So, after submitting 16 resignation drafts, José Mourinho finally got Roman Abramovich to accept one.
You can just feel the panic ripple this must be spreading amongst Fleet Street’s Sports Editors, I would imagine their offices are reminiscent of the scene from Arthur where Liza Minnelli breaks the news to her father that multi millionaire Dudley Moore’s jilted her. Harry Redknapp’s been unemployable since most top flight football chairmen finally realised that Kevin Bond’s mastery of the training cone was not quite at the forefront of tactical innovation, Tim Sherwood was last seen disappearing up his own rectum and now christmas has been utterly ruined for English football journalists everywhere by the removal of the undisputed heavyweight champion of the soundbite. 22 weeks of LVG matter-of-factly explaining the meaning of existential football realism beckons.
What next for Chelsea in a moment, the real burning issue is what next for Mourinho. Here is a guy who you get the impression has been working a life time career play book since the age of 6. He knows his high intensity methodology for success has a limited life span of about 3 years, he knows that football is cyclical and managers of the top clubs have to win the league and Champions League double every year to last longer than 2 or 3 years anyway. He knows the score, he gets with the program and he knows how to play it.
Anyone thinking they were seeing a new, emotionally fractured Mourinho, behaving bizarrely, going out of his way to alienate even the most loyal of his playing foot soldiers, clearly had missed his three year tenure at Real Madrid.
He walks away a champion, again, and with (possibly) the biggest payoff in football history, again.
But why ? Where’s left for the man who needs to mainline winning into his veins. Who can offer that and keep him in the ever ludicrously increasing salary to which he has become accustomed.
Real Madrid are a basket case right now, but I don’t think even they could pay him enough to take that most poisoned of chalices again.
Berlusconi (AC Milan) would probably chop off his own todgerino if it meant he could persuade Mourinho to go there and with new investment coming in and the Italian league very open right now it wouldn’t be a terrible match. But enough investment ? Enough salary ? I don’t think so.
But I think there is a much more tempting proposition out there for Mourinho, a (possibly the only) team that can afford his gargantuan pay demands, guarantee to feed his title winning addiction, offer him no conflict of loyalty interest, as jobs at other English clubs, Inter, Barca, Atletico (should Chelsea fancy swapping for Simeone) would, very obliging owners when it comes to recruitment (none of this “we want to be self sufficient” nonsense spouted by Bruce Buck) and life in one of the few cities he could possibly sell to Mrs Mourinho as an even better place to spend some of that colossal housekeeping allowance. In return, PSG get to move their profile at least one more rung up the kudos ladder and get one of the few managers they know can go toe to toe with any of the big boys over two legs and provide them a chance of winning the Champions League, the only way they can truly join the old boys elite club.
Suivant Paris St Germain ?
As for Chelsea, Hiddink’s current out of work status is an interim match made in heaven and would please or at least pacify all parties including most of the fans. Then who ? I can’t see Guardiola going for a bunch of what he perceives as new money upstarts, it really isn’t part of his career play book, and it’s hard to imagine a top club who’s footballing philosophy has been more anathema to his puritanical footballing ideology. Surely his eyes are set more on the footballing blue blooded heraldry of the United job, where LVG is already laying the ticky tacky groundwork.
Simeone would be the perfect philosophy fit. A man after Mourinho’s own high intensity, death by brutal pragmatism heart.
Let the musical chairs begin.
forensic onions 