BOOK/BARCELONA v REAL MADRID:When Barcelona threatened to surge ahead of their arch rivals, Real Madrid employed Jose Mourinho as manager, ushering in a new era of polemic and bitterness between the clubs, writes RICHARD FITZPATRICK
THE 2009-2010 league race in Spain went down to the last weekend of fixtures. Real Madrid set a points’ record; that is until their Catalan rivals’ tally was added up. Barcelona amassed 99 points, three more than Real Madrid, in a race that Pep Guardiola, Barca’s manager that season, called ‘f***ing barbaric’.
To seek redress, Real Madrids president Florentino Pérez announced that his next major off-season trade would be José Mourinho – “the galáctico on the bench”.
The Portuguese man was wheeled in, lured from Inter Milan who he’d just led to the Champions League crown. He cost Real Madrid more than his compatriot and star player Cristiano Ronaldo’s transfer fee – over €100 million, between salary for himself and his entourage and the pay-off to his predecessor, Manuel Pellegrini.
Pérez, who heads up Grupo ACS, a global construction giant, is one of the most powerful men in Spain – on an equal footing with the country’s prime minister and the chairman of Santander bank. He has a withering disdain for football managers, having fired seven in four seasons before Mourinho’s appointment. In Pellegrini’s sole season in charge, Pérez never spoke to him after August.
Mourinho, of course, never stops talking.
Some suggest he’s a master of mind games; that his facility for winding up opponents and the grandees from football’s ruling elite is some kind of premeditated plan to distract attention – and pressure – from his players. He cultivates the conceit himself.
“I prefer,” he has remarked, “to be, before the game and after the game, the man where all the rifles are pointed”.
Nonsense. He just loves the sound of his own voice. He’s a rogue. In Spain, they say he’s bocazas, big-mouthed.
SEVERAL MONTHS later, Real Madrid played Sevilla at the Bernabeu the last game before Christmas 2010. Real Madrid won 1-0. The win kept them on Barcelona’s tail going into the two-week league break over the holidays. This would annoy those who wished ill fortune on Mourinho’s team.
“Tonight’s victory will be very frustrating,” he said, “for those who wanted us to fall four or five points behind Barcelona. This makes us stronger. Everything was set up for us to drop points, but we didn’t.”
As an aesthetic experience, however, the match displeased him. It was not the beautiful game. He wouldn’t have paid money to see it, he said; if he’d been sitting at home, he would have turned over the channel to watch a game from the Vietnamese league.
The referee issued 12 yellow cards. Nine Real Madrid players were booked. Ricardo Carvalho, their centre half, and a player from Sevilla were sent off.
In the press conference afterwards, Mourinho brandished a list of ‘13 serious errors’ the referee had committed. The charge sheet was carefully written up on Real Madrid-headed notepaper, but unfortunately he couldn’t share the details.
“If I talk about them, I won’t be at the next game,” he said.
Instead, Mourinho made a public plea to the 17 men who sat on Real Madrid’s board to intervene. Directors enjoy a kind of diplomatic immunity in football, which allows them, in Mourinho’s rulebook, to lambast refs without fear of censure.
“This is a club,” he pointed out, “with a structure, and I want them to defend my team, not only me.”
He needed to talk to his president, he said. Someone asked him if it would help to talk to Jorge Valdano, the presidents right-hand man.
“If I can talk to the number one, why would I talk to anyone else?” he replied. Did this imply a spilt in the club’s management ranks? “Why can’t we have a division of opinion?” he said rhetorically.
Mourinho and Valdano had been on an uneasy footing from the off. Ten days before Mourinho was appointed to his post, Valdano said Mourinho wasn’t the best coach in the world. He didn’t think much of him as a player either. When he famously criticised the style of football played by Mourinho’s teams in a 2007 newspaper article (like watching “shit hanging from a stick”), he said the reason lay in Mourinho’s frustrated youth. Mourinho failed to make it as a professional footballer. He’d been forced to channel his vanity into coaching.
“Those who do not have the talent to make it as players,” wrote Valdano, who scored in the 1986 World Cup final, “do not believe in the talent of players, they do not believe in the ability to improvise in order to win football matches.”
Valdano bothered Mourinho.
He belittled Mourinho’s tactics during the traumatic 5-0 loss to Barcelona two weeks earlier, the heaviest in his management career. He congratulated Sergio Ramos for giving a press conference after the match to defend himself from accusations of foul play when Mourinho had told Ramos not to.
During pre-season, Mourinho pushed to sign a new striker. He said they’d be shanghaied if Gonzalo Higuaín or Karim Benzema got injured. His request was turned down. In mid-December it was confirmed that Higuaín, who missed El Clásico through injury, would have to undergo surgery for a slipped disk. It would keep him out of action for four months at least. That only left Mourinho with Benzema.
Mourinho was unconvinced about the young, languid Frenchman. He complained that training could not start until 10am because Benzema was “still asleep”. He said that Benzema “could learn a lot sitting on the bench”. When deputising for Higuaín up front against Barcelona, he didn’t even get a shot on goal.
Again, Mourinho pushed to sign another striker. Valdano, who had signed Benzema, vetoed the request. Instead, Mourinho was told to concentrate on the imminent return of Kaka, who was back in the fold after knee surgery the previous August.
Mourinho and Valdano also differed in style. Real Madrid likes to cultivate the image of señorío, that it is imbued with a gentlemanly, Corinthian spirit. The Spanish word señorío comes from the French savoir faire – to do and to say things well or gracefully. In this regard, there is no smoother ambassador than the suave, finely dressed Valdano, a man of elegance and eloquence who has penned five books on the vagaries of football.
“He’s a mightily articulate guy,” says journalist John Carlin, a friend of Pérez and Valdano. “He speaks in metaphors. He’s quite brilliant, really.”
Mourinho’s brilliance lies elsewhere.
“Valdano transmits the image of a señor, a gentleman,” adds Tomás Roncero, a Spanish football pundit. “He always says the appropriate words. Valdano gives balance to the club. If Valdano was like Mourinho, then Real Madrid would be like a Mexican gang. They’d be like Pancho Villas army.”
During the fractious match against Sevilla, there had been a brawl between the two benches at half-time. The Sevilla contingent had been taunting Real Madrid’s staff by doing a manita – by raising their hands at them, fingers outstretched, one for each goal Barcelona had knocked past them a fortnight earlier.
In his haste to get to the opposing dugout, Mourinho’s goalkeeping coach, Silvino Louro knocked over Agustín Herrerín, a 75-year-old club delegate from Real Madrid. Due to restrictions on the number of staff allowed, Louro should not have been pitch-side. Mourinho got him in under the radar as one of his medical team.
At Real Madrid’s next home game in the league, a thrilling 4-2 win over Villarreal, Mourinho responded to his side’s fourth goal by parading past the Villarreal dugout. It was like a March Past. While facing their dugout he pumped his fist in celebration until Cani, one of Villarreal’s substituted players, threw a water bottle at him. Mourinho claimed he was celebrating with his son who sits behind the away team’s dugout.
Mourinho wasn’t sold on the idea of señorío. Moments before delivering his rap sheet of refereeing errors from the Sevilla game, he upbraided a director in front of Real Madrid’s players in the dressing room.
“You say this is a señor club. This is una puta mierda – a f***ing shit – of a club! And now go and say that to the president! Now, I’m going on holiday and if you want to fire me, as far as I’m concerned I won’t come back.”
The message was relayed to the president. He mulled over the idea of sacking him, but decided against it. Instead, he used the club’s Christmas lunch the following day to send his own communique.
Addressing the assembled guests, he said: “There are people here who think they are qualified for any enterprise and don’t realise that Real Madrid is the biggest enterprise. Not all of them are qualified. The pressure suffered here is not for everybody. Some go mad.”
Mourinho was mad all right. At their next private meeting, he put Pérez on the back foot. “Neither am I the manager you expected,” he said, “nor are you the president I thought”.
MOURINHO, TO use his own parlance, has added pepper to the fun. He will forever be remembered in the annals of El Clásico as one of the saga’s great hate figures. That he has been an agent provocateur isn’t surprising, but the response to his antics is illuminating. For taking the fight to Barcelona, he has become a poster boy for Spain’s political right.
It is not uncommon for footballers to get lassoed into the political bullring, willingly or otherwise. Real Madrid’s majestic team of the 1950s is the obvious case in point.
Mourinho is noteworthy because he’s not an athlete. He’s adored – and is egged on by Pérez – because of his polemics.
The Portuguese despises the holier-than-thou attitude of Guardiola and the Barça project, a collection he refers to as “the beautiful children of football”.
“The interesting thing,” he bemoaned in a press conference in March 2012, “is that there are people much smarter than me that sell an image and get to have a completely different picture than mine”.
All the while, Mourinho has remained oblivious to the ridiculous contortions required to transform Real Madrid, the ultimate team of the establishment, into some kind of victim at the mercy of a bizarre cabal, incorporating bent refs, the media and Uefa.
Mourinho has finally delivered, however, on his mandate: he has beaten Barcelona. The earth’s axis has tilted slightly with Real Madrid’s record-breaking, 100-point league title victory in May and the announcement a couple of weeks beforehand that Guardiola would be stepping down as manager of Barcelona, to be replaced by his assistant, Tito Vilanova.
The Catalan cited exhaustion as the reason for his departure. It seemed extraordinary that he would walk away from the finest collection of players he is ever likely to manage, with the best days yet to come for many of them, but the stresses at FC Barcelona are not normal.
Only two men have served longer management terms at the club since the Second World War. Both of them were broken by the experience. Johan Cruyff, Guardiola’s mentor, suffered a heart attack during his reign and never managed a football team again after being sacked. Frank Rijkaard, Guardiola’s predecessor, became so unhinged at one stage during his last, rudderless season that he moved out of his family home and into a hotel near the Camp Nou. His nerves, by his own admission, were shot.
Guardiola had reached his threshold. “I don’t have good memories of the Madrid-Barça games – neither the victories nor the defeats. There were always other things that took away from the football,” he said before his final Clásico match as coach, a 2-1 loss at the Camp Nou in April 2012. He spoke with a dejected air. The rope-a-dope tactics favoured by him in the pressroom had taken their toll.
“Many things have been hidden by our silence,” he said as his time drew to a close. In Mourinho he encountered a foe whose modus operandi – like Alex Ferguson – is one of a siege mentality. In Spain, Mourinho had found the most fertile ground yet for instilling an Us v Them mindset in his charges.
This is an abridged extract from Richard Fitzpatrick’s El Clásico: Barcelona v Real Madrid, Football’s Greatest Rivalry.
It is published by Bloomsbury and priced €14.99.
