rusiakos » 20 апр 2021, 15:24
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'He sucked the culture out of the club’ – the inside story of Jose Mourinho’s downfall at Tottenham Hotspur
Jack Pitt-Brooke and more 13m ago
It was half-time at the Etihad Stadium on February 13. Tottenham were 1-0 down to Manchester City but had barely been in the game at all. No shots on target, no corners, 35.9 per cent possession.
Jose Mourinho walked in and was unusually positive, telling the players they were doing well and to keep it up. Some of the senior players in the dressing room were shocked that such a passive, negative approach could be right for this club. “You really think this is good?” remarked one. Tottenham did nothing in the second half and lost the game 3-0.
That one moment encapsulated the divide between the Tottenham players and their manager, the divide that has finally cost Mourinho his job. His defensive tactics, his reactive training and his repeated public criticism of the players has driven Mourinho apart from the squad, the fans and ultimately Daniel Levy.
While many of the players were pleased to hear of Mourinho’s dismissal on Monday, the only part that surprised them was the timing, six days before the Carabao Cup final, and when the rest of the world was discussing the new Super League Spurs are signed up to. The decision was made over the weekend after Friday night’s 2-2 draw at Everton. Spurs are now five points away from fourth place, a stark contrast from the optimism of November when they were top of the league. The Mourinho reign at Tottenham has unravelled faster than anyone could have expected six months ago.
The Athletic can reveal how:
-Tottenham players were left bored and untested by Mourinho’s training sessions
-Most of squad were expecting his sacking
-Tactics so obsessed with stopping opposition that players were unsure how to attack
-Mourinho’s assistant Joao Sacramento was unpopular with the squad
-The club were unhappy with Mourinho’s criticism of the players and asked him to stop
-Mourinho ran out of allies at the club on and off the pitch
-Only Harry Kane was loyal to Mourinho at the end
-His dismissal had nothing to do with the Super League and was based purely on results
The result is that Mourinho, 17 months after his appointment, is now on gardening leave with the rest of his coaching team. Ryan Mason and Chris Powell will be in the Wembley dugout for Tottenham on Sunday, with Levy thinking that a new management team gives Spurs the best chance of a strong finish to the season. And, providing that as a Super League club they are not banned, qualification for next season’s European competitions.
The fact that it has ended like this, and this quickly, marks the Mourinho era as one of the most costly mis-steps in Levy’s 20 years running Tottenham.
Having arrived to such high expectations, Mourinho leaves Tottenham in seventh place, and he has not won them a trophy (leaving a job trophyless for the first time since Uniao de Leiria 19 years ago). The football his team has played has been negative and uninspiring. Spurs have not won any new fans during the Mourinho era, and have upset plenty of their traditional ones. Levy was anxious that when fans returned to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium at the end of the season they would make their feelings about the manager known. Levy has spared Mourinho that indignity.
When Tottenham appointed Mourinho, Levy proudly told the Amazon documentary he was “one of top two coaches in the world”.
Mourinho was appointed to replace Mauricio Pochettino, Spurs’ best and most popular manager since Bill Nicholson. Levy hoped that Mourinho would build upon the progress of the Pochettino era and finally win them a trophy. He also hoped that Mourinho would build up the global image of the club, star in Amazon’s behind-the-scenes documentary, and bring new fans to the club. Levy had built a world-class training ground and stadium, and now he finally had his superstar manager to go with it. Levy had considered Carlo Ancelotti that autumn, but Mourinho’s winning aura swung him the job.
If it was a marriage of convenience, it worked for both parties. Mourinho had long seen Tottenham as a model club. They were ambitious, well-run and with a streamlined management. After his political problems at Real Madrid, Chelsea and Manchester United, this was a club with fewer decision-makers in charge. Mourinho sold Tottenham a vision that he was a changed man, that he had learned from his last few failures, and that he would bring Spurs a new era of success.
Mourinho and Levy were very close from the start. Mourinho would discuss everything with Levy, including team selections. Some sources who know Levy thought the Spurs chairman was too close to Mourinho, too pleased with the fact that he had finally appointed one of the biggest names in football to manage his club.
It should be remember that when Mourinho took over, Spurs were in 12th place, their players looking mentally and physically drained by a year in which they had reached but lost the Champions League final in Madrid before seeing the Pochettino era unravel the next season. The squad had needed a rebuild for years and the lack of transfer activity caught up with them. Mourinho lost Kane to a serious hamstring injury six weeks after taking over, and two months after that he faced a three-month coronavirus stoppage.
Mourinho had to guide Spurs through some very difficult waters and the fact that he managed to get the team into sixth place in July 2020 has to go down as a success. But in the summer transfer window Mourinho got plenty of the players that he wanted — Matt Doherty, Joe Hart, Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Sergio Reguilon — while Levy landed fan favourite Gareth Bale. As unhappy as Mourinho has been about the failure to sign a new centre-back, the ingredients were there for a far more successful 2020-21 season than Tottenham have actually got.
As the reality of Mourinho’s methods became apparent, it did not take long for the Tottenham players to pine for the days of Pochettino.
Under Pochettino the team had a clear philosophy of play which they would work on perfecting every day. Under Mourinho that was out of the window. His approach was to tailor a different approach for every single opponent, to exploit their own distinct weaknesses. Players remarked that as they got closer to every match, the atmosphere was increasingly marked by fear of what might go wrong. Spurs were so fixated on what the opposition might do that they forgot to focus on their own game.
Throughout the Mourinho era, Tottenham looked unsure of what to do with the ball or how to build up play from the back. At times they were still capable of getting good results, because any time with Son Heung-min and Harry Kane up front is still likely to create and score chances. But there was nothing to replace the playing identity that Pochettino had worked on for so long. The players found themselves relying on the same attacking moves Pochettino had taught them, long after he had left the club.
It did not take the Tottenham players to grow bored of Mourinho’s training sessions. They felt weighed down by the defensive focus, the hours spent working on how to defend throw-ins before facing Liverpool, and frustrated by the lack of attention to their own game. For years, Spurs teams of all levels had focused on building up from the back and passing the ball, but for Mourinho that was all forgotten. “He has sucked the culture out of the club,” said one dressing-room source, “and destroyed what Spurs have stood for for years.”
The Spurs players were also struck by the lack of intensity to their training programme. Working under Pochettino was extremely hard, and the players would complain of the number of double sessions, and the lack of days off, as Pochettino and his staff got the team fit enough to play his aggressive pressing football. But the same group of players then felt the opposite was true under Mourinho, that they were not being worked hard enough. They felt as if almost every session was either recovery from one match or tactical preparation for the next one, which made it especially difficult for the players who were not in the team to find any rhythm.
When they got what they felt was a harder week of training before the Wycombe Wanderers FA Cup game in January, the players were even relieved to have been worked hard. They would even joke amongst themselves that training at this intensity could prolong their careers.
In Mourinho’s defence, he had a uniquely difficult season to prepare the players for. Many of them only had a brief break between the end of the 2020-21 season last July and the internationals in September, and Spurs’ progress in the Europa League and Carabao Cup meant that Spurs have played two games each week almost all season. By the end of this compressed season, Spurs will have played 58 official games. The fact that they have escaped with relatively few injuries could be taken as proof that he has managed the workload well.
There is also a sense at the club that the players must bear some real responsibility for the struggles in recent years. The fact that the same squad has made the opposite complaints about Mourinho as they did about Pochettino has not gone unnoticed, nor has the way that the players’ form tailed off at the first sign of trouble. The debate about whether the players or the manager deserve the blame for what has gone wrong has dominated this season, and often been driven by Mourinho’s own attempts to deflect the blame onto his squad. But ultimately it is the manager’s job to get the best out of the players, something Mourinho clearly failed to do.
The players’ frustration with the coaching staff was not limited to their uneasy relationship with Mourinho. Ever since he managed Porto, Mourinho had worked with Rui Faria as his assistant. But after Mourinho was sacked by Manchester United in 2018, Faria wanted a new challenge, and to try being a head coach himself. So Faria did not join Mourinho at Tottenham, going to manage Al Duhail in Qatar instead.
That meant Mourinho needed a new assistant and he decided to appoint Joao Sacremento, a gifted 30-year-old analyst and coach, who had been a protege of Mourinho’s old friend Luis Campos at Monaco and Lille. Sacramento was meant to provide an update to Mourinho’s methods and a link to the players at Spurs.
But in reality Sacramento proved just as unpopular than Mourinho himself. Multiple sources report that the players struggled to connect with him, saying that he lacked the emotional intelligence to deal with a squad of established Premier League stars. Rival coaches also picked up on Sacremento’s lack of experience, especially compared to Faria, with one even remarking to The Athletic how little authority he seemed to have on the touchline, barking tactical instructions to uninterested players. “Sacramento takes a good role in team shape and opposition analysis,” said a more sympathetic source. “But Jose was clearly boss.”
When Mourinho was appointed by Tottenham, he arrived as a figure bigger than the club itself. His first few weeks were a media sensation and he relished his image as a serial champion who came to Spurs to teach them how to win. When he spoke to the players, they listened.
Just before the start of this season Eric Dier told The Athletic how much of an impact Mourinho could make with a well-placed comment. “He’s incredible in the way that he pokes you with his words to get the best out of you,” he said. “He’ll say things to you and nudge you, with the idea of triggering you to want to do better, to want to improve or to prove him wrong.”
Dier himself told the story from before Spurs’ trip to Selhurst Park, the last game of the 2019-20 season. Dier had been suspended for the last four games but was eligible to play in this one. Mourinho walked up to Dier in training and said: “You’ve been shit in training since your suspension, do you want to play this weekend?” Mourinho walked off, Dier took this as a “kick up the arse” and played well at Crystal Palace, as Spurs got the draw that sealed sixth place for them.
Tanguy Ndombele is maybe the best example of the success of Mourinho’s methods. When Spurs drew 1-1 at Burnley in March 2020, just before the coronavirus stoppage, Mourinho hooked Ndombele at half-time and hammered him in public afterwards, saying that with Ndombele on the pitch Spurs did not have a midfield. But Ndombele responded well to the challenge and significantly improved his fitness and his performances this year.
But one of the stories of this season was the collapse and ultimate failure of Mourinho’s tactics of “confrontational leadership”, of trying to criticise the players to provoke the right response. What started as a clever trick to keep the players on their toes soon started to grate with the team. Especially when Mourinho made his criticisms in public rather than private. The players felt, as this season wore on, that whatever went wrong they would be blamed for it, and that Mourinho was happy to throw them under the bus. Ahead of the team being announced for the game against Manchester United recently, one club source remarked, “I wonder which lambs will be sent out to slaughter this week”.
It was not always this way. After Spurs lost 3-1 at Sheffield United in July 2020, Mourinho criticised his players’ mentality and the way they caved after a VAR decision went against them. But the players rallied, took 14 points from their last six games, and got back into Europe.
This season, though, Mourinho’s barbs have made things worse rather than better. At the start of the season his anger was at least targeted and appropriate. Of course it helped that, for the first half of the season, Spurs were doing well, scoring goals and, for a few weeks of the season, they were top of the table. When Mourinho went after his players, it felt like a one-off.
When Spurs lost 1-0 at Antwerp in the Europa League in October, Mourinho hooked Dele Alli, Carlos Vinicius, Giovani Lo Celso and Steven Bergwijn at half-time. Mourinho said afterwards that his team selections would be “very easy” from then on, given how his fringe players had performed. But Spurs won their next five games in all competitions and that was swiftly forgotten.
