Circus Mourinho is also running at full speed at Roma: ‘He sees through the whole game’ | NOW

With AS Roma, Feyenoord will also meet the world’s most famous trainer: José Mourinho in the final of the Conference League. Although the Portuguese has been waiting for a prize for five years, he remains as eccentric as ever, also with the European sub-topper Roma. “He feels bigger than the club and then all his mechanisms kick in.”

The current Roma season offers Mourinho in all its guises: he whines that he has a “mediocre squad”, applauds the box for minutes with the fanatic fans, refuses to answer questions from journalists after a defeat, bursts into tears after reaching of the Conference League finals and regularly quarrels with referees, whom he then mercilessly burns in the press.

The low point is the telephone gesture that Mourinho makes to referee Luca Pairetto in February in the league match against Hellas Verona (2-2). He is referring to Pairetto’s father, who was involved in the match-fixing scandal in 2006. He faces a two-game suspension.

Circus Mourinho is also running at full speed at AS Roma, where he surprisingly settled last summer. But his status as a prize-winner is slowly crumbling: the Europa League with Manchester United in 2017 is the last prize of the former success coach of FC Porto, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Internazionale.

“He has not appealed to the imagination for a few years now. At his previous clubs Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur he has no longer performed at the level that we are used to,” said Emile Schelvis, commentator at Ziggo Sport and expert on the sport. Italian football.

“But now he feels that he is bigger than the club. He sees through the whole game: he is highly intelligent. He has trained clubs hundreds of times bigger than Mourinho will ever become, but the other clubs surrender to him. Dan strikes.” Then he gets under the skin of players, board members and media and the whole circus starts.”

Beloved psychologist among players

Although Mourinho is anything but undisputed in the football world, players are running away en masse with the Portuguese coach, who entered top football in the 1990s as a translator of Sir Bobby Robson. He gives them all the freedom, as long as they perform on the field.

Wesley Sneijder says in his biography that players at Internazionale were even allowed to smoke and drink. “Then he walked by and you got a hard tap on your cheek. ‘Walk two laps, then go home and get to work super fit tomorrow!’ got you then.”

Mourinho also regularly sends his players on holiday. Moreover, on the plane he is not seated in the front with the board members, as trainers usually do, but in the back with the players. It turns out to be a recipe for success: in 2010 he won the Champions League, the league title and the cup with Internazionale. In this way he also brings unprecedented success to FC Porto and Chelsea.

According to Schelvis, Mourinho is the most successful top coach who uses psychology. In the biography written by Kees Jansma, Sneijder cites as an example the diptych with the unapproachable FC Barcelona in the semi-finals of the Champions League. “We were deeply impressed by that team. We had won at home (2-1) and away (0-1) from Chelsea in the quarterfinals, but Barcelona? That seemed too much to ask.”

“Mourinho felt that. At the beginning of his meeting, we were all still a bit slumped. But he went all out, with images, with analyses, with voting power. It was only about the weaknesses of Barcelona, ​​the vulnerability in the transition, that sort of thing. His story actually revolved around our self-confidence and we sat up more and more. In the rooms we told each other we were going to win.”

‘At Roma they love Mourinho’

Mourinho was appointed to Roma last summer with much fanfare: who else but ‘The Special One’ could give something to the millions of yearning fans from Rome? After all, the national title from 2001 is the last prize of the ‘Giallorossi’.

But the result in the first season is rather meager: Roma finished in sixth place in Serie A, good for Europa League football. That while the goal was to qualify for the Champions League and Mourinho was able to invest more than 100 million euros in the selection. In the Conference League, Roma even went up against the puny FK Bodø/Glimt twice, including the humiliating 6-1 defeat in Norway.

Despite the lesser performances, Mourinho has not been under pressure for a moment. “When he loses, the fans always stand behind him,” said Massimo Cecchini, AS Roma follower for the Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport. “They think it’s impossible to win anything if even Mourinho can’t do it. They love him.”

Schelvis nevertheless sees Mourinho descend further and further, having previously been fired from Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur. “Last season I even started to wonder if he is still the great Mourinho and not a caricature of himself. He is constantly fighting the arbitration. It is never boring, he always has a story. But you must also see that Roma fail every time at the important moments.”

According to Schelvis, the Conference League is therefore a “godsend” for Mourinho and Roma, who have never won a European top prize. “He turned the final against Feyenoord into a benchmark in Roma history so that he can give the people of Rome what they crave. And most importantly, that he can do it.”