Premier League: Jose Mourinho is his own ideological prisoner who's overtaken by modernity

Is this the end game for Jose Mourinho at Manchester United? The question is almost rhetorical and yet it shouldn’t be: the World Cup has left football with beautiful memories, new stars and fortified reputations; the pre-season buzz engulfs the globe as the International Champions Cup rolls on from Michigan to Stockholm and Singapore. All of the razzmatazz feels new and sexy, even if it is just the dawn of a new, all-consuming, operatic cycle. At Manchester United, however, there is little sign of the razzle-dazzle. The pre-season, the friendlies, the new acquisitions, the malcontent over transfer policies, it’s all there — and then, strangely, at the same time it isn’t. Everything at United has been ossified, almost fossilised, in the plenitude of the world: fixed and incapable of change or development. [caption id=“attachment_4395585” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho. Reuters[/caption] That is, after this glorious summer of soothing football, very peculiar. United clan boast a world champion in Paul Pogba, and the Belgian duo Romelu Lukaku and Marouane Fellaini and the English pair Ashley Young and Jesse Lingard, who all demonstrated that progression is within the realm of Manchester United players. They can no longer be pigeon-holed: the self-indulgent superstar, the flat-track bully, the bully ‘pur sang’ and the Manchester misfits all had, one way or the other, transformative tournaments in Russia. Serbia’s Nemanja Matic and Sweden’s Victor Lindelof also played more than respectably. Fred, from Shakthar Donetsk, Diogo Dalot, from FC Porto, and Lee Grant, from Stoke City, have arrived for a lay-out of £74.43m to reinforce the squad. Ossification and even regression should be taboo then, but somehow Manchester United have seemingly already come to a standstill before even a single ball has rolled across a Premier League ground. It’s remarkable and yet an unsurprising, enduring feature of Mou-land, where the founding father has allowed room for just the one protagonist, even as a world champion cranes his neck, with his medal dangling briskly in a tricoloured gleam, around the elevated enclosure of the land he is trying to trespass on. But the golden sheen and grandeur has faded form the protective fence. The world is no longer young: the self-acclaimed Special One has almost passed on, a relic from a different era when sprinting down the touchline with glistening hair and a triumphant aura of superiority were voguish in Mou-land and the football world at large. His irresistible smile and the natural celebrity demeanour have no one swooning or gushing anymore. Faint lines of permanent fret have set in Mourinho’s forehead. He has a worn look, but the potency of his words remain, be it turgidly. He lambasted Ed Woodward, the club’s executive vice-chairman, advised fans against coming to the friendlies and questioned his young players by highlighting how Alexis Sanchez could not be ‘very happy with the players around him.’ It was another extraordinary dismissal of his own players and the club hierarchy. His different gripes, his gloomy demeanour and overall despondency have in part been addressed to Woodward, who simply doesn’t sign off all the players Mourinho craves, but even so, Mourinho’s defeatist attitude in pre-season has been staggering, a performance that no longer hints at the Portuguese’s mastery of football’s intricate politics and operatic compulsions, but betrays a more unhinged portray of the Manchester United manager. Mourinho has presented himself as a struggling medium-sized club manager up against higher forces and an antagonistic universe, including his own board, but that is cunning perversion of reality: the Portuguese has spent about £387 million on players — a good part of them handpicked — since his arrival at Old Trafford. No, the truth is much simpler. The Special One has been surpassed by others. Pep Guardiola, the other half of the great duopoly, and Jurgen Klopp have not have not simply analysed and dissected his philosophy, but they have stormed past the antiquated teams that Mourinho fielded with modern, upgraded football. In the Champions League, Sevilla also showed that defensive solidity and steeliness no longer suffice in a football cosmos that is ever in flux. Mourinho has long ceased to proffer tactics or visions that have contributed to football’s progression. With recourse to reinvention not an option, Mourinho is his own ideological prisoner. His rantings and ravings then become pitiful, exposing a man, who overtaken by modernity, may ultimately be the architect of his own downfall as he waddles dangerously to Wenger territory and a world that wants to see him fail.