Netflix has just released its contemporary version of The Odyssey, a three-part documentary that narrates the feats and adventures, the glories and hardships of José Mourinho, culminating with the hero’s return to his Ithaca, Real Madrid, and to his patient Penelope, Florentino Pérez.
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The Portuguese coach has been the most controversial figure in the world of football this century; for me, the most repellent and, at the same time, the one that fascinates me the most: the villains in the movie are always the most interesting. But, oh surprise!, the final feeling the series left me with was tenderness. “Tout comprendre –as that one said– c’est tout pardonner”.
The story begins with a boy who adores his dad, first a goalkeeper in professional Portuguese football, then a rather unremarkable coach whom young José tries to help by providing written analyses of his rivals. A stroke of luck takes him to Barcelona, where he goes from being the translator for the English coach Bobby Robson to assistant to the Dutch coach Louis van Gaal.
From there to glory: he wins the Champions League, incredibly, as Porto’s coach. He conquers London, leading Chelsea, and Italy leading Inter Milan. Along the way, he suffers the ignominy of being passed over as a candidate to coach Barça in favor of the rookie Pep Guardiola, but Florentino offers him the opportunity for revenge when two years later he appoints him coach of Madrid.
He loses more than he wins in his confrontations with Guardiola, suffers tremendous humiliations on the field, but in his second season he obtains a league and a cup, which leaves him satisfied. “Mission accomplished –he tells us in the documentary–. We broke Barça’s domination. We killed them.” That single season of triumphs at Madrid, Mourinho stages his leadership style by attempting not to kill Guardiola’s assistant, Tito Vilanova, but to turn him into a Cyclops. He pokes him in the eye.
His third and last season in charge of Madrid, prior to his second coming today, is a disaster. Half the squad turns against him, fed up with the insults he throws at them publicly and privately, forced to always play against Barça as a small team against a big team. Alfredo Relaño, director of the sports newspaper As, writes in his farewell to the Portuguese: “The reality is that Mourinho failed at Madrid… He came to conquer the world and ended up eating something else.”
After Madrid, he begins the second half of his career, a more promiscuous and emptier trajectory. In 13 years he coaches Chelsea, Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbahçe, and Benfica. Result: one English league and a couple of small European trophies. “You don’t make a documentary about a guy who hasn’t won anything,” he tells us, with his usual modesty, but the truth is he has only won the Europa Conference League, the third division of continental football, since 2017.
The Portuguese has been the most repellent figure in football this century and, at the same time, the one that fascinates me the most
However, Florentino signs him anyway. Prisoner of nostalgia, he gives him the miracle of resurrection. So much faith! So much love! And here, dear readers, lies the key to why the documentary about Mourinho ended up making me feel tenderness. 95% of what we hear from his mouth leads us to conclude that Mourinho is a monster. “I’m not nice, nor do I want to be –he says–. For me, anything as long as I don’t lose.” Winning is everything; jogo bonito, a thing for “weaklings”; his football philosophy, “destruction.”
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But there is 5% of the series in which we glimpse that, despite everything, the monster is human. Like everyone, it turns out, what Mourinho pursues most in life is love. There is a moment when he confesses: “Fundamentally I need to feel loved.”
The context in which he said this was the following. After leaving Madrid in 2013, he could choose between returning to Chelsea or replacing the old and venerable Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, a club much bigger by tradition. He chose Chelsea because there he had won almost everything in his first stint, the fans revered him, and there were still players on the squad, interviewed in the documentary, who said they would “die” for him.
The most revealing thing is what Ferguson tells us. Mourinho called him to say that, sorry, but he was rejecting the United offer and was going to Chelsea. “While we talked on the phone he was crying,” says Ferguson.
The final feeling about the coach that the Netflix series left me with was tenderness
There is another moment when tears come to Mourinho’s eyes, towards the end when he is asked about his father, who died in 2017. “You’re pushing me to talk about myself –he stammers to the interviewer–. But I don’t want to.” Curious, that, because, as is well known, there is nothing Mourinho likes more than talking about himself. The truth is he likes to talk when he plays the role of the character he has invented, but not the person of flesh, bone, and tears behind it. However, the interviewer gets one more quote out of him: “My father was the opposite of me, because everyone loved him.”
Forgive me, but in my opinion as an amateur psychoanalyst, the father is decisive in Mourinho’s inner life. He longs for his love more than anything else and his unconscious has told him that the way to achieve it is by being what the father was not, a special guy. And to be a special guy, he convinced himself, the decisive thing would be to forget that virtue his father had of being loved by everyone and become a pursuer of victory at all costs. The importance of the paternal figure is such that he finds it in the veteran Ferguson, before whom, when he has to say no, he cries. He sees a dad in Florentino Pérez and, when he calls him, the prodigal son comes running.
Even his children are secondary to the drive to succeed. There is a moment in the documentary when Mourinho is walking by the sea in Portugal and confesses: “My children enjoy life much more without me.” Devastating and tragic, as has often been the case with characters who have achieved everything in public life and sacrificed everything in the personal realm. Odysseus understood after so much heroism and so many victories that the most important thing in the end was his wife and his son. Mourinho does not. The myth of his character devoured him.
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“I don’t want to change –he confesses to the camera–. It’s too late.”
