Should the Jose Mourinho-Factor Make Manchester United Favourites for the Title?

Associated Press
Jose Mourinho after being informed he's expected to deliver trophies immediately at Old Trafford.

"I'm not going to hide behind three bad seasons, three bad championships, behind two seasons not even with the fourth place finish. I'm not going to hide behind that, I'm not going to hide also in that fourth is the target and everything better than that is amazing for us. No, I want to win the title."
On Thursday evening Jose Mourinho gave his first interview with the British press from the team's hotel in Shanghai, relayed here via the Guardian. As ever in his honeymoon period at a new club he was in ebullient form.
In a wide-ranging interrogation, amongst other topics, he held court on what Zlatan Ibrahimovic will bring to the party (an amazing body, apparently), Juan Mata's future (he has one, perhaps), Wayne Rooney's captaincy (not in question), his short-terms aims for himself (convincing the club's owners he's the right guy for the job), and long-term aims for the club (trophies, plenty of them).

On being appointed Porto manager in January 2002 he declared: "Next season we will be champions." He stopped short of making such a bold promise, but only just.


David Moyes' first dealings with the media were littered with references to "hope." As if cowed by his new surrounds the "Chosen One" less hit the ground running, than never really hit it at all. It was no real surprise when he lasted just nine months into a six-year contract. He should have been suspicious when executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward asked him to sign it in pencil. Especially given it was one of those with a rubber on top.


Louis Van Gaal was the Alpha male supporters were always going to warm to after dithering Dave. The Dutchman could always talk the talk, and to be fair his team could walk the walk, usually during matches, which didn't always make for the most entertaining of spectacles.


It's hard to get used to Mourinho in red, but then the devil always did have all the best lines. Like Miles Davis he has nearly always been in one kind of blue or another, whether at Porto, Chelsea or Inter Milan. The pure white of Real Madrid never quite suited him.


There was nothing blue about his mood. In China's most populous city it seems there was only one man everyone wanted to listen to. Mourinho presents himself as infallible, a short man who has the presence of a giant, and the rare gift of being able to hold a room just by being in it. With a punchy rhetoric he delivered a clear message.


Manchester United may have finished seventh, fourth and fifth since Sir Alex Ferguson bid farewell to the dugout with a 13th Premier League title – the club's 20th in total – but Mourinho has every intention of replicating what he did at Porto, Chelsea and Inter: winning the title in his first season.


David Beckham backs Manchester United to return to their former glories under Jose Mourinho. pic.twitter.com/08puFxByza


— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) July 21, 2016


After eight league titles in four different countries, along with two UEFA Champions Leagues, a UEFA Cup and a smattering of the domestic variety, his ambition of being one of the world's finest tacticians has been fulfilled. He needs to reaffirm that fact on the back of the worse season in his professional career by some distance.


His critics will point out that in eight seasons after taking the Porto job he won six titles. Since 2010, when he took the reins at Real Madrid, just two more have followed.


As Jonathan Wilson points out in his superb essay The Devil and Jose Mourinho (a Blizzard piece republished by the Guardian), few managers last more than a decade at the top. Methodologies become tired. It's hard to stay relevant when a new wave of manager auteurs are directing their sides in entirely different ways to their forefathers.


The Premier League will be full of them next season: Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino, Antonio Conte and Jurgen Klopp will each have sides in their own image. Mourinho must ensure he doesn't look like the old dog in a pen of puppies, as Arsene Wenger has at times, in demonstrating a stubborn unwillingness to adapt principles he presumably chiseled into great stone tablets at the start of his career.


If he can add a ninth league title to his resume with Manchester United, it may be his greatest achievement yet. After three seasons in which the football on the red side of Manchester has matched the weather, grey and drizzly with the (very) odd sunny spell, a Lowry painting brought to life; Mourinho and United have converged in circumstances neither would have anticipated.


The British playwright Sir David Hare once wrote, "Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides." Only a fool would argue either Manchester United or Mourinho are ever overawed in times of prosperity, now they must prove they possess a high tide even in periods of adversity.


— Sky Sports News HQ (@SkySportsNewsHQ)July 21, 2016


Like a pair of down on their luck recent divorcees, the pair have walked down the aisle over the summer with concerned parents Sir Alex and Sir Bobby Charlton in the wings muttering, "it'll never last, they're not right for one another" to anyone in earshot. It's like Cheshire royalty marrying a kid from a council estate.


This has been no shotgun wedding though. It has always been the job Mourinho has wanted. Other than leave his calling card in Manchester phone boxes (which he may well have done when Chelsea were in town), he couldn't have done much more to land a role he has coveted since dancing down the Old Trafford touchline to Ferguson's ire back in 2004.


Porto and their cocksure young manager introduced themselves to the watching world by knocking United out of the Champions League, and ever since, there has always been a grudging respect, a fascination even, between Mourinho and many of the club's supporters.


"I have the feeling – of course not everyone, I guess – that the majority of the supporters they trust me, they believe that I can help the club," he said, per the Guardian.


"I'm not saying they didn't want Mr Van Gaal, I'm saying that since I arrived I feel that they are very fine with me and my way of leading and my way of work."


That's not to say his appointment has been universally approved. There are many supporters concerned a manager not exactly known for either attacking football or nurturing young talent, will compromise the club's identity.


"People talk about style and flair but what is that? Sometimes I ask myself about the future, and maybe the future of football is a beautiful green grass carpet without goals, where the team with more ball possession wins the game."


— Manchester United (@ManUtd)July 15, 2016


It's fair to say the above quote, via the Guardian, would not have sat well with either Sir Matt Busby or Sir Alex.


Ever the pragmatist he'd argue what use is identity when you have no direction.


It has taken United's board 12 years to return solicitous glances in their direction. It's clearly not just a smattering of supporters who have their doubts. Mourinho must ensure third-season syndrome does not afflict him once again, if he is to silence his detractors completely. He has to get that far first.
"I never thought about it really," Mourinho replied unconvincingly, when asked by one journalist if Old Trafford had always been his calling, before another complained of being caught in the eye by the Portuguese's Pinocchio-engorged proboscis.

He quickly warmed to the question, per the Telegraph:
I always had that good feeling, for sure, and I think the fans feel the same.
I remember playing at Old Trafford and the way to the dugout was always nice. It was never like in other stadiums. There was always a connection.
Then can you end up being their manager one day or not? I always felt that what has to happen happens and it happened so...
It's not hard to imagine him sat at home sulking in the final few months of last season. Wearing Chelsea shorts with Gaffa tape stuck over the club's badge, he'd make a terrible patient with a notepad in his hand. He'd roll his eyes in unison with Manchester United supporters every time his one-time mentor would pollinate proceedings with a dollop of inertia, or splash of sloth.
A theatre of dreams where the audience hasn't bothered rushing back to their seats for the curtain going up since Ferguson swapped his spot in the dugout for one in the gantries.

In his pad he'd write down the names of those he would need. Blaise Matuidi perhaps, or Cesc Fabregas. Then he'd remember what his predecessors had forgot. This is Manchester United. Striking a line through the names of both, he'd add another: Paul Pogba.
If he's going to have to deal with Mino Raiola, it might be worth mentioning Ibrahimovic too. Two Galacticos for the price of two (or three or four, depending on how you value Pogba) isn't an opportunity to be sniffed at, after all.

If Ferguson and Raiola were like oil and water, Mourinho and the super (rich) agent are more oil and oil.

Righting Van Gaal's wrongs is not a new thing for Mourinho. As a precocious "third assistant" to the Dutchman at Barcelona back in 1997, he would often question his boss's methodologies, according to Luis Lourenco's excellent biography Jose Mourinho. He was just 34 at the time.
"During the day I would work at Nou Camp, the serious and faithful assistant I had always been.

"At home I was far more critical, often thinking about how Van Gaal had taken this one off and put that one on, whereas I would have done this or that."
Van Gaal, per the Guardian, paints a slightly different picture to the scholarly, deferential version Mourinho presents of himself:
An arrogant young man, who didn't respect authority that much, but I did like that of him.

He was not submissive, used to contradict me when he thought I was in the wrong.

Finally I wanted to hear what he had to say and ended up listening to him more than the rest of my assistants.
In Lisbon Mourinho had worked as a physical education teacher; in Barcelona he was the perfect pupil. A human sponge capable of not just taking it all in, but discarding elements he regarded as superfluous or counter-intuitive to his own developing mind as a coach in his own right.


From Sir Bobby Robson, who had brought him to Barcelona from Sporting Lisbon after finding him a useful translator with a surprising understanding of tactics, he learned how to manage players as people.


Robson was a coach who always loved the pitch more than planning. His successor Van Gaal was the opposite, a thinker who planned his training sessions with meticulousness bordering on obsessive. Robson focused the majority of his attention on attack, Van Gaal on defence.


— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk)July 21, 2016


It didn't take Mourinho long to realise if he could marry the qualities of both men he would have a prototype of the near perfect coach. Maybe it was possible to be liked (Robson) and feared (Van Gaal), to be hands on (Robson), but capable of stepping back and seeing the bigger picture (Van Gaal). In terms of the importance of defence over attack though, he was always in camp Van Gaal.


As Van Gaal will testify though, being inflexible to the wishes of Manchester United supporters isn't always great for job prospects. Having an iron first is fine, but sometimes it's better to disguise it in a velvet glove.


The swift and tidy acquisitions of Ibrahimovic, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Eric Bailly has demonstrated Woodward may finally have worked out corporate sponsors look great emblazoned across private jets, but aren't so hot at stopping or scoring goals.


Mourinho has effusively thanked Woodward for getting the players he wanted in quickly; aware it's best to sleep with one eye open when dealing with money-men. Unlike his predecessor, he also understands the importance the club places on commercial tie-ins with international partners. Mourinho won't be caught yawning at coma-inducing corporate events.


Woodward has stayed behind from the club's preseason tour of China to negotiate a world record deal for Juventus demigod Pogba, happy in the knowledge Mourinho will smile in all the right photographs, shake all the right hands, and ooze charisma whether he has to engage in small talk with CEOs with deep pockets.


Mourinho is no-one's puppet, but appreciates certain strings have to be pulled if you want to spend £100 million on a single player.


For his part, Pogba looks anything but concerned at all the speculation. He has spent the week playing basketball with Romelu Lukaku in America. If he doesn't get a move to United, he may end up at the LA Lakers going off the footage of his hoop skills.

But did he ball like LeBron?


After failed flirtations with Neymar, Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo since replacing David Gill, there's a sense Pogba is the one Woodward knows he has to land. From hero to zero would be Woodward's epitaph if he pulls off the biggest deal of his career.


A purported £100 million fee may seem outrageous, but in terms of marketability, commercial appeal, merchandise opportunities, age (23), ability, and most importantly, what he'd bring to a pedestrian United midfield, he seems the line of best fit.


From Mourinho's perspective, Pogba's capture would further distance the club's present climate from Ferguson's glorious, but perhaps now stifling legacy. The Scot is unlikely to be beating the drum for the £100 million return of a player who left the club for a nominal fee under his tenure back in 2012. Bringing Paul Scholes out of retirement at 38, ahead of promoting Pogba from the club's youth ranks, was not his finest hour.


Jose Mourinho confirms there’s a fire behind the Paul Pogba smoke 🔥 pic.twitter.com/zCBK8WIIfZ


— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) July 22, 2016


With the best goalkeeper in the league in David De Gea, and Bailly likely to forge a new partnership with Chris Smalling at centre-half, when coupled with return of Luke Shaw, United's back four should be in the best state it has been in for some time.


At the other end of the pitch, United have an embarrassment of riches. There was plenty to work with already in the shape of Rooney, Antony Martial and Marcus Rashford. Add into the equation the direct dynamism provided by Mkhitaryan and Ibrahimovic's obvious goal threat (he's taken Martial's No. 9 shirt, read into that what you will), and it's hard to think of another Premier League attack with such bounteous options.


The £100 million question in the centre of the pitch could define United's season. Pogba's signature, along with Mourinho's, should make Manchester United favourites for the Premier League title.


Without it, it may be a whole different ball game.