Jose Mourinho once told me that if you are unhappy with a player, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, you have to know their personality and know what buttons to push.
“If it’s John Terry, then I might get in his face, shout at him and tell him he’s a [expletive],” he said to me and Gianluca Vialli when we were writing “The Italian Job.” “But if it’s William Gallas, I can’t do that. I will lose him if I do that. I might need to put my arm around him, be supportive, reach him in a different way.”
You wonder what then Mourinho would make of himself today if he could time travel and meet his future self, 13 years into the future.
(Or if somehow, to go all Charles Dickens for a minute, the ghost of his long-time assistant Rui Faria were to materialize one night in Mourinho’s suite at The Lowry Hotel and take him to meet the Ghosts of Jose Past, Jose Present and Jose Yet to Come.)
My guess is that his younger self would wonder what the heck the older version is doing.
Of course, it is not as if 2005 Mourinho was a saint. He could be as Machiavellian as anyone.
In that sense, he might even have approved of the execution of the latest Paul Pogba bust-up and the way it was orchestrated. Because let’s be clear, however you feel about Pogba, this was stage-managed.
Start with the fact that there is no such thing as the “vice captaincy” or “second captaincy” at Manchester United. The club captain is Antonio Valencia, and in his absence, Pogba has worn the armband on several occasions. But so too have other players; in fact, Mourinho said in the summer that a whole range of guys — from Chris Smalling to Juan Mata to Ashley Young — would be captain when Valencia was not around.
Mourinho rightly knows the armband is just a piece of cloth: If you are not a leader, it will not turn you into one. Equally, though, by announcing Pogba does not have the traits of a captain, the United manager is not only humiliating him but going further by taking away a second captaincy that doesn’t actually exist. The only purpose served was to make the point that Pogba is unfit to lead.
The 2005 Mourinho would have been on board with that and might have said exactly the same thing. Except, you would imagine, he would have done it in private and to Pogba’s face because, unless the player had some unusual inclination toward public humiliation, that is not the way to motivate performance.
And what happened on Tuesday was a public humiliation. While it might have taken place within the Carrington training ground, it was in front of Pogba’s peers and teammates; when something like that happens in front of so many people, it is pretty much guaranteed to leak out.
Mourinho has been around long enough to know that, and what is more is the quote that “players were happy with the decision” offers a clear clue that the leak did not come from Pogba’s end. It was designed to get out and have maximum resonance.
And just in case anyone missed the point, the following day only reinforced things when video emerged of a tense exchange between Mourinho and Pogba. Rights holders are allowed to film training once a month and they only get 15 minutes. Club press officers babysit the camera operators, so the coaching staff are fully aware when they turn up and when they leave.
You can even throw in the story, which by sheer coincidence appeared on Thursday, that Pogba marched into executive vice chairman Ed Woodward’s office just before the club’s opening game of the season and told him he had agreed personal terms with Barcelona and wanted to leave.
(What’s more, it does not ring true. Pogba’s agent Mino Raiola is paid when deals are done and demanding a move hours before the Premier League transfer window closes is not the way to do that. From the United perspective, there would be no time to find a replacement, and they are under no financial pressure to sell. Barcelona, meanwhile, had spent $70 million to add Arthur and Arturo Vidal to add numbers to an already deep pool of central midfielders.)
Once again, the 2005 Mourinho might have approved of all this. However, he would have been befuddled by the end game. After all, old school Mourinho knew not to pick fights he was unlikely to win, just as Machiavelli instructs.
Indeed, it is difficult to even define victory in this case.