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Jose Mourinho is a Champions League dinosaur - Manchester United have become European also-rans
All the best articles start with quotes. So here’s one: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.
And if Manchester United want to make serious progress in the Champions League someone needs to print that out and hang it up in the manager’s office.
The Albert Einstein of Football (in his own mind) thinks he is some sort of great sporting philosopher but if this week have proved anything it’s that Jose Mourinho is a footballing dinosaur.
Man United’s dismal evening against Sevilla on Wednesday, as they crashed out of the Champions League, can be charted in the three stages of Paul Scholes’ decline into sheer anger in the BT Sport studios.
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It started with trepidation at Marouane Fellaini’s inclusion: “It’s different starting tonight, I think he will be in there for his defensive qualities. I don’t see how United will have much possession, I think they will play on the counter attack.”
It progressed to faux confidence at half time: “Sevilla are a poor team, a really poor team. They have not got a goal in them. United should win this game.”
And ended with sheer, resigned, you-knew-it-was-coming-really anger at full-time: “We can’t use the fear of an away goal as an excuse, you have to say they’ve been poor. When it seems your main plan is to knock the ball up to Fellaini at the back post and play for knockdowns, that’s not good enough in the last 16 of the Champions League. You have to be better than that.”
Mourinho is the very definition of that Einstein quote; steadfastly sticking to a formula that served him well and won him countless trophies in the 2000s but refusing to acknowledge that football has moved on.
Many, many people were quick to point out that since Alex Ferguson retired five years ago, it’s the much-maligned David Moyes who has taken Manchester United furthest in the Champions League. But the problems in Europe run deeper for Mourinho.
It is four years since he last managed a club to a knockout victory in the Champions League and yet he still won’t change his ways. If Mourinho literally was a dinosaur he’d be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, angrily trying to tie his shoe laces with his tiny hands, at the same time refusing to use longer laces like everyone else.
Everyone adapts. Ferguson adapted. Pep Guardiola has adapted since coming to England. Even Antonio Conte sent his Chelsea team out to have a go at Barcelona on Wednesday evening, a week after instructing his players to literally walk around the Etihad pitch during their defeat to Manchester City.
The problems for Mourinho are plentiful at the moment. He has a £75m striker struggling for confidence; he has an £89m asset who seems more concerned with his hair than turning in match-winning performances in midfield and he has a Chilean whose best performance at Old Trafford since arriving in January has been at the piano.
Humiliating
And now the Red Devils hierarchy are reportedly starting to wonder whether Mourinho really is the right man for the job. The defeat to Sevilla has shone a light on a lot of issues everyone already knew he and Manchester United had, but to have them exposed in such a public and humiliating way appears to have left both at the point of no return.
That defensive approach that won his Premier League titles at Chelsea and Champions League trophies at Porto and Inter has failed at Old Trafford. This season his side are the most toothless of the top five; they have scored the fewest goals, attempted the fewest shots and managed to get the fewest on target. And that is with the aforementioned £200m worth of talent in his team.
Either Mourinho changes his ways soon – or at the very least tweaks his system – to show he can adapt to the fast-changing modern game or he may find himself very quickly a footballing relic, spending less time on the touchline and more time in TV studios with the likes of Scholes talking about past glories.
To end with another Einstein quote – because that’s what I do now: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
Mourinho, at the moment, doesn’t seem to be either…
