A thought: Of all the managers for every club that could be reasonably considered “top,” there’s no stranger sight than seeing Jose Mourinho lose.
Why does it feel so weird when Chelsea and Jose Mourinho lose?
It’s funny and always odd when big teams lose to their so-called inferiors. But when Jose Mourinho’s around, it’s even stranger.
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It’s always a bit odd to watch any top club lose. But it’s even stranger when the loss is the result of something other than football being its own peculiar, scarce-goaled self. And with Mourinho, it’s particularly weird. It’s this way because of who he is and, more importantly, his perception of football management.
Over at the Guardian, Jonathan Wilson put together a video in which he charts the development of Mourinho through his career. The most interesting moment comes early on, when Wilson talks about Mourinho’s foundational success at Unaio de Leira:
... that reinforced in him the idea that pragmatism was important, that you couldn’t always play great, beautiful football.
Then Mourinho goes to Porto:
... where he can really impose his ideas, where he can really express what his philosophy is and you see immediately it’s very different to that of Barcelona. Although they press high up the field, although they play passing football, although it’s very focused on triangles, you talk to any player from that team and they will all say: the thing was, they had to win. Winning was absolutely key. Mourinho would do what he to do to achieve that.
There’s an odd implication in that (presumably well-researched and considered) statement. Winning, by extension, isn’t “absolutely key” to other managers, who are presumably more concerned with the triangles, the pressing or the passing. On one hand it sounds quite silly -- winning is absolutely key to every single manager’s job prospects -- but on the other it’s immediately recognizable. When, say, Arsene Wenger or Louis van Gaal lose, and lose properly, there’s always a reason.
Maybe Wenger -- typical Wenger! -- spent all his time fostering a collegiate and non-confrontational atmosphere, without noticing that it inhibits on-field leadership, robs Arsenal of character and makes him rest his best goalkeeper for must-win home games. Maybe Van Gaal -- classic Van Gaal! -- philosophized his charges into a frenzy of perpetual and sterile recycling.
They all win more than they lose, but when they lose there’s always that obvious and fundamental flaw in their grand scheme. Just occasionally, the rebels get their photon torpedoes in the right place and everything gets blown to smithereens. That is part of what having a vision of football entails. If it goes wrong, it’s because the rebels found the thermal exhaust port and landed their photon torpedoes.
When a Mourinho side loses, it can do so for many reasons, yet none of them ever seem to add up to something fundamentally wrong with how the manager understands football and instructs his footballers. He blamed Tuesday night's loss on Porto, for example, and not unreasonably, on a decent defensive performance undermined by "two ridiculous mistakes." The 2-2 draw against Newcastle that preceded it was the fault of an abysmal first half. And there have been plenty of appalling refereeing decisions.
Such is the nature of pragmatism. If a manager is working forward with a vision and they lose, then that vision is clearly faulty and they need to be more direct. Or pick a proper goalkeeper. But if they’re working backwards from the central pursuit of victory, then you can’t really fault the idea, merely whatever went wrong. Maybe it was wonky planning, poor selection or inadequate motivation on the part of the manager. Maybe Kurt Zouma forgot to jump for a header.
And that's why the spectacle of Mourinho losing is so peculiar: because it is only ever a failure of execution, not of concept. It makes sense to an outside observer that a series of strange defeats should be down to some underlying malaise or misconception. And that provides an ongoing story with a possible ending. With Mourinho, all you can really do is shake your head at the arch-pragmatist failing, and wonder whether everybody at Chelsea finally got tired of him acting up.
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So when the plan is to win and the plan stops working, where do you go from there? Wenger, Van Gaal and Pep Guardiola all have a code to fall back on, and onfield lieutenants who have been inculcated in and trust that code. We do this, more. We stick to our beliefs. We keep going. And then they either get proven right, get sacked or have a Damascene conversion to some other way of playing. (Unless they’re Arsene Wenger! A little joke for Arsenal fans, there.) By contrast, there is nobody on earth so helpless as a failing pragmatist. Doing what works makes no difference when nothing is working.
Perhaps this is all a little grandiose. Chelsea's sticky start to the season has a whole host of more mundane sources -- truncated preseason, awkwardly coincident losses of form in a few key players, Oscar getting injured -- and will likely correct itself at some point. Eden Hazard can't stay bobbins forever, nor can Cesc Fabregas. As much as we might pretend otherwise, Mourinho's job isn't to provide handy stories for outside observers, and his approach isn't a bad way to manage a football team. He has, after all, been rather good at winning.
Until then, though, it’s fascinating to watch him scowling in the technical area and glowering in press conferences. Not so much the Special One, more an angry man angry at the sudden and inexplicable death of his computer. There he is, banging on the top of his Chelsea squad and muttering under his breath. “Work, damn you. You were working fine a moment ago. Why don’t you just work?”
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