The story of Man Utd’s season is of a yesterday’s man of a coach throwing a prolonged tantrum as he didn’t get to throw good money after bad in the transfer window.
Again he couldn’t resist getting in a dig at his central defenders in the Champions’ League group stage post-match interview last night by comparing them unfavourably with Juventus’s. He bought Lindelof and Bailly (who was on the bench).
Mourinho cannot even be in the top 100 coaches when he apparently can’t get a performance out of players he’s spent a third of a billion pounds on. His criticism of players is also entirely driven by his own ego. The two biggest underperformers of the season have been Lukaku and Matic — both players he coached at Chelsea. Matic’s performances have been pretty appalling of late. His strength is meant to be shielding the central defence and playing the ball forward from midfield and these have been Man Utd’s main deficiencies this season. Yet he never gets criticised by his manager.
It seems that commercial considerations overruled ability to manage in the modern game in terms of Man Utd’s choice of coach two years ago. After his murky exit from Chelsea where, amongst other things, he managed to alienate the dressing room, no club with serious footballing ambitions should have touched the egotistical one with a bargepole.
Maybe he’s right in that the club management place success on the field second to social media buzz. However, if they were to change this headline-grabbing attitude the first place to start would be Mourinho’s dismissal.
That’s how it will end sooner or later, why prolong the agony?