Mourinho returned to Chelsea a seemingly changed man in 2013, declaring himself “the happy one” following a spell at Real Madrid during which the atmosphere at the club had been tense at best and quite often poisonous. He spoke of staying at Stamford Bridge for 12 years - leaving just enough time to coach at a World Cup before he retired - and claimed he would have failed if the likes of Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Dominic Solanke did not go on to become fully fledged England internationals.The question that came to mind in response to these vows was not so much whether or not Mourinho could deliver on them but how long it would take for them to unravel. The public hostility was back before long, Loftus-Cheek and Solanke’s prospects hardly changed and the Portuguese departed some months before the three-year mark that usually signals his exit.
Mourinho will surely learn lessons from the way things disintegrated at Chelsea, but by and large it would be unwise to expect him to be anything other than the manager he has always been at United. On the back of three miserable seasons since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson, the flaws will be tolerable for most at Old Trafford if he wins. For others - including Eric Cantona and, seemingly, some members of the United board - Mourinho is just not a fit.
One of the biggest concerns is his track record - or lack thereof - of developing young players. Mourinho has always been very defensive on this topic and some newspaper reports have claimed it bothered him that he might be overlooked for the United job because of it. “Any time I have had young players with the ability to become top players and play for the first team, any time I had that, I picked them,” he once said. “I did it everywhere I worked.”
The latest stick that is being used to beat him on the youth development front is Kevin De Bruyne, who Mourinho sold to Wolfsburg for approximately a third of what Manchester City paid to sign him two years later. De Bruyne will be the star of Pep Guardiola’s team at the Etihad Stadium and if the first Manchester derby of the season does not go Mourinho’s way the headlines will write themselves.
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De Bruyne’s sale was a blunder, but it does not really hold up as an example of a consistent shortcoming. At Porto, Mourinho put Carlos Alberto, a teenager, at the forefront of their 2003-04 success in the Champions League. Raphael Varane and Kurt Zouma have cemented their reputation as rising stars under his management. Alvaro Morata played the full 90 minutes of a Clasico in 2013 and Davide Santon broke into the Inter first team at age 17.
These players were not handed chances because Mourinho was planning some kind of bright future - Carlos Alberto never had a better season - but because he judged them as his best hope of winning a particular game. Mourinho’s vision does not extend any further. It works both ways; as much as it can hold back young players, it also results in decisions such as John Terry’s substitution for Zouma during Chelsea’s humiliation at Manchester City in August.
This means Anthony Martial will be fine, and Marcus Rashford has probably shown enough to capture Mourinho’s attention as well. It might be more cause for concern for the likes of Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and the next crop of prospects hoping to be given a first-team opportunity. One infamous Mourinho quote sums up his thought process: “[Young players] don’t need five matches in a row. You need 10 minutes. In 10 minutes you can show me if you are ready or if you are not ready. Zouma didn’t have five matches in a row.”
That is quite clearly nonsense, and what Mourinho really means is that he is not willing to put the next five matches at risk for a pay-off in a hundred after that.
Whether that is the right policy for United is up for debate. On the one hand, they cannot afford to keep slipping away from English football’s top table as they have done over the past three seasons. On the other, quick fixes have not worked and it is the likes of Rashford and Jesse Lingard who have started to restore some semblance of an identity to the team over the past few months. A signing like Zlatan Ibrahimovic might put them back in the Premier League title race, but they still would not hold a candle to Barcelona or Bayern Munich.
In that respect, Mourinho’s appointment shows that the scale of the ambition of United’s decision-makers has changed. David Moyes was brought in to rebuild and continue the Ferguson dynasty; Louis van Gaal was supposed to speed things up a bit without losing sight of the club’s core principles. Now, United simply want to win again.
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