Mourinho, who coaches AS Roma, has delighted and angered with his statements over the years. The Portuguese is still unbeaten in the Eurocup finals.
One the utterance was enough to raise Jose Mourinho’s on the pedestal of the English football media at the beginning of June 2004, when the Portuguese coach had accepted the position of Manager at the London club Chelsea.
Mourinho had led tiny Porto to a surprise Champions League win, and Chelsea, financed by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovitch, offered the Portuguese a place in the Premier League.
Mourinho arrived in London and Chelsea slamming the doors.
“We have top players. And I’m sorry to be a little arrogant, but we have a top manager. I am the European champion, not just any coach. I think I’m special,” Mourinho said in his first press conference.
“I think I’m a special one”, Mourinho shot at the time in a still somewhat struggling English.
The statement remained alive in English football. In the fall of 2015, Liverpool’s big coaching appointment Jurgen Klopp referred to Mourinho’s words, calling himself a completely normal coach (“I am the normal one”).
Modest Mourinho’s career as a player opened up as a coach in the early 1990s, when Bobby Robson, who arrived at Sporting Lisbon, needed an interpreter.
The Englishman was impressed by Mourinho’s coaching skills, and the two continued their successful collaboration as a coaching pair in Porto and Barcelona.
Mourinho started his first head coaching job at Benfica in 2000, but it wasn’t until the move to Porto that brought the jackpot.
Under Mourinho’s leadership, the team won the league championship, the Uefa Cup and the Champions League during two full seasons.
In Chelsea, winning the Champions League remained a dream, but the London team won the Premier League championship twice in a row under Mourinho. Chelsea’s previous and only league title was in 1955.
Mourinho showed his skill at Chelsea with his skillful and sometimes even sloppy media game, which the Portuguese aimed especially at competing coaches.
In 2005, Mourinho invited Arsenal’s French manager Arsene Wenger as a “peeper” obsessed with Chelsea.
The bickering between the two continued in 2014 during Mourinho’s second spell at Chelsea. At the time, Mourinho responded to Wenger’s comments by calling the Frenchman an “expert in failure”, a reference to the Arsenal pilot’s meager trophy haul.
In addition to Wenger, others have received their share of Mourinho’s verbal sword Rafael Benitez, Claudio Ranieri mixed Carlo Ancelotti.
Mourinho was a pioneer in football coaching in the early 2000s in changing direction and mentally coaching his team.
The Portuguese’s skills were perhaps best seen in the two Inter seasons from 2008 to 2010, when the Milanese club celebrated two Serie A championships and, after a 45-year hiatus, also won the Champions League.
“Jose Mourinho became a man I would die for. … He had the ability to make us kill for him,” the Swedish striker who played for Inter Zlatan Ibrahimovic said a little ramblingly in his book published in 2011.
Ibrahimovic, who has a strong personality, got along well with Mourinho, but the Swede was annoyed by the head coach’s stony face on the side of the field.
At Inter, though, Mourinho’s wild vents were also seen, as well as the emotional farewell of the tough-tempered top by Marco Materazzi with when Inter had won the Champions League in May 2010.
Mourinho’s departure from Inter was virtually sealed, and the pair embraced at the Santiago Bernabeu, Mourinho’s future home stadium as Real Madrid manager.
Mourinho’s over the years, coaching with defensive victories has started to be called “parking the bus”, which refers to a defense form that has fallen very low.
One of the most memorable victories of Mourinho’s career came in the semi-final of the 2010 Champions League against reigning champions and supremely skilled Barcelona, as Inter progressed to the final 3–2 on aggregate.
In their home match, Inter knocked out Pep Guardiola’s piloted by Barcelona 3–1, and in the away match the Milanese defended their own goal furiously.
“We didn’t park a bus, we parked an airplane and we did it for two reasons. One, there were ten players on the pitch (after Thiago Motta was sent off), and two, we beat them 3-1 at San Siro. Then we didn’t park the bus, the boat or the plane, we smashed them,” Mourinho said after the match.
In the 2010s, Mourinho’s coaching career waned at a steady pace, although the Portuguese celebrated league titles in Real Madrid and Chelsea, and in his first season at Manchester United, the Europa League championship in 2017.
The spells at Chelsea, United and Tottenham ended in sackings after poor results.
Repeat Mourinho, who has been leading AS Roma this season, will coach his first European game in Finland on Thursday night, when the team will face HJK in the Europa League match played in Töölö.
Mourinho is also under pressure in Roma, as the team was unarmed in Serie A on Sunday against Napoli, who played a fiery start to the season, and the playoff spot in the Europa League has not been announced in the church either.
Mourinho increased his popularity in Rome last spring, when the team won the first UEFA club competition championship in the club’s history in the Conference League.
The season included a lot of fumbling, such as a humiliating 1-6 loss to the Norwegian team Bodö/Glimt, but the championship trophy made Mourinho continue at the Stadio Olimpico.
In Serie A, Roma’s supporters expect the team and Mourinho to even win the league championship, i.e. the scudetto, which has been around the yellow-red club for 21 years. Currently, the team is satisfactorily sixth in the league.
Mourinho, who turns 60 in January, has won 26 championship trophies as head coach, 17 of which came in Porto, Chelsea and Inter from 2002 to 2010.
The peak of the Portuguese’s coaching career was already over ten years ago, but Mourinho’s Eurocup finals statistics are still unbeatable: five wins and zero losses.
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