ImagePAwouldn’t pay to watch this United team.
More than 50,000 fans had paid top dollar to
do just that.
Mourinho was fighting battles across
several fronts. On a personal level, Old
Trafford staff found him amenable and he
did things people didn’t see, like visiting the
family of a fan who had died in Switzerland
in August 2018. He was the first United
manager to speak to a fanzine in over 15
years, too – and was in superb form when
he spoke.
Mourinho could have cut back and done
the minimum three interviews with rights
holders, but he regularly did over and above
what was expected. Yet his general
reluctance was down to his belief in a media
conspiracy against him, one orchestrated
from London after his time in charge of
Chelsea.
Yet Mourinho had his own way of working,
and once staff were used to that they were
fine with him and considered him a nice guy- not a view shared by all the players,
probably because he was the one who
delivered home truths about their failings.
Jose set the tone during pre-season and it
was a negative one for such an expensively
assembled squad of players. Nemanja Matic,
a relaxed style, as the man benefitting from
a clean slate.
The mood at the club is now
unrecognisable from that immediately
before his return, but things had to change
drastically as it wasn’t just Mourinho’s stock
that had fallen. Fans were running out of
patience with Paul Pogba, brought in as the
man around whom the new United would be
built. Pogba was so hacked off with the
Portuguese and the club that his Twitter
profile showed no evidence that he played
for Manchester United.
For former defender Wes Brown, now back
living in Manchester and attending United
games, the palpable negativity and
dejection was all too familiar. “The manager
was not getting the best out of the players
and I could relate to that situation,” he says.
“I’d been at Sunderland when things weren’t
going well. It can be a negative cycle and the
longer it goes on, the worse it gets. I would
have loved it to work out for Mourinho, but it
clearly wasn’t.”
Before Solskjaer parachuted in, Manchester
United were a mess. Mourinho took much of
the blame for being out of the title race
before the season had got going, but
United’s form started its slide during a
wretched 2018. It began after Jose signed a
new contract in January 2018, which most
fans welcomed. Then came Champions
League elimination in two dreadful last 16
matches against Sevilla, with Mourinho
telling a fan he felt pressured to play Pogba
by the club. The Frenchman showed his
frustration and would probably have joined
Barcelona had they not already spent so
much money on Philippe Coutinho.
Despite all this, United finished 2nd last
season, which Mourinho rates as one of his
greatest achievements, but the campaign
played out with poor away displays against
Brighton and West Ham before United fell
tamely to Chelsea in May’s FA Cup final. The
hangover continued into a pre-season which
Mourinho turned into a PR disaster.
In Michigan last July, before Liverpool beat
a depleted United side 4-1 in front of
101,000 fans, a smiling, singing Jurgen
Klopp mixed with hardcore Liverpool
supporters who had crossed the Atlantic
the night before the game. That contrasted
with Mourinho, who rejected any media
beyond those he was contractually obliged
to undertake.
When he did get in front of the press
at Ann Arbor, he publicly said that heAbove Solskjaer
won over the
Stretford End with
91 league goalsFourFourTwo.com The Managers 101OLE GUnnA R
SOLSKJAER