Jurgen Klopp left North America joyous. Pep Guardiola threw a barbecue for his Manchester City players despite the defeat chucked in against Liverpool. The mood at the Etihad and Anfield is conditioned by flatout, unbridled positivity. Meanwhile Jose Mourinho is stuck in a time warp of disruption and agitation. Whatever his perceived grievances at Manchester United his methods and his demeanour are hopelessly yesteryear.
Pre-season is but a fortnight old yet Mourinho’s year-three syndrome is already well established, the face he presents to the world achingly familiar. Like a child trying to emotionally blackmail parents to get the toy he can’t have, or my dog giving me the long face because he can’t have a biscuit, Mourinho is on the wrong end of the power equation. I want doesn’t get. Sulking is never persuasive.
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The age of empire is gone. The control and influence wielded by Sir Alex Ferguson, the last of the great dynasty managers, is no longer a feature of the job. Mourinho’s nemesis (real or invented), chief executive Ed Woodward, reports to the Glazers not to the great Jose. This ends only one way. With United looking for a new manager in November as the bookies’ favourite for the chop meets his inevitable end.
Value for money?
What a carry on. If Mourinho thinks he has it hard at Old Trafford he should try a tour at Hull, Burnley or Stoke. He is manager of the richest football club on earth for goodness sake, ranked second only to the Dallas Cowboys in the Forbes list of the richest sporting institutions. Of course the exaggerated ‘woe is me’ schtick is strategic, a propaganda tool designed to shape the public mood in his favour and prompt the board to acquiesce to his demands.
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And the Oscar for best sad face goes to… “I would like two more players. I don’t think I’m going to have two. I think it’s possible I’m going to have one. I gave my club a list of five names a few months ago. I wait to see if it’s possible to have one of these players.” ‘My club’ and ‘a few months ago’ are marked with asterisks. The former suggests genuine attachment, not the sentiment of a mercenary coach who loves his clubs in three-year cycles. The latter informs the world how he is doing his job and if this does go belly up you know where the fault lies.
As if. Mourinho can’t plead poverty having persuaded the same board to part with the readies in the hundreds of millions to bring in the likes of Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Eric Bailly, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Victor Lindelof, Nemanja Matic, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Alexis Sanchez, Fred and Diogo Dalot. When that spend produces a team that finishes 19 points adrift of the champions the board is entitled to wonder if they are getting value from the man spending it.
Adverse results
They must also wonder if the divisive and provocative treatment of some players is producing the required results. It was kind of Luke Shaw to speak up for his manager in the US last week, yet you wonder how much quicker he might have reached a positive relationship had Mourinho been more encouraging and less judgmental in his public observations, which Shaw admitted had been difficult to process.
Mourinho’s spiteful defenestration of Anthony Martial is borderline bullying. His peevish acceptance of the player’s decision to leave United’s tour to be at the birth of his second child and his spiteful assessment of his failure to return to participate in matches that even he says he would not attend is so obviously offensive and insulting.
All this with Real Madrid and Bayern Munich to come before Mourinho sends out a ‘team’ to face Leicester at Old Trafford next week in the opening fixture of the Premier League. The Widow Twankey-esque, pantomime dame in distress about working conditions won’t wash. While he is attributing United’s failure to make the grade in the age of Pep and Klopp a matter of playing staff, the board will start to see it, if they don’t already, as a failure of management. United don’t have the wrong players. They have the wrong bloke picking them.
More on Manchester United:
Three ways Jose Mourinho can get the most out of Paul Pogba at Manchester United
Why a player as gifted as Anthony Martial has failed at Manchester United
Manchester United fixtures: Premier League 2018/19 – in full
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