Cliff Notes – Does Mourinho have any magic left for return to Benfica
- José Mourinho returns to Benfica after a challenging period at various clubs, seeking to revive his managerial reputation in a familiar setting.
- Critics argue that Mourinho’s tactics have become outdated, questioning his ability to adapt to modern football dynamics, particularly in domestic leagues.
Does Mourinho have any magic left for return to Benfica?
It’s showtime, because love him or loathe him, that’s what Jose Mourinho brings. Five-and-a-half years after coaching his last Champions League game — a 3-0 loss to Leipzig in the round of 16, the heaviest aggregate defeat of his career — he returns to the fold at the club where he made his first-team coaching debut a quarter century ago: Benfica.
You can talk about homecomings and the return of prodigal sons, but that’s slightly misleading. Because by the time he signed for Benfica, in September 2000, he had already worked for two of the other big three Portuguese super clubs, Sporting and Porto, as an assistant to Bobby Robson.
More telling is what actually happened. He was hired by one club president with elections looming and after the president lost the elections two months later, he marched into the new president’s office and threatened to resign if he didn’t get a contract extension, as a show of confidence. The club said it was premature — he had coached just 11 games after all, winning six of them — and he quit the next day.
Yes — Alpha Male Mourinho, the guy always willing to go to war and bet on himself goes back a long, long way. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to walk out on the biggest club in Portugal at age 37, when you have no résumé at senior level other than 11 games, but his gamble clearly worked. Less than three years later, he was winning his first league and European trophy at archrival Porto. Less than a decade later, he was at the world’s biggest club, Real Madrid, with a résumé that include two Champions League crowns, six league titles in three different countries and an aura of invincibility.
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Of course, his critics will point to diminishing returns since then. Three seasons at Real Madrid yielded one LaLiga title, a Spanish Cup, a memorable rivalry with Pep Guardiola (whom he once coached as an assistant at Barcelona) and a supertanker’s worth of bad blood. His return to Chelsea produced a Premier League and League Cup Double, but also the club’s second lowest league finish in the past three decades.
Mourinho was also unable to cure the sick man of European football, Manchester United — despite talking a lot about “empathy” — over 2½ seasons, though he did win a Europa League and a League Cup. His stint at Tottenham lasted 17 months and saw him fired on the eve of a League Cup final. Then came 2½ seasons at Roma, where he donned the gladiator helmet, went full-on Maximus and become a folk hero after winning the Europa Conference League and taking them to the Europa League final, which they lost in acrimonious circumstances. Poor league results — after massive investment — ultimately got him the boot.
Then there was his time at Turkish side Fenerbahce. When the Istanbul giants were knocked out in the qualifying round of the Champions League for the second straight season last month, the writing was on the wall, though club president Ali Koc said it had more to do with finishing 11 points behind the champions in the league. Either way, he was dismissed two days later.
Mourinho has lost a lot of his luster in recent years thanks to some notably difficult spells at clubs in England, Italy and Turkey, but he’s back at Benfica hoping to turn back the clock and prove his critics wrong. Bruno de Carvalho/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The stock explanation from Mourinho’s haters is that he’s a dinosaur whom the game has passed by and whose antics — from hiding in a laundry basket to sneak into a game for which he was suspended, to reminding a proud footballing nation like Turkey that he “reached more European finals in the previous seven years than the entire country in its entire history” — have grown stale. He doesn’t intimidate, he doesn’t manipulate, he plays to his own crowd. Like confronting English referee Anthony Taylor in a car park after losing the Europa League final with Roma on penalties, or talking about how the Turkish league “smells bad.”
Playing the victim of conspiracies — whether driven by referees or clubs who don’t acquire the players you want — can win you credibility among supporters for a while, but the “us vs. the world” schtick wears thin pretty quick.
We marveled at how Mourinho used his “dark energy” to get an edge in a world of marginal gains when he was dominating at Porto, Inter, Chelsea (the first time anyway) and Real Madrid (for a while). But maybe we were the suckers all along. It wasn’t his Machiavellian “by any means necessary” routine that made those clubs great — it was the fact that he had excellent players, and he coached them very well. Once he got stuck with worse players at more dysfunctional clubs, the siege mentality didn’t really move the needle much, despite being really entertaining in a WWE kayfabe sort of way. At least not when it comes to week-in, week-out consistency of the sort needed to do well in league settings.
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Cups are another matter, and maybe it’s no coincidence that in the past decade, Mourinho reached finals in three domestic and two European cups. In the in-or-out, two-legged format, ratcheting up the intensity, burning the boats and setting fire to the barricades can work if you know what you’re doing.
Koc summed it up the prevailing wisdom on Mourinho when he said: “When [Fenerbahce] brought [Mourinho] here, we knew he was a defense-oriented coach, but at the end of the season we talked about playing more dominant … the way we got eliminated [in the Champions League qualifying playoff] was unacceptable. This made me feel that last year’s football will continue.
“We parted ways because we believe that this squad can play better football … [Mourinho’s] football might work in Europe, but in Turkey we need to crush [opponents] in most matches. [And instead] in every match, we fall behind and struggle to get ahead.”
Translation: we can play underdog football in Europe, no problem, but at home we’re Goliath and we need to stomp the Davids.
Benfica will be a similar story. True, they only won one league title in the past six seasons, but they are, historically, Portugal’s biggest and best-supported club. In that sense, it presents a very similar challenge to Fenerbahce, who have been waiting since 2014 to win the Turkish Super Lig again.
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Unlike Fenerbahce, who like other Turkish clubs often relied on bringing in experienced foreign talent — Nélson Semedo, Jhon Durán, Allan Saint-Maximin, Youssel En-Nesyri, Diego Carlos, Filip Kostic and Milan Skriniar all arrived on Mourinho’s watch — in recent years Benfica, like other Portuguese teams, have historically been a club that showcased younger talent and then moved it on to bigger clubs for big fees. Álvaro Carreras, Gonçalo Ramos, João Neves, Alex Grimaldo are just some of the stars who have left in the past three seasons.
Mourinho hasn’t worked at a club like that since his days at Leiria, more than two decades ago, and the siege mentality is going to be a little bit harder to instill in your own country, where people know you inside and out and are just dying for you to give them a reason to call BS.
Still, for the neutral it’s going to be fun. If Mourinho regains his mojo, great. If not, knowing we get him for another seven Champions League games (maybe more) is a treat. A treat akin to watching videos of arguments on social media, but a treat nonetheless.
