He shoots he scores

David Runciman has a terrific essay in the London Review of Books on Patrick Barclay's biography of Jose Mourinho.

"Mourinho has no intention of being a typical manager of a typical middle-ranking club. When he arrived at Chelsea, they were a team of underachieving superstars bankrolled by the world’s most affluent thirtysomething. Mourinho insisted they could do better and, after he had spent quite a lot more of Roman Abramovich’s money, do better they did. But Barclay has mistaken cause and effect. Chelsea didn’t do better because Mourinho said they would; rather, he said they would because he knew that as an underperforming team they were very likely to improve. Mourinho, who is an intelligent as well as a ruthless man, knows that the most important thing for a football manager’s reputation is being in the right place at the right time. It’s not that he does what it says on the tin so much as that he waits until he has a pretty shrewd idea of what is in the tin, then puts his own label on it...

As Barclay points out, the thing that most obviously sets him apart from many of his peers is that he is not himself a former professional player (he tried, but failed, not even managing to be picked for the Portuguese club side his father was managing). Rather than playing the game, Mourinho studied it, first at university, and then in various coaching and other capacities at a series of clubs in Portugal and Spain, including finally as Bobby Robson’s assistant at Barcelona...

he tends to rely less on his own experiences than on a series of carefully compiled technical dossiers that break the game down into a series of controllable variables, which he then does his best to control...

In truth, it seems likely that what Mourinho learned from his years of work experience was not what to do, but what not to do. The advantage the non-player has over the ex-player is that they can trust in the hard evidence of percentage football, without the memories and fantasies of their playing days getting in the way...

Even Barclay notices that Mourinho’s special gift is the remorseless attention he pays to detail, though he treats this as though it were some kind of magic trick in itself. For example, when UEFA introduced the idiotic ‘silver goal’ rule into European club competitions – which meant that if a team was leading at the end of the first period of extra-time, the second period would be abandoned and the match end – Mourinho instructed his Porto players to adapt their tactics to this new 15-minute format. What Barclay, quoting Marcello Lippi, considers remarkable is that Mourinho didn’t express a view about whether the silver goal was a good or a bad rule, he just got on with the business of trying to extract some advantage out of it. What, you wonder, does it say about the other coaches that this value-neutral approach is taken as a sign of inspiration...

Last summer he visited Israel, and gave an address to a joint conference of Israeli and Palestinian coaches in Tel Aviv. He told his audience: ‘When I have retired, when, in 13 more years I have finished with football, I can see myself 100 per cent involved in human actions. I have always thought about problems in the Middle East and Africa, not just about football.’ Barclay suggests a role perhaps at the United Nations, since Mourinho ‘has, after all, proved he can unite dressing-rooms’.

It is all so horribly familiar. I recently heard one of Tony Blair’s closest confidants tell an audience of students about the prime minister’s plans following his retirement: he wants to make a real contribution on the international stage, to bring his talents to bear on the big humanitarian issues, ‘like Bill Clinton, only more so’. Oh the fantasies these people have about the difference they can make."