‘You don’t want to make me cry, because I don’t want.’ There is then a long pause as an uncomfortable Jose Mourinho looks around, taps the table, and attempts to suppress his emotions.
This is Mourinho as we have never seen him before.
The 63-year-old had just been asked about how he processed the death of his father while he was manager of Manchester United in 2017. He fights back the tears for as long as he can, battling to keep his enigmatic personal persona intact.
This is something that Mourinho tries to do throughout his new hit three-part docu-series on Netflix. The legendary manager wants to give football fans an insight into his outrageously successful career on the touchline, which has seen him win 26 major trophies across England, Spain, Portugal and Italy, rather than delve into his private life.
Speaking in the latter stages of the documentary, Mourinho says: ‘People think they know me, but they don’t know me. And I’m happy they don’t. It’s a privilege for the people that know me.
‘You want to do a documentary because of my career. You don’t do a documentary with a guy that win nothing in football.’
Jose Mourinho shows vulnerability like never before in his new Netflix docu-series
The documentary goes through the higs and lows of Mourinho’s life and career
Mourinho is right; there is no world in which he would be sat on a sofa in his luxurious mansion, with the sunshine beating down on his swimming pool in the background (a Netflix cameraman’s dream setting) and be speaking to director Joe Pearlman if he had not achieved what he has done in his trophy-laden 30-year coaching career. That said, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know what makes him tick.
Pearlman, who has directed documentaries about pop stars Robbie Williams and Lewis Capaldi, and BECKHAM producer John Battsek do an exemplary job of respecting Mourinho’s wishes to maintain his privacy while also providing a window into Jose the man and what he has been through.
From how his children ‘enjoy life more without me’ to how his father shaped the person he is, the docu-series showed us a more vulnerable Mourinho than he has ever allowed us to see previously.
Now, these small snippets are only really delved into toward the end of the final episode. The majority of the show takes us through the box office rollercoaster of a career Mourinho has had in the beautiful game. And boy, does it do a great job.
To make a sporting documentary enjoyable, it needs heaps of insight from those closest to the subject, untold anecdotes and exclusive information we haven’t heard before. MOURINHO ticks all three of these boxes, and some.
It has bucketloads of insight from the likes of Frank Lampard, John Terry, Sir Alex Ferguson, Iker Casillas, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and that’s just to name a few. These household names show just what a mammoth impact Mourinho has had on the game. I mean, they aren’t exactly nobodies, are they?
Not all of them drop in to shower the manager with compliments and praise. Former Real Madrid captain Casillas spoke of the ‘very cold’ relationship he had with Mourinho and how it was ‘taken to a limit’ during his first tenure.
This is Mourinho, after all; he has created a whole host of enemies throughout his time on the touchline. The programme doesn’t hold back from showing that; it takes us on a journey through the good and the bad, the highs and the lows. It doesn’t shy away from anything.
There is plenty of insight into Mourinho from big names such as Sir Alex Ferguson
Zlatan Ibrahimovic also spoke of how Mourinho impacted his career when at Inter Milan
This is a man adored by Chelsea fans for his successes in England and by Inter Milan supporters for putting them back on their pedestal with a magical Champions League triumph.
But he is also the same man who had an acrimonious exit from Madrid, after forming what Sami Khedira calls a ‘nightmare’ and poisonous dressing room, and who was forced to agree a settlement with former Chelsea club doctor Eva Carneiro over claims that the manager discriminated against her.
There are also some incredible revelations, such as Mourinho discussing how he had meetings about returning to Barcelona in 2008 as manager, almost a decade after working tirelessly as an assistant and, how he to this day, doesn’t like to be described as, ‘the translator’.
But by far the biggest revelation of them all was Mourinho admitting, for the very first time, that he had verbally agreed to become Sir Alex Ferguson’s replacement at Manchester United in 2013. However, the desire to feel ‘loved’ again changed his mind, so he made a dramatic U-turn and rejoined Chelsea.
‘The objective of the work that we are doing is to tell the truth,’ Mourinho eloquently said when revealing his big United bombshell. And well, that’s what he is in this documentary: honest. He is, as always, unapologetically Mourinho.
