DURING the long months Jorge Mendes spent attempting to convince Manchester United to employ Jose Mourinho the agent's sales pitch included the following arguments.
First, Manchester United were being offered an almost unique opportunity to hire football's most successful manager minus the complications and cost of extracting that manager from another club. Second, Manchester United would be hiring football's most successful manager at a time at which that manager felt he had a point to prove.
Mourinho wanted to prove that Chelsea were wrong to sack him. That Roman Abramovich – whom Mourinho yesterday pointedly described as “never my friend” – had made a huge mistake in first undermining and then ultimately dismissing the coach who delivered three of the Russian's four Premier League titles.
It is one reason why Mourinho's return to Chelsea on Sunday afternoon is a fixture of such importance to the Portuguese. As in March 2010 when he took a seat in Stamford Bridge's away dugout for the first time before guiding Internazionale to a 1-0 victory that paved a path to the Champions League trophy (and exposed a fault line between Abramovich and Carlo Ancelotti which would end with another Russian sacking), Mourinho's focus is at its most intense.
If Manchester United stand to be the beneficiaries of Chelsea's mishandling of Mourinho, there are also lessons for them to learn from it. An accumulator of titles in every league in which he's operated, the 53-year-old is a demanding man to work with.
Where past employers have gone awry – Chelsea, Real Madrid and Benfica – is in failing to grasp that Mourinho's demands are concentrated on one goal: optimising the conditions for his club to win.
No football manager gets everything right, and Mourinho is no exception. Yet if United are to extract the very best of his immense talents they need to avoid replicating these Chelsea errors:
Trust his judgement in the transfer market
Such was Mourinho's personal desire to return as Chelsea manager in 2013 that he made compromises to secure the position, agreeing to further two Abramovich goals: Promotion of Chelsea's hyperexpensively developed academy players and the adoption of a possession-centred attacking style. Mourinho was also restricted in the transfer market, with his initial recommendation that prize Abramovich purchases Juan Mata and David Luiz be sold to generate funds to sign players more important to his tactical plans not immediately acted upon.
By 2014 the club had got on board with Mourinho, raising record transfer fees for the Spanish playmaker and Brazilian defender and using some of the income to sign Nemanja Matic, Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa. All three manager's choices were central to Chelsea's Premier League title success in a team that delivered several months of dominant, highly entertaining attacking football.
Then the self-destructive trident of Abramovich, executive director Marina Granovskaia and technical director Michael Emenalo reverted to type. Well before the title campaign concluded, Mourinho presented a recruitment strategy prioritising the need to sign a quick, ball playing centre back capable of both leading and transforming a defence which had become incapable of combating stronger opponents with anything other than a low block.
To retain the title and make a proper assault on the Champions League, Chelsea required the new central defender and a quality left back.
With an economy-minded Granovskaia leading negotiations while following Emenalo's advice on targets, the club waited until the season had kicked off before providing Mourinho with Baba Rahman, Papy Djilobodji and Michael Hector. By mid-December, a defensively fragile Chelsea had lost nine of 16 League games and Mourinho was sacked.
Let the manager assess the quality of your academy players
In the 13 years since Abramovich bought Chelsea, he has spent more money on its academy than any other football club. Globally. As yet, that unprecedented, more than decade-long, investment in youth footballers has failed to deliver a single regular starter to the first team.
This despite the Russian instructing every one of his 11 managerial appointments to prioritise the promotion of youth. The logical conclusion would be that the problem lies in Chelsea's academy, not every single one of the club's managers.
Abramovich, it appears, has issues with logic. The billionaire's obsession is not an unusual one. Football fans countrywide take a special interest and pride in the development of homegrown footballers.
There is a constant incentive for managers to satisfy those desires, yet the Premier League has become a environment into which fewer and fewer academy players have graduated.
The best managers are generally the best judges of whether and how an academy player should be introduced to first-team football. They don't promote for the sake of it, and realise that the youth ranks are just one of the options for sourcing players to improve the club's chances of winning titles.
If your aim is to win titles and you believe you've appointed the best manager to achieve that aim. Maybe it's a good idea to trust your manager's opinion of those academy graduates.
Do not place commercial income ahead of sporting success
Chelsea were presented with the 2014-15 Premier League trophy after their final fixture on May 24. Their players, though, were not granted an immediate holiday. In search of additional commercial income, the club sent them to Thailand and Australia on a post-season tour that required over 21,000 miles and 46 hours of flying time.
Constrained by the shallowness of his squad, Mourinho had rotated his first team far less than normal. His players were exhausted, and many angered by what they considered a wholly unnecessary trip. Sympathetic to their complaints, Mourinho elected to push back the start of pre-season training for Chelsea's campaign to compensate for lost recovery time.
It proved to be a mistake on his part.
Mourinho justifiably prides himself on the quality of his physical and technical preparation, his players consistently ranking amongst the fittest and least injured in their divisions. The last start to Chelsea's 2015-16 campaign cost him that edge, multiple Premier League points, and ultimately contributed to him losing his job.
The initial error, however, was Chelsea's.
The club's pursuit of a few million pounds of extra commercial cost them tens of millions in paying off Mourinho and his technical team, tens of millions of Champions League revenue, and provoked a poorly planned, poorly executed spend of over £100million on new players, the majority of whom were not the preferred choices of new manager, Antonio Conte.
Do not value support staff over the manager
Another compromise Mourinho made in his return to Chelsea was the acceptance of Christophe Lollichon as part of his technical team. The Frenchman remained as goalkeeping coach despite Mourinho's disquiet with his unconventional methods, a suspicion that Lollichon was reporting dressing-room information to Granovskaia and Abramovich, and Thibaut Courtois blaming Lollichon for a training-ground injury.
Chelsea value Lollichon's presence so highly that when Courtois informed the incoming Conte that he would rather leave Stamford Bridge than continue to work under Lollichon's supervision, the club simply moved the Frenchman aside, creating a new position for him as 'Head of Goalkeeping Department'.
A far more damaging problem was Chelsea's failure to rapidly deal with the conflict that emerged between Mourinho and Eva Carneiro at the beginning of last season when the first-team doctor ignored her manager's instructions not to run onto the field and treat a grounded Chelsea player.
Participants in this conflict are legally prevented from discussing its detail and background. Much of it, including the exact quantum of the seven-figure settlement Carneiro extracted from the club, has gone unreported.
What is clear is that Mourinho's status and ability to act as the club's leader was undermined by Chelsea's handling of their first-team doctor. Some believe that may not be unconnected to Carneiro's relationship with Granovskaia, the individual who first promoted her to first-team duties.
Beware the counsel of players
As the wheels tumbled off Mourinho's final campaign at Stamford Bridge, Abramovich took a familiar tack and began asking players if the manager needed to be replaced. Before long Mourinho fielded a phone call from a friend informing him that one individual he'd trusted closely was counselling the Russian billionaire that the first team wanted the Portuguese gone.
Footballers using the manager as an excuse for their under-performance is a dysfunction of the Abramovich regime that regularly repeats itself. When Mourinho discussed his job security with the media following a controversial 3-1 loss to Southampton he referenced the club's great Achilles heel.
“This is a crucial moment in the history of this club,” Mourinho said. “Do you know why? Because if the club sack me they sack the best manager this club ever had. And the message again is that if there are bad results, the manager is guilty.
"This is the message people have got over the last decade from Chelsea so this is a moment when people assume responsibilities, including me, the players and other people in the club. We need to stick together. This is what I want.
“I have no signs that anything changes. But you know the history of this club: every time the results are not good, there has been a change of manager. The power is always, in the end, with the owner and the board.
"But when I was contacted to come back, I was told: ‘We had so many managers, and we know you are the best.’ So I think it’s time for the club to act in a different way, to mark a position of stability, a position of trust.”