The Special One: Why José Mourinho Still Fascinates Football
- Vismay Bisht
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Netflix's new three-part documentary premieres weeks after its subject returned to the club that made him a legend. A look at why football still can't look away from José Mourinho and why, at 63, he's determined to prove it never should.
José Mourinho returned to Valdebebas, Real Madrid’s training center, on a Friday of mid-July as the manager of the team for the first time since 2013. "This is a mission for me," he said to Real Madrid TV in just five words which explained everything about the significance of the next challenge for him. 13 years ago, he had left that building amid the fallout with the captain of the team, Iker Casillas, and other players who were tired of pretenses. Now he was back: at 63 years of age and hired by a club president whose re-election campaign partly depended on bringing him back.
That same week, Netflix released a minute-long teaser for MOURINHO, a three-part documentary about his career. In it, he walks a camera crew through a private trophy room a replica Premier League trophy, a pair of Diego Maradona's signed boots, Cristiano Ronaldo's first professional shirt hanging like a relic and offers his own explanation for why anyone bothered making the film at all: "You don't do a documentary with a guy that wins nothing." It's the kind of line that makes you wonder whether he's confirming his reputation or performing it. With Mourinho, that has always been the joke, and always the point.
MOURINHO premieres globally on 11 August, ten days after Real Madrid's pre-season friendly against Fiorentina in Austria and a month after Mourinho took his old office back. The timing is mostly coincidence filming reportedly began around two years ago, well before anyone at the Bernabéu was seriously discussing a second Mourinho era. But coincidence has a habit of finding him. Few managers' lives arrange themselves into such convenient chapters.
Twenty years, four countries, one nickname
In order to know the reason behind a huge streamer employing a film producer who is an Oscar winner as well as a BAFTA-nominated director to work for two years on the football coach, one should look back to May 2004, when a football manager who was known by hardly anyone except for Portuguese fans managed to lead FC Porto to the final of the Champions League. For that, he had to beat Manchester United in the last sixteen, the match during which the world saw him run from one end of the Old Trafford pitch to the other after Costinha's last minute goal. Ten years ago, he used to be a translator both for Sir Bobby Robson in Sporting Lisbon and Porto, and for Louis van Gaal at Barcelona. By 2002 he had his own job at Porto.
By 2004 he had a European Cup.
Chelsea hired him within weeks. At his unveiling, he told the assembled press that he was a European champion and, in his own words, a special one. The nickname stuck because the results did too: two Premier League titles in his first two seasons, at a club that had won exactly one league title in the previous fifty years. His defence, built around Petr Čech, John Terry and a holding midfielder named Claude Makélélé, conceded barely a goal a game. Makélélé's role became so identified with that team that pundits started calling the position itself "the Makélélé role." Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba became the attacking faces of a club that had spent decades as London's nearly-men. After Mourinho, winning became Chelsea's baseline expectation, not its exception.
Every stop followed some version of the same pattern: arrive somewhere underachieving or unsettled, impose an unusual degree of control over environment and psychology, win quickly. At Inter Milan he inherited a talented, trophy-starved squad built around Javier Zanetti and Samuel Eto'o and turned them, in 2010, into the first Italian club to complete the continental treble Serie A, Coppa Italia and the Champions League, sealed by a backs-to-the-wall semi-final win over Pep Guardiola's Barcelona. At Real Madrid, in his first spell, he built a team around Cristiano Ronaldo, Iker Casillas and Mesut Özil that won the 2011-12 La Liga title with 100 points, the first team in the competition's history to reach that mark and the only La Liga title Real Madrid won while Guardiola was in charge at Barcelona.
Each of those achievements changed something structural, not just decorative. Porto proved a club without financial power could out-organise richer opponents over two legs. Chelsea proved a newly wealthy club could buy a culture, not just players. Inter proved disciplined counter-attacking could still beat the best passing side in the world on the night that mattered. Real Madrid's 100 points proved that even Guardiola's Barcelona, then arguably the greatest club side in history, could be out-hustled for a single, brutal season.
What followed proved to be more complicated, and a good faith documentary can never ignore the facts. A second league title at Chelsea in 2015 ended in his dismissal by December. A Europa League victory at Manchester United in 2017 was certainly a great accomplishment; however, a smaller one compared to his previous two Champions League trophies before he was fired in the middle of his third year there. Tottenham fired him six days before the League Cup final. At Roma, he claimed the first ever trophy for the club in Europe, the UEFA Conference League, in 2022, and a year later lost a Europa League final on penalties before getting fired during the first part of his third season there. At Fenerbahçe, he repeated the old problem which plagued the team for years: finishing in second place after Galatasaray in the league. At Benfica, in what appeared to be a send-off tour, he managed something rare indeed: remained unbeaten throughout the whole 34 games league season winning 23 and drawing 11 times to end up in third place because of too many draws. It's one of the strangest lines on his CV, and also one of the most Mourinho things to ever happen to him: a manager whose whole identity rests on not losing, discovering that not losing isn't the same as winning.
The bus, and what replaced it
None of this is unrelated to the tactical argument that follows him everywhere. For two decades, Mourinho's teams have specialised in what is now called the "low block": banks of defenders sitting deep, conceding territory rather than the ball, waiting to break at pace. It is not a fashionable way to win, and it has increasingly been treated by a certain kind of pundit as football's version of showing bad working, especially once Guardiola's Barcelona and Manchester City made possession and pressing the sport's dominant aesthetic.
But "outdated" is the wrong word for a method that Diego Simeone, Antonio Conte and a good chunk of the Premier League's relegation-survival specialists still lean on every weekend. Football didn't discard the low block; it just stopped calling it innovative. Mourinho's real tactical legacy isn't a formation so much as an argument that has never actually been settled that knockout football rewards nerve and containment as much as it rewards style, and that a manager's first job is to make his players hard to beat before he makes them nice to watch. He remains the only manager to have won all three of UEFA's club competitions the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League partly because that argument keeps winning one-off, high-stakes matches, in eras that insist they've moved past him.
A man who needs an enemy
Mourinho has never separated the tactics from the theatre. He picked fights with Arsène Wenger, once calling him, in a phrase still repeated in pub arguments a decade later, a "specialist in failure." He poked Barcelona's assistant coach in the eye during a touchline brawl in 2011 and never fully lived it down. He has accused referees, federations and entire football associations of conspiring against him sometimes seriously, sometimes as a pressure valve aimed at taking the heat off his own players. It has made him easy to dislike, and, judging by who turned up for the documentary, remarkably easy to stay loyal to. Terry, Drogba, Lampard, Zanetti and Casillas are among more than a dozen former players willing to sit for interviews, joined by peers like Sir Alex Ferguson and by boardroom figures former Inter owner Massimo Moratti, ex-Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon who dealt with him from the other side of the table. People don't usually queue up like that for a man who only ever used them.
That contradiction is the actual subject of MOURINHO, according to Netflix's own description of the project: a portrait of "the winner the game can't live without, and can't always live with."
It's a fair summary of a manager who has now been sacked by four different clubs, often within a year of major success, and hired again by a bigger one almost every time.
What the cameras caught
For lifelong fans, the appeal is straightforward: three episodes of behind-the-scenes footage, feuds relitigated by the people who lived them, and an unusually long sit-down with a man who has spent two decades controlling exactly what the press gets to see. Except the 2004 Porto run, the Inter treble, the Clásico wars against Guardiola and, pointedly, not very much about the last four years, since that chapter is still being written a few miles from wherever the film premieres.
For everyone else, the pitch is broader than football. Mourinho's career is a case study in ambition that refuses to plateau, in the specific loneliness of being the person everyone blames when things go wrong, and in reinvention as a survival skill a 63-year-old who went from a runners-up medal in Turkey to an unbeaten-but-third finish in Portugal to a Bernabéu comeback nobody saw coming, because he refused to accept that his story had reached its natural stopping point. Leadership under pressure, failure absorbed in public, ambition that won't quit: that's a theme with an audience well beyond people who know what a low block is.
The pre-season of Real Madrid begins with a game against Fiorentina in Klagenfurt on 1st August, 10 days before the release of the film and nearly two years since the documentary team began telling this story, which cannot possibly have been planned by anyone so perfectly. The only unknown about this story, which Netflix will never be able to plan in advance, is whether the final act of Real Madrid at the stadium of Bernabéu will end with a Champions League win that he never won for his team, or perhaps another shocking departure masquerading as a consensual one. For two decades now, football has been wondering whether Jose Mourinho is a genius, a RELIC, or both.
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