It’s the day before his first competitive game as Fenerbahce manager and Jose Mourinho has been accosted.
He is heading away from his pre-match press conference for the Champions League second-round qualifier against Lugano of Switzerland when he’s stopped by a man named Kai, a technician with the local media. Kai presents him with a large piece of art, depicting Mourinho with his two children. From the look of his hair in the picture, it’s based on an image that is probably at least 15 years old.
Mourinho looks slightly baffled at first, joking that he thought Kai, with his big mass of curly hair “was (Marc) Cucurella”. But he does actually seem relatively touched (well: half touched, half amused) and gets someone else to take a picture of him and Kai holding the art.
“He’s the Special One!” says Kai afterwards, and he genuinely did say that. “Usually you can’t get near someone like him, so I just wanted to show him he’s appreciated and give him some of my art.”
The Athletic regrets to inform you that Mourinho didn’t actually take the piece with him. There’s a brief conversation about framing it, but Kai goes back to his work with the art under his arm. I hope he gets it to him somehow.
Jose Mourinho and Kai, with his piece of artwork (Nick Miller/The Athletic)
If nothing else, this illustrates that Mourinho still engenders a peculiar brand of fascination. You can say you don’t if you like, but you did click on this article. You must be keen to find out something about him, even if you think you’re rubbernecking at the wreckage of a once great career. He is still compelling, sometimes in a grim way, sometimes through flashes of the old Jose, the occasional flicker of a fading sun.
The classic perception of Turkish football is that it is a pseudo retirement home, a place for players who aren’t quite up to the top leagues anymore. It is a little unfair, but there is some truth to it.
As such, it is easy to think that Mourinho accepting the Fenerbahce role — five months after Roma sacked him — is an admission that he just can’t hack the big jobs anymore. At 61, with a hall-of-fame CV in his past, he has retreated to a relative footballing backwater for the same reason that all those players have.
The other way of looking at it is that it’s incredible he hasn’t managed in Turkey before. This is a footballing country that thrives on chaos and conflict, which fosters paranoia and a sense of injustice that isn’t always pretty to watch but is viscerally thrilling.
Is this part of his decline, or is it where he’s always meant to be?
GO DEEPER
A presidential election, lack of offers but plenty of passion – why Mourinho ended up at Fenerbahce
This is technically the earliest point in a season, by the calendar at least, that Mourinho has taken charge of a competitive game, though he has managed at a similar stage before: his Tottenham Hotspur side played Bulgaria’s Lokomotiv Plovdiv in the Europa League second qualifying round in 2020-21.
Still, rather than feeling self-conscious about a man of his reputation participating at such an early stage, he spun it as a positive. “I don’t like friendlies,” he said the day before the game. “We train to play matches. And tomorrow we have a match.”
Lugano’s 6,300-capacity stadium was deemed unacceptable by UEFA for such an occasion, so the game is held 135 miles away in Thun, just south of Bern. Thun is a delightful, quiet lakeside town. It is the sort of place where a bus driver can stop for a chat with a friend without anyone getting annoyed. Try that sort of thing in London, Rome, Milan or Madrid and see how far it gets you.
The Storkhorn Arena, the venue for this game and home of FC Thun, who play in the Swiss second tier, is a curious place. New, out of town, theoretically picturesque given that it is surrounded by cloud-tipped mountains, but you have to walk around the shopping centre that is part of the same complex to actually see those mountains.
Despite this technically being the home game of the two-legged tie for Lugano, their supporters are massively outnumbered. Two and a half hours before kick-off, a few hundred Fenerbahce fans are already waiting for their team to arrive (although they’re ultimately disappointed: Jose et al are smuggled in via an underground entrance). At one point, a small group wearing the shirts of Galatasaray, Fenerbahce’s fierce rivals, turn up and are initially booed, but then briefly applauded.
Fenerbahce fans gather at Thun’s Storkhorn Arena (Nick Miller/The Athletic)
This early arrival isn’t necessarily an expression of pro-Mourinho enthusiasm: this is just what Fenerbahce fans specifically, and Turkish football fans generally, are like. Still, there is a sense of incredulity that Mourinho is at their club: he is their first manager with a Champions League/European Cup title on his CV since Guus Hiddink in 1990. “It’s an amazing thing for Fenerbahce,” says Okan, one of the fans waiting outside, before offering a warning. “But if he doesn’t win the title, he’ll just end up like all the others.”
Indeed. Mourinho has a tough act to follow. Last season, Fenerbahce won 99 points, the highest total in their history, and it would have been the highest in Turkish Super Lig history had Galatasaray not finished on 102, pipping them to the title. Coach Ismail Kartal might have reasonably expected to get a second crack, but no dice: a week after the season ended, Kartal was shoved out of the back door as Mourinho was welcomed through the front.
Mourinho is here partly as a political pawn, a Hail Mary attempt by club president Ali Koc to finally win a league title. Fenerbahce haven’t been Turkish champions since 2014, the longest dry spell in their history. Koc, from one of the wealthiest families in Turkey, was seen as the man to bring glory back to the Asian side of Istanbul, but his failure to deliver a title could well have seen him voted out at their presidential elections this summer.
Particularly when it was made known that his opponent, former club president Aziz Yildirim, had lined Mourinho up as coach if he won the election. But then, hey presto: Koc, with the help of Hull City owner Acun Ilicali, who is also on the Fenerbahce board, pulled a rabbit from a hat and it emerged that, plot twist, it was he who was talking to Mourinho. A week after Mourinho was unveiled in front of 30,000 fans at Fenerbahce’s Sukru Saracoglu Stadium, Koc was re-elected with 61 per cent of the vote.
When he emerged from the tunnel before the game, Mourinho headed straight to embrace his opposite number, Mattia Croci-Torti.
The Lugano manager is one of Swiss football’s up-and-coming coaches and a lifelong Inter Milan fan, so facing the man who won the treble with them in 2010 carried extra significance. “It will be a source of personal pride to face a coach like him,” Croci-Torti, 42, said before the game, “because it may never happen again.”
Mourinho had some advice for his opposite number Mattia Croci-Torti, the Lugano head coach (Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Those pre-match cordialities were a distant memory when, just before half-time, Fenerbahce were awarded a penalty, which Croci-Torti protested with a little too much vigour for Mourinho’s liking. He stalks up the touchline to remonstrate with his opponent, in the manner of a wise old head telling the hot-headed young thing how one should behave.
“He was like myself when I was younger,” Mourinho says after the game, with a slightly wistful grin. “Speaks too much. Complains too much. It’s the emotion of youth. He was lucky because when I did it, always a red card.”
Before that penalty, Mourinho’s debut hadn’t been going well. Fenerbahce are behind after just four minutes, with some sharp work by Ayman El Wafi putting Lugano in front. On the touchline, Mourinho’s frustration grows — 12 minutes in, his hands are on his hips in the manner of a disappointed mother after Jayden Oosterwolde is dispossessed carelessly; his arms are outstretched after the ball is given away in midfield; he shoots an exasperated glance back to his bench when a corner doesn’t beat the first man.
But it’s all fairly low-energy irritation, more the grumblings of an old man tired of life than the sort of raging against the world we remember from Mourinho of days gone by. Until, that is, Dusan Tadic is fouled inside the box on the stroke of half-time for that penalty. Edin Dzeko converts, but it almost feels like it was Mourinho remonstrating with young Croci-Torti that has lit the spark, rather than simply the goal.
Everything is amped up after the break. Mourinho is much more animated and, after some brilliant footwork by Tadic and a perfectly timed run and finish by Dzeko, they’re ahead. For the rest of the game, they’re much more fluent — more than you might expect from a Jose Mourinho side. There’s a brief scare when Lugano equalise, but the 38-year-old Dzeko completes his hat-trick and substitute Ferdi Kadioglu whips one into the bottom corner. They ultimately win 4-3.
“It was a game with seven goals,” Mourinho said after the game. “People like goals,” he added, and there’s a delicious pause where you think he’s going to say, ‘I don’t care for them quite so much myself…’, but he doesn’t. This is, after all, a man who once described an Arsenal vs Tottenham game that finished 5-4 as a “hockey score”.
Mourinho congratulates Ferdi Kadioglu for scoring Fenerbahce’s fourth goal (Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Mourinho doesn’t quite celebrate these goals with the knee slides or coat-flapping dashes of old, but there was a primal roar, particularly from the last two. There are more glimpses of classic Mourinho in his post-match comments, including a lengthy gripe about the artificial pitch — “Honestly, I don’t understand why UEFA allow Champions League games on a plastic pitch” — about Lugano not returning the ball to Fenerbahce following an injury and, of course, about the referee. Mourinho changes, but at his core, he’s still the same old Jose.
When you think about Mourinho managing in a country that is ranked ninth in UEFA’s league coefficients, it is difficult not to remember the time that he sniffily put down Manuel Pellegrini, saying that if Real Madrid were to fire him he would never have to stoop so low as to manage Malaga, as Pellegrini had.
From that perspective, you could be forgiven for revelling in his perceived fall. You could also be forgiven for wondering why he still bothers. He could happily sit back and enjoy retirement, enjoy his money, enjoy life.
Mourinho in a typically forthright mood at the post-match press conference (Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Fenerbahce offers the things that Mourinho appears to need. It’s a colossal club in a city and a country that thrives on all the things he thrives on. It’s a club that uses conflict as fuel, as does he. Watching him during this game — stalking up and down the touchline, yelling at his players, picking a fight with a manager 20 years his junior who is taking charge of his first Champions League game — you realise why he hasn’t given it up. What would he be without it?
Mourinho and Fenerbahce and Turkish football might be the perfect combination. Or they could be a cocktail that blows up with more force than any of them can cope with. It really could go either way.
Mourinho tends to thrive when his club needs him more than he needs them, or at least when he can realistically perceive that to be true. And Fenerbahce need him.
This game won’t be the start of Mourinho’s most glorious era — his great achievements are almost certainly in the past — but it might be the start of Mourinho’s most ‘Mourinho’ era. You get the feeling this is perfect for him.
It’s going to be worth watching, whatever happens.
(Top photo: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu via Getty Images)