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There was an early moment of excitement at the start of Thursday night’s meeting of Rangers and the José Mourinho industrial entertainment complex (Fenerbahce branch). As the players lined up on the Ibrox pitch Mourinho was caught by the TV cameras leaning forward on his bench, rubbing his hands, looking up to salute the watching world because of course being watched is always the game.
The most significant part of this tableau was Mourinho’s coat, which was ludicrous. This was a statement coat, a coat that looked as if it was given to him by the emperor of Sylvia with a ruby in each pocket. The key detail was its colour, a shade of grey so unnatural its only function is to tell you this garment cost as much as a tenement house, the whole thing finished in a weirdly natureless luxury fur, like a dictator’s dressing gown. Frankly, the coat was a brilliantly played opening gambit, a one-goal start on the night.
As it turned out, this wasn’t enough by the end. But then, that mastery of optics has always really been about the more important business of the Mourinho Identity, insulating the being at its centre from the vicissitudes of actual results. Penalty shootouts come and go. The one-man regiment marches on.
This quality has always been there, from early José, so smoulderingly handsome he would probably need to be pixelated now or accompanied by a trigger warning. It was there in my own favourite Age of Mourinho, the sloppy, tracksuited, mid-career version, a little sallow and overweight, standing on his touchline looking like a drug lord woken at four in the morning to be told his favourite rottweiler has been shot.
It’s there in the current lordly, supra-football version. He looks good now, slim and fit, with his £200 haircut and elite knitwear, like some vigorous shah in exile running a puppet regime from his yacht. And of course Mourinho is still unignorable. At the start of the TNT Sports broadcast he appeared on a chair in the Rangers trophy room, prepping his own journey through the evening with some stuff about “the impossible job of trying to take a Turkish team to a final”.
Nobody questioned these statements, but then this is of course just Mourinho doing Mourinho. Perhaps the best way of understanding his career is to see it as following the same arc as a great American novelist: early success, luminous celebrity, then a sense of being fixed, trapped in his own identity. The past two decades have been his Hemingway years, spent going around being yourself, too big for the stage, a portable human fame-event.
There were two problems with this at Ibrox. First, Fenerbahce are a poor team full of grizzled, disappointed players, like henchmen in a cowboy movie whose only role is to hang around for a bit and then die clutching their chests in the final shootout.
The second problem was that Ibrox is a powerful place on nights like these, and in the wrong kind of way for Mourinho, who couldn’t really find anything to dislike or undermine, who looked as if he was kind of enjoying it even during the losing penalty shootout, who would probably quite like all this energy, this real-ness for himself.
The OK-you-can-have-this-one face was in place even before Jack Butland produced those brilliant adrenal saves to win the tie. Mourinho exited in benevolent-loser mode, waving to the crowd, taking the returning wave of applause. He’s 62 now, with a year to go on his contract in Turkey. Are we actually going to see him again on these shores?
There is a sense of circularity to this question. It is now 20 years since his coronational first season in England, founding José, still reigning champion of Europe and en route to a league title with 15 goals conceded. This same week in 2005 Chelsea were going 3-0 up against Barcelona, a flipchart of wild images, the Ronaldinho sex-shuffle goal, the Terry-Lampard ascent, a version of football that seemed a volcanic, oddly untamed place.
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Twenty years on Mourinho looks happy. Going to Turkey makes sense, a place where he can still be mini-master of his own domain. At this late stage there are two things worth saying. First, something interesting has happened in the past few years with Mourinho and the idea of legacy. There is a sense history is already being kind to him, for one thing in his current second life as an avatar of internet football authenticity.
Here’s an interesting development. Young people really like Mourinho. It turns out his power is transferable. He is deemed to have that vital quality: aura. What is aura? It is energy, presence, a way of speaking, standing. So Mourinho has become a meme factory. Let us count them down, the hits, the canon. Wink. Shushing gesture. Knee-slide. If I speak I am in trouble. These are his Sergeant Pepper, his Like A Virgin, his You’re Beautiful.
This is not by chance. It turns out Mourinho was right all along about some things. As sporting jeopardy recedes, as the game becomes more fixed as a product, it turns out performance really is key, that this is an industry of personality, theatre, big fat wet moreish storylines.
Mourinho pre-imagined this world. He got there first. He was always perfect for the internet, for clips and soundbites. So he remains fixed in football’s hive-mind, an industry character, evil sexy truth-bomb football boss-uncle, the Beatles and the Stones of the football banter-clip. Mourinho is a button you always want to press, a square of light in the middle of all this junk and static.
It raises some interesting ideas about legacy. For years it seemed Mourinho would be remembered as a static figure, an example of entropy and declining returns. The wrestle with Pep Guardiola was settled years ago. Guardiola has tactics, influence and the relentless trophy haul, vindication for the Barcelona marketing machine that always cast his teams as the Ewoks in this dynamic, hand-woven hemp-football against the machine.
Pep was flair, human stuff; José cynicism, fingers in the eye, the overclass. But who exactly is good and who’s bad these days? Which one do the kids like? Which one is the generational treasure? Mourinho is fun, a speaker of truths, a relief from patterns and orthodoxies. Mourinho has that undimmed presence. Maybe – as he, José, always suspected – really is the Main Character.
The idea of Mourinho as a tactical dud was always overstated. The Champions League wins with Porto and Inter are elite achievements, distinct from Pep’s peak moments because these are underdog triumphs at that level, acts of will. When Mourinho came to the Premier League, English football was still fixated on straight lines. His 4-2-3-1 was revolutionary in its own way, as was his attention to detail, the culture stuff. Guardiola retains his tactical influence. Mourinho perfected the other half of the modern game, the weaponising of stage-management and personality.
It isn’t hard to see why his enduring fascination may be bound up with a nostalgia for that more vivid, less orderly footballing landscape. At a time when an architect’s conceptual stadium plan is considered an entertainment event, the Mourinho years look pretty wild and funny right now. This is a man who smuggled his dog over the back wall of his house inside a rucksack because the police were at the front door talking vaccinations. Tell me again about your latest arm’s-length feud with Something Jamie Carragher Said.
Is this thing done now? Could he still manage one more lap in English football? The reality is Mourinho was never really suited to modern club structures, to working under an executive. He is in many ways the last of football’s old-great-man-of-history template.
It still seems a little odd that he was once seen as football’s greatest villain, a lone force of toxic energy, even as nation states, bad actors and hedge funds quietly bought up the space. But then it is also an interesting turn that in an age of managed content and top-down control he feels now like a voice of dissent, a defiantly human element: flawed and maniacally self-serving, but essentially unbroken.
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