Mourinho Criticising his Players could Force Chelsea to Sack him as Manager
While that was happening, stock was being taken further up the food chain.
The club's rationale this season, as things went from bad to worse, had been that -- while Chelsea would revisit the situation in December -- Mourinho was bound to turn it around.
By the end of September and the 2-2 draw away to Newcastle, the talk inside the club was that he could still win the title (they were eight points back at the time). By mid-November, during the international break that followed the defeat at Stoke, the message was that they could still get into the Champions League (at that stage they were 13 points out of fourth place).
After the defeat to Bournemouth some 10 days ago, the message changed. Effectively, it became a question of: How bad can things realistically get? What's the worst case scenario? How confident are we that replacing him in midseason would substantially improve the situation this year?
The thinking was that the worst that could happen -- once Porto had been dispatched and a place in the knockout phase of the Champions League had been secured -- was a bottom-half finish. Maybe twelfth, possibly as low as fifteenth. The season would peter out in disappointment. Mourinho himself would resign, and, if he didn't, nobody would fault Chelsea for making a change.
Even if those at Chelsea did bring in a new boss, how much of an improvement could he really produce? Chelsea were on pace for 38 points. If a new manager were twice as effective as Mourinho through the rest of the campaign -- and that's a huge ask -- they'd end up with 61 points. That's basically seventh or eighth place, which would still equal an unmitigated flop of a season.
That rationale might have changed somewhat after Monday night's defeat to Leicester, when Mourinho shared his postmatch thoughts. There was another scenario, one worse than anyone had imagined: that Mourinho would fall out with his players and start burning bridges.
It's not something that had been contemplated, because, other than the end of his time at Real Madrid, Mourinho had always been a player's coach. Even the situation at the Bernabeu was quite different. In Madrid, there was a core of high-profile, veteran personalities who had experienced plenty of success without him and an animosity that grew over time and went beyond mere performance on the pitch.
This is different. The bulk of the Chelsea squad is made up of either younger players or guys who lack the stature, inclination and gravitas to challenge Mourinho the way he'd been challenged in Madrid.
With his sarcastic comments over Eden Hazard's injury, with the talk that the players had "betrayed his work," with the comment that his "phenomenal" performance last year led them to overachieve and this is what they're really like.
That postmatch routine was a game-changer.
It's one thing to lose games. It's another to question your own players' guts, loyalty and quality. This wasn't from the Mourinho playbook: even when things got bad, he generally always defended the players as a group in public (though occasionally he might have questioned individuals, and goodness knows what he did in private). This was something else entirely.
Has Mourinho damaged relationships beyond repair? It's a legitimate concern. If the likes of John Terry, Diego Costa, Nemanja Matic or Hazard stop buying what Mourinho is selling, it will damage performances.
But there's another side effect to Mourinho's postmatch interview that is far more of concern. It's one thing for a group of talented players to underachieve and have a bad season. It's another for them to have an equally poor campaign but also be singled out by their manager for their inadequacies. Especially if, as appears inevitable, Chelsea will be rebuilding in the summer and they'll be doing it under Financial Fair Play regulations.
Six months ago, a guy like Hazard might have easily fetched north of $100 million and Costa maybe two-thirds of that. A poor campaign would obviously depress those numbers. But if you throw in the notion that they might be bad eggs as well, it hurts them even further. That's the spanner Mourinho threw in the works Monday night. That's what, potentially, moves the needle from "keep" to "reconsider".
Name-brand managers -- whether they're Carlo Ancelotti or Diego Simeone or Pep Guardiola -- demand, to varying degrees, some level of investment when they join new clubs. Otherwise, they stay put or, if they're unattached, they opt for the guys who are willing to wheel and deal.
That's the new variable Chelsea are now forced to consider. That the situation degenerates to the point that their assets -- i.e., the playing squad -- becomes far more damaged than it otherwise would be, because their manager shifts the blame on them.
That's what could force their hand if there aren't distinct signs of improvement. Not just in terms of results -- there's only so much they can improve -- but crucially in terms of relationships.
It would take a phalanx of psychoanalysts or maybe even a Vulcan mind meld to figure out what Mourinho was thinking Monday night. There are still those who contend that actually all of this is part of some kind of Jose master plan, a psychological ploy aimed at getting a reaction out of his players. One of those situations -- straight out of made-for-TV high school sports epics -- where the coach tells the players how much they've let him down and how they'll never amount to anything. This hurts their feelings, and then they get angry, and then they bond, find the determination to prove him wrong and go on to win the state title.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
You can't help but think back to Inter manager Marcello Lippi and a comparable outburst in October of 2000, following a defeat at Reggina.
"I'm ashamed of this team," he said. "What would I do if I were the president? I'd sack the coach, first and foremost. And then I'd take all the players, line them up against the wall, and kick their a---s, one by one."
Inter president Massimo Moratti only took part of his advice, but he took it literally. Lippi was fired a few days later. The players stuck around, because, well, they're tougher to sack. But also because they're assets on a balance sheet, and you need to protect your assets.
That's where Chelsea are heading unless this entire soap opera is either a Mourinho mind trick or he manages to fix those relationships in double-quick time.
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