The irony underpinning the whole, sorry car crash is that Chelsea told Jose Mourinho, from the moment he returned to them, that they no longer wanted to be the Nasty Party. That he should try to stand for something different, second time around.
He accepted this and it was in part with his own legacy in mind that he told them he wanted no longer to be seen as the bad man, or enemy, of football – albeit with some disquiet in the back of his mind. “I won’t have the same success if I cut out the conflict,” Mourinho said in one of the early conversations with those at the top of Stamford Bridge. They knew that when the pips started to squeak, the so-called Happy One would give way to the Machiavellian One. It would always be one of the “tools in the box,” says one who has seen this unravelling from the inside and points out that nice guys aren’t winners.
No one quite anticipated how relentlessly those implements would be used, though. In one four-week period last spring, Mourinho’s vials of poison were administered to Brendan Rodgers, accused of failing to appreciate his own goalkeeper; Graeme Souness, impugned for his managerial record; Sky Sports, blackballed for providing a critical appraisal; and an unsuspecting Chelsea ballboy, bollocked for throwing a ball to a Manchester City player.
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Mourinho expected to be given £12m severance package by Chelsea
Well, unfortunately for Mourinho, the club were determined to move on, even if he wasn’t. They meant it when they said they actively wanted to represent something positive, as Arsenal and the Manchester clubs do, and you certainly give thanks for that. There’s a contradiction at the heart of Stamford Bridge, you see. When you meet the front-desk staff, become acquainted with the communications staff, encounter the stewards, you discover a club which stands for modernity, dignity, hospitality. And then the manager pops up behind the press conference table and hauls us all the way back to the bad old Chelsea.
The modernity runs all the way through to the way the club conducts its contractual business, actually. Marina Granovskaia, the long-time head of Abramovich’s family office, does its negotiating and, the agents will tell you, has formidable powers in that field and a fierce grasp of financial detail. No more of those Wild West days, with the club being taken to the cleaners. As the Eva Carneiro saga deepened last autumn, with Mourinho incapable of contrition, you wondered how on earth Granovskaia felt about the unreconstructed image of Chelsea it was creating.
The search for something better is bigger than Mourinho. That much was clear when, having told Petr Cech that he would be allowed to leave for the club of his choice if he gave them one more year’s service, Roman Abramovich sanctioned it being Arsenal – even though Mourinho hated that. And when, as Manchester City’s opaque accountancy work left them in default of Uefa’s financial fair play regime, Chelsea accepted its spirit – even though it meant selling André Schürrle to buy Juan Cuadrado, catastrophic though that calculation proved to be.