struggle to sign the top players until they win something, with Jose Mourinho in charge, the lure of playing under such a great manager could help them make the world class signings they need to push on and upset the other half of Manchester. I think Mourinho would be the perfect manager for Manchester City at this point in time, but I think he’ll always favour going back to Chelsea, that is if the door is open for his return.
There have always been rumours that Mourinho would finally be the man to take over from Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, and to be honest, if he stays on at Madrid for a couple more seasons, this looks to be like a very good shout. Sir Alex can’t go on forever, there’s only so much longer he’ll be able to go on for, and with the CV that Mourinho’s got, I’m pretty sure he’ll love to add Manchester United to the list of clubs he’s managed. The only issue with this is that unlike City and Chelsea, Manchester United haven’t got money to be throwing around carelessly, and if Jose wants to build his own squad, it’ll be unlikely that he’ll be able to do it as quickly as he’d be able to at the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea.
Whichever club he ends up choosing, it will definitely not be his final resting place, Mourinho has vowed to one day take control of his native country, Portugal. A country that has underachieved for many years now, Mourinho could be the missing piece of the puzzle to push them on to gain European and maybe even World glory. After all, when you look back at recent tournaments, the influence of a good manager on a fairly good international team can make a massive difference, just look at what Guus Hiddink did for Russia in Euro 2008.
Part of me wants to see him back in England, he was a breath of fresh air, managers who tell it how it is are always the most entertaining, a less insane version of Ian Holloway if you will. The press conferences are always eventful and he’s an absolute dream for the media. The other part of me realises that if Mourinho comes back, he’s likely to be his ever dominant self in terms of winning trophies, trophies that I would very much like to be in the Arsenal trophy cabinet, and not in the arms of Jose Mourinho. Although he has been out of the country for nearly four years now and we haven’t done much since he’s left, so that’s probably not a good excuse.
Video Courtesy of ITN Sport
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