It was the moment that the English press have been waiting for all summer. It’s rare that the arrival of one of world football’s greatest managers in Pep Guardiola can almost be overshadowed, but as one of football’s great performers, Jose Mourinho is certainly trying his best. Witty, incise and authoritative, Mourinho looked back to his best and a huge difference compared to his final days at Chelsea, where he often looked desperate, exhausted and tense when speaking to the media.
For Mourinho, the moment had been a long time coming. In Diego Torres’ ‘The Special One: The dark side to Jose Mourinho’, he claims that Mourinho was in tears when told that David Moyes had been chosen over him to replace Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013, yet today Mourinho claimed that the Old Trafford hot seat was not his ‘dream job’. He said “It is not a dream job, it is reality as Manchester United manager but it is a job everyone wants and not many have a chance to have and I have it and I know the responsibility and the expectation.”
Being the man that he is, Mourinho certainly did not hold any punches, with veiled criticisms of Arsene Wenger, saying “”There are some managers that the last time they won a title was 10 years ago. Some of them the last time they won a title was never. The last time I won a title was one year ago, not 10 years ago or 15 years ago so if I have a lot to prove, imagine the others.”
He was also surprisingly open regarding the departure of club legend Ryan Giggs, saying that Giggs wanted the manager’s role and left to get experience. However, Mourinho played down any rumoured disagreements between the pair, insisting that the door remains open to the Welshman, “The job Ryan wanted is the job the club decided to give me. If one day he wants to come back to the club while I am here I would never stop him.”
There were all of the obvious questions for Mourinho, including many of the criticisms which saw him not given the job in 2013, largely because he was criticised for his defensive style of football and his failure to bring through youth players into the first team at his previous clubs. Mourinho reacted viciously, claiming to have a list of 49 players he had brought through to the first team from the academy.
Bizarrely, he was not asked to name any on the list, but our count only calculates that to be 39 players who received their debut under Mourinho during his time at Porto, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Inter Milan. Of those, only eight made any significant impact on the first team, including the likes of Raphael Varane, Alvaro Morata, Davide Santon, and Reuben Loftus-Cheek.
Mourinho is also set to experience life without the Champions League for the first time since 2001 when he was at little known Portuguese club União de Leiria, and he admitted to being “frustrated” by that. He has plans in place though, and with his claim that they have signed three of their four top targets this summer already, preparations for a return to the top level seem to be well underway. Mourinho showed this himself, with his aim clear, “it would be easy to focus on the last three years and say ‘Let’s work and try and be back in the Champions League’ but I prefer to be more aggressive and say we want to win.”
He also explained that he felt that Wayne Rooney is no longer a “number 9” but also saying “he will never be a number 6” suggesting the end of the Englishman’s deeper midfield role seen under both Louis Van Gaal and Roy Hodgson n recent months. With the likes of Zlatan Ibrahmovic, Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford all competing for a role in the forward line, it will undoubtedly leave question marks over how Rooney will fit into a Mourinho eleven at Old Trafford.
With such plans and passion on display already, there could well be reasons to be excited for Mourinho’s debut season as a Red Devil, which will put fear into the Premier League’s other new arrivals, Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte. With Zlatan and Eric Bailly already signed up, Henrik Mkhitaryan reportedly set to be announced and rumours flying that Paul Pogba could be following in their footsteps, there are plenty of reasons for Manchester United fans to be looking forward to kick off in August.
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