by We should never forget that the Premier League is the most popular soap opera in the world. Yes, there is football, games won and lost, and that is important, but with it runs the constant drama, the laughable plots, the intrigue, the operatic farce. It is the loop of the two that made football a global obsession. All the best soap operas need a big villain and the biggest, the Dirty Den, the Paul Robinson, the JR Ewing in football is José Mourinho.
Mourinho is now 60, his hair white, his eyes set above shades. The old shtick has worn a little thin. The power to predict the course of games has been abandoned. The game has gone on and players are just as good: he cannot, as he used to, light the fiery fire of wronged derivation in his team. He once mocked Rafa Benítez for winning the Europa League; now he’s celebrating winning the Conference Championship and was angry enough not to win the Europa League last season that he waited with referee Anthony Taylor in the car park after the final.
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Mourinho is reduced and yet there is something irresistible about him. Within an hour of him marrying Roma on Tuesday, stories appeared claiming Newcastle had no intention of appointing him. (To be clear, that is Newcastle answering questions rather than making a proactive statement, but still, it was revealing how many journalists and social media commentators alike made the connection.) Why would a club be supported by wealth The giant of Saudi Arabia The Public Investment Fund, looking up with an eye from the bottom of the highway, to appoint a coach who has not been at the top of his profession for ten years? And yet, and yet…
Eddie Howe may still have the majority of fans back despite poor form. The sporting director, Dan Ashworth, may favor someone closer to the tactical guard rather than a coach whose glory is in the age of tolerance before the guard revolution.
But who really makes the decisions? As Newcastle have not had to make a managerial change since Howe replaced Steve Bruce following his inevitable sacking in October 2021 nobody knows exactly who is making these calls. Mourinho’s aura was enough to attract even Tottenham’s experienced chairman Daniel Levy in 2019; would it be surprising if he caught the eye of Yasir al-Rumayyan or some other Saudi executive, especially given his position as a board member at the Mahd Sports Academy in Jeddah, together with the influential Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud and the assistant sports minister?
Moreover, there is something about Mourinho to Newcastle that feels right and not only because, three years ago, he described himself as a “little Magpie” after hearing stories about the club and the passion of its fans kneeling Bobby Robson. Mourinho’s greatest success came at Porto, Chelsea and Internazionale with clubs that could portray themselves as rebellious outsiders, fighting the establishment. That is exactly how Newcastle chief executive Darren Eales portrayed the club – poor Newcastle, cursed with the richest owners in the world – as he explained last week how constrained the club is by profit rules and sustainability.
Since the PIF takeover Newcastle seem to have embraced the dark side; the paranoid desire of some of his fans seems louder, those who see every concern about the abuse of human rights, or states buying titles, as motivated by club loyalties or a global conspiracy to suppress the geordie people, fertile ground for the classic Mourinho pouting. and whining. The coincidence of Mourinho losing his job just as Newcastle have lost six of their last seven league games is almost too perfect.
But in the absence of Newcastle – and it should be said that the club is sure that Howe’s job is not in danger – where else will Mourinho go? He has made little secret of the fact that he sees himself managing Portugal at some point, but that job is not going to be available before the Euros at the earliest: Roberto Martínez’s 10 games in charge have produced 10 wins and an aggregate goal difference of 36-2.
What clubs would take him? Chelsea’s third spell, only to confirm its status under Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali as the greatest example yet of a football club football project? Climate bonfire in Paris Saint-Germain? Joan Laporta returns to Barcelona making an appointment that he did not make in 2008 when he chose Pep Guardiola instead, to salt the turf that gave the world 15 hegemonic years. position game?
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The problem is, almost any option that doesn’t immediately sound funny, the kind of thing you want to see but hate to happen in your own club. Roma was a little different from other recent posts because of how popular Mourinho stayed with fans until the end, how limited the toxicity was, but it still followed the familiar pattern: filling his arrival and immediate rise perhaps bringing success soon, then. increasing friction with the squad and/or directors as results deteriorate before the final crisis.
With each post, the highs get a little lower. A sixth place finish in Serie A and a lack of resources being heralded as a triumph makes a manager who once struggled with the gods feel out of touch.
So where else? Mourinho doesn’t need the money; In a recent study he was the richest coach in the world with a net worth of almost £100m. Rather, he seems driven by anguish and the need to prove that he was right to reject Barcelona’s principles when the club rejected him in 2008, to back down from pressure and ownership to accept approach radical reactivity.
But to do that, to achieve one last big victory, he needs his degree. He probably doesn’t want the clubs that would attract him, the clubs that can afford him. Logic suggests a stint in the Saudi Pro League but the narrative of the Premier League’s epic soap opera calls for the Little Magpie to fly to St James to do one last job for Sir Bobby.
