DEVOTED viewers of The Simpsons have strong opinions about when the series peaked and the general consensus is in or around the 10th season. It’s possible to make a similar assessment about Jose Mourinho. His 10th campaign as a football manager was 2009-10, the season he took Inter to a historic treble.
The Champions League semi-final was his masterclass, the point to which everything in the 2000s had been leading. The 15 goals Chelsea let in during the 2004-05 Premier League season hinted at how much control a Mourinho team could exert, and for the remainder of the decade at Chelsea and Inter, his dominance seemed like it would, well, dominate the sport forever.
I re-watched The Simpsons and charted its decline.
(Based on my episode ratings out of 10). pic.twitter.com/JFkvVlFiOB
— Sol Harris (@solmaquina) June 23, 2017
Let your mind’s eye conjure up a Chelsea game from the mid-2000s under Mourinho. They’re 2-0 up. Somehow it feels like they began games 2-0 up. If they didn’t then Mourinho would usually make a triple substitution after about 23 minutes. Job done. 2-0. No danger. But sometimes your memory can play tricks: 44.7% of Mourinho’s Premier League wins at Chelsea were by a single goal, a higher proportion than in any of his subsequent spells in the competition, although he came close at Tottenham.
But there the similarities end. At Chelsea, with that defence, a single goal lead was akin to a concrete wall for their opponents. At Tottenham, he didn’t have that luxury and Mourinho’s repeated attempts to shut down games once Spurs had taken the lead invariably backfired. In his two partial campaigns at the club Tottenham threw away 27 points from a winning position, a figure beaten only by south coast calamity brothers-in-arms Brighton and Southampton. Mourinho was trying to play hits from the mid-2000s only to find that the game has moved on. 11 points dropped from goals scored in the last 10 minutes this season, too. Just because you know something’s coming, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Sometimes people accuse football analytics of trying to overcomplicate football but in reality something like expected goals has managed to distil the game into one simple task, which I like to call “keep the heroic red worm above the evil purple worm”. 10 game rolling xG is a nice way to see a team’s actual form at any point in a time period and Tottenham’s for the last six seasons is, when you look a bit closer, a sad story of a team who deserved to win a big trophy, namely the Premier League title. Or maybe the Champions League. But not under Mourinho.
Leicester’s principal challengers in 2015-16, Spurs under Mauricio Pochettino kept that blessed red worm above or level with the purple one from early that season all the way through to the start of 2019-20. Then he paid with his job and Jose Mourinho came in to replace him. From having it all to having nothing. Mourinho had an initial bounce but by the closing nine games of last season the Tottenham defence had become incredibly generous, averaging almost 2.0 xG conceded for a spell long enough to inform even the most casual of observers that this was not a team ready to challenge for honours.
And yet Tottenham found themselves on top of the Premier League in the autumn. In a pandemic-hit season people wondered if the conditions were right again for Mourinho’s brand of practical football. People wondered a lot of things in late 2020: would the Premier League goals per game record be shattered? (no). Would we see close to 300 penalties in a season? (no). Were Manchester City finished under Pep Guardiola? (also no). A season that was looking like no other has turned out to be much more familiar than we thought. And that includes yet another modern campaign where Jose Mourinho’s football just didn’t cut it.
In all competitions this season Mourinho lost 13 games, more than in any season in his 20-year career. In his first 12 years he never reached double figures, then he lost 11 in his final campaign at Real Madrid. Since then only the 2014-15 season with Chelsea (four defeats in 54 games) has looked like classic Mourinho. The following season he lost 11 of 25 in one of the most baffling downturns of form in the modern game. He returned, to the Manchester United job he craved, and, yes, won two trophies in his first season there but at no point has Mourinho dominated football in the way he did in in the 2000s. People used to tune in for the reactions of the Special One, but somewhere along the way he became just reactive and you wonder if we’ll ever see him on a Premier League touchline again. He should have tried going 2-0 up a bit more often.
