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Rafael Benitez

Jesse Pinkman

by Jesse Pinkman
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TRon

TRon

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“I manage big clubs, but I always find them in very similar situations. . . I get the giants, but the giants are difficult when they are in trouble.”

 

Jose Mourinho has a knack for perception-changing statements. A fortnight ago, just after his current giant extended their impressive Premier League opening, came some words that made you reconsider the challenges of his past three appointments: Real Madrid, Chelsea, Manchester United. One major reconstruction job after another.

 

When we sit down to talk football at Carrington, the first question selects itself. “Just how much trouble were Manchester United in when you arrived here?”

 

Mourinho starts his reply slowly, picking his words deliberately. He won’t stop speaking for another 10 minutes. “Well,” he says. “The story was very rich. And that story had — an end. Then was the beginning of a period that hurts more because of the past. It was the weight of the past on the shoulders of everybody. Players, managers, everybody in the club. Even boards, even probably owners, because when you are used to win and win and win, and suddenly you stop, it’s like a heavy burden. But there is always a reason behind that. And for me the easiest way to look at it is just to say the best manager of the history of the Premier League is gone. It’s the simplest way to analyse it, and it’s much more deep than that.”

 

By their current manager’s analysis, Manchester United lost Sir Alex Ferguson, lost the habit of winning and lost the infrastructure that supports a winning team. “There was an evolution in the other clubs; there was no evolution in this club. In all the areas that make a team successful I think we stopped in time. When I say ‘the club’, I say the football team and what surrounds the football team was in trouble, big trouble. Not the club at all. Because the club is much more than results — it’s the fanbase, it’s the passion around the world, it’s the business, it’s the commercial, it’s the merchandising. And a club like Manchester United as a club can be one, two, three, four, five, 10 years without winning, Manchester United will always be Manchester United and as a club will never be in trouble.

 

“The football team I think clearly there was an evolution in other clubs, and that was quite an empty period in this club with no evolution in areas that are important for the football team, and that was the first step to try to bring the football team in the right direction.

 

“Of course in the first season I was trying to improve [this], but I also felt the club need to feed — at least emotionally — the fans, the self-esteem of the players, the motivation of the people. And you can’t do that without some success. That’s why I fought hard for trophies. And that’s why I prefer a Europa League victory than a third or fourth spot in the championship. Because the best way to accelerate the process is to do the process winning. Because winning gets you smiles, you get better atmosphere, you create better empathy with the people, you can demand more from the people, you can persuade the people to give more. And that was a very successful way of work in the past season, because last season was important, not just to bring the club back to the Champions League, not just by winning something as a very important target, but do that at the time you are improving the structures.

 

“Today we have better working conditions, a better medical department, a better analysis department, a better scouting department, a better media department, and in many cases we did it without changing the people, which is quite important. Because you can arrive in a club and change everything, and another thing is to try and improve it, but not in an easy way. But we try to, I don’t even like to say improve, it’s to adapt them to my way of thinking. So they have to learn with me how to work the way I want to work. It was a big challenge; it is a big challenge. We accelerate the process exactly because of that smile that comes with the good results, but it’s still a process that is going on.”

 

Mourinho was offered the United job in May 2015, six months after Chelsea sacked the Premier League’s champion manager. He signed for three seasons, a year shorter than his contracts at a series of previous clubs, but a duration he considers “the correct timing to put the football team on the right track”. Three years, Mourinho calculated, would be needed to rebuild United’s squad into one capable of challenging at the highest level of the European game. He is a manager in the Ferguson sense of the word; not just an elite coach, but an individual who thrives on running the football side of a club from top to bottom. It is no coincidence that Mourinho’s record in the transfer market from Inter Milan through Real Madrid and Chelsea is superior to his peers. His explanation of the United rebuild provides a sense as to why.

 

“Three summers are the period because it’s in the summer where you design the future of your squad. In January you get a specific player who is in the end of his contract, you can get him in better conditions, or it’s an emergency buy. But the design, the architecture of the future of your team is made in the summer. So three summers are the ideal to put the team back on track, but also to make the whole structure solid and working like a perfect machine, giving to the football team the best conditions — not just for now, but for the future.

 

“There are players that can change the destiny of the team, players that can be crucial in the development of a team. There are others that are very important for the quality and stability of the squad. And there are other players you don’t need to get because you have them already. When I arrived we were in need of some personality and quality that could give us a sense of a personality the club lost in the past years. The club agreed totally with that [Paul] Pogba dimension, which was a player that could be a great at every level for the next 10 years. We go for Zlatan [ibrahimovic] knowing he was not a player for the next five or six years, but we thought we need that player that arrives and feels, ‘The club is big, but I’m also big’. A player that wouldn’t need any second to adapt to the dimension and the pressure of the club.

 

“Mikhi [Henrikh Mkhitaryan] and [Eric] Bailly had qualities I thought the team didn’t have. Mikhi took a little bit of time but the team was lacking a player with his multifunctionality in every attacking area. And a fast, strong central defender. Again we are not going to compare with Rio or Vidic or these monsters that we had, but a player also with good personality and adapted to the Premier League.

 

“In the second season, we know that the team by the human point of view is a very special group of players. And that makes it more difficult because you cannot bring a very good player that is not a very good man. You cannot gamble. I was watching some programme in Sky with [Thierry] Henry, Roy Keane, Kenny Dalglish, and Kenny Dalglish said, ‘We all three won a lot of trophies and for sure we cannot remember a big trophy in a team that was not an amazing family with a great dressing room’. He’s totally right. In my career the biggest achievements were when the group was a special group.

 

“[Romelu] Lukaku was my player as a kid. He left the club because at that time he was thinking he deserves more opportunity from me, but he’s such a good guy that during these years we were in close contact with a very good relationship because probably he understood that I couldn’t accelerate his timings at that moment. So I knew he was an intelligent guy with a very positive attitude. Very close to Paul, and to be close to Paul you have to be like Paul. You have to be funny, you have to be open, you have to enjoy life, but a good professional. I knew that the man was there.

 

“[Nemanja] Matic, I cannot say that I had better guys than him in my career. And he has with me something which marks forever, which was a match where he was on the bench, I play him minute 45 and I took him off minute 70, 75. The press wants a story, the press wants blood. My blood, or his blood, or both. He was really sad. I was also sad because it’s not something nice and it’s something that I did only twice in my career. But the next day he comes to me and he says, ‘I’m not happy, but it’s my fault. I’m not happy with what you did to me, but it’s my fault, because the way I was playing I can understand the change. So let’s keep going.’

 

“We didn’t keep going for a long time because a few weeks later I was sacked. But again he was one of ‘my guys’, was one of the guys that we kept close during these years even not working together. So I know that the big man is there, even with more maturity.

 

“[Victor] Lindelof was the only one that I didn’t work with. But in Portugal I control. I control inside information. I know the qualities of the people, I know many things about social life, about private life, I know because even without working for that, the informations are arriving.”

 

That trio arrived at a training ground intentionally redecorated with “new pictures on the walls of my players with the Europa League, with the Capital Cup, at Wembley, against Amsterdam”. Two major trophies plus a Community Shield gave the lie to a season in which Mourinho was meant to have been surpassed by a ‘new generation’ of coaches — Antonio Conte, Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino. Added to the cliched litany of criticism of allegedly overly defensive tactics and refusal to promote youth was a new theory that Mourinho was poor at coaching attacking play. His tactical plans and methods in this area were written off as “basic” and “a world away from the modern ‘automatisms’ of Conte”.

 

The critique amuses Mourinho. “Maybe the drones are working because our training sessions are behind closed doors,” he smiles. “Probably this season they don’t say that because we are playing very well. Probably this season they are saying we are spending lots of time working defensively because we kept a few clean sheets. I don’t know. I don’t care.

 

“Our method is global at every level, and you cannot develop a team if you don’t develop different phases of the game. The past two champions in the Premier League were super defensive teams. Super defensive teams, with a killer counterattack. So be defensive and have a killer counterattack was the way to win the past two Premier Leagues.

 

“I know that sometimes that becomes quite trendy because success makes people try to repeat it, but we try to go in a different direction, playing the football we think is adapted to the qualities of our players. And we are not going to defend with seven behind. To play five defenders and two defensive midfield players, seven in a low block, we are going to try not to do. Sometimes the opponents are so powerful and so strong in a certain day that if you have to do it an isolated case you have to do it. I have no problems with that. But we are going to try not to play in that way, in spite of the fact that we know in the Premier League in the past couple of seasons it was the way to reach success.”

 

Success has always been the best prism through which to analyse Mourinho’s methods and actions. We discuss a story Patrice Evra tells of winning the Champions League, celebrating on the pitch, then almost immediately feeling the thrill of victory replacing itself with the desire to win again. “That’s our nature,” says Mourinho. “And sometimes when we are not in the best moment, or we are in a difficult moment, or a couple of defeats, a little bit of sadness, sometimes we are in between us trying to take some of the bad feeling away, remembering, ‘Hey, we won 20-something titles. Hey, come on, we are still the best. Come on. We just won a title four months ago. Come on.’ But in the end we look to each other and we say, ‘This is not us’. We are unhappy and nothing is going to change. So don’t try to disguise, because this is not us.

 

“This summer I went to my house in Portugal, I was in my office, I was looking to the walls. Some cups, medals, shirts, some history and I was thinking ‘F***, we did a lot’. But it’s just a moment. The season starts and you go again the same way. You know it’s the kind of job that you can last forever if you want. And I want. When you are happy with what you did, when you don’t dream again, when you don’t want to win a fourth Premier League, when you don’t want to win a fifth Capital Cup, when you don’t want to win a third Champions League. When you don’t want, then enjoy life and stay in Los Angeles. Don’t come back after the pre-season and get the sun.

 

“This is not us.”

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-all-areas-that-make-a-team-successful-united-had-stopped-in-time-there-was-no-evolution-qhn8h8wn2

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TRon

TRon

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It's long, and I know he's not everyone's cup of tea, but you can see this sort of mindset in the top managers. They need something to aim for, then three years doesn't seem so far off. If Ashley wasn't taking the  piss, Rafa would be quite happy to do a 'project'. When the project is just stay in this division then he's probably going to lose interest.

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rgk_lfc

rgk_lfc

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There's no way he's leaving until the end of the season imho, you all can relax. He's just not the kind of manager that bolts in the middle of the season.

 

Same here. Rafa is not the type to quit in the middle of the season. I think he will have you comfortable in the PL by December and then put pressure on Ashley once again through the media. How Ashley responds to that will determine his long term stay.

 

When he was LFC manager, he got offers from Madrid, Bayern, Juve - far more comfortable jobs with higher transfer budgets and pay. He did not leave. Once he commits to a project, he will try to see it through to the best of his ability.

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Scoot

Scoot

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Seems like a smashing lad like, there's no doubt about that. Gonna have to just assume/hope that there's absolutely boatloads more to come from him.

 

Agree like. Needs to be eased in to life in the premier league really. Surely Atsu, Ritchie and Aarons (when fit, if ever) are all ahead of him in terms of starting games.

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