Jose Mourinho

About the author The author of Johan Cruyff: The Total Voetballer, Ciaran Kelly is a 20-year old football writer from Galway, Ireland. Ciaran just completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History at National University Ireland Galway. He has written weekly for backpagefootball, monthly for Chelsea football clubs fanzine, cfcuk, and has just moved to Twickenham to take one of the 10 places on St Marys Universitys Sports Journalism Masters course. About the book Never has football seen such an intriguing figure: a man who, psychologically and paradoxically, represents much more than the somewhat lazy, marmite notion of love or hate. José Mourinho is a self-made and self-driven tactical innovator, who, even more so than Arsène Wenger, emerged from relative obscurity and a lack of public notoriety to become footballs first acclaimed postmodern manager and one of the greatest football managers of all-time. In just 12 years of management racking up a mightily impressive 69.49 win percentage in this period Mourinho won seven league titles, two Champions Leagues, one UEFA Cup and six domestic cups, and, in 2010, became the first ever FIFA Ballon dOr coaching award winner. So, while his legacy will undoubtedly be boosted by even more trophy hauls after he enters his peak-aged fiftieth year in January, the Portuguese like many undoubted managerial trailblazers who have also had inferiority complexes, such as Béla Guttmann (money, after being brought up in poor circumstances), Helenio Herrera (paranoia) and Brian Clough (fatal playing career injury) has an unsavoury side. With a career filled with moral nadirs, from the Anders Frisk incident in 2005 to his absurd eye-gouge of Tito Pito (Mourinhos nickname for the new Barcelona manager, translating as penis) Villanova in 2011, Mourinho has stopped at nothing to, arguably and purposefully, become sports most controversial figure of the 21st century. This book aims to differentiate Mourinhos undoubted achievements as The Special One from his unsavoury controversies as El Gillipollas (the asshole), but, unsurprisingly, they are intertwined and symbiotic, and manifest themselves in global sports most conflating individual: The Special Paradox.