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José Mourinho has had a turbulent first year in Turkish football - Getty Images/Ali Atmaca
It was 20 years ago yesterday that José Mourinho declared, not for the first time in his career, that football could be very cruel. “We have to accept the result,” he said. “They scored a goal, if you can say they scored it. I can say that the linesman scored it.”
He was talking, of course, about the ‘ghost’ goal by Luis García that decided the Champions League semi-final between his Chelsea side and Liverpool – given at Anfield by the Slovakian linesman Roman Slysko, despite not having crossed the line.
Those first Chelsea years can feel like the vintage years, as he turned English football upside down but now, at 62, the challenge is different: can he come back to the Premier League again?
His career has been through many iterations. Bridges have been burned. Patience has been expended. Options have narrowed. There was not much else on the table last summer when he took the Fenerbahce job, one in which every appointee is expected to end the long wait for a league title going back to 2014.
But he took it, addicted as he is to the job and firmly of the belief that there is another big moment out there. That is why he finds himself deep in the politics of Turkish football, living in a hotel in Istanbul, a little too far off Galatasaray in the title race. His career has become about living to fight another day.
The English game has changed much since his arrival in 2004 but there are still echoes of peak Mourinho in the defence of some of the Premier League’s leading teams. The tendency of Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta to deploy centre-halves as full-backs to increase the physicality of their defences.
Leeds United, perhaps considering a change, would be an attractive option to him although the reality now is that most clubs regard this as a younger man’s game.
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Would Leeds United chairman Paraag Marathe entertain the idea of approaching Mourinho to manage his club? - Getty Images/Pat Scaasi
Mourinho would say that the four years out of the English game have given him new experiences, and a return to working with players just outside Europe’s elite clubs.
There will never be an end to the antagonism. He has been banned this year for tweaking the nose of his opposite number at Galatasaray, Okan Buruk.
Credit: A Spor
There have been other occasions of claim and counter-claim, including the “monkeys” comment that was construed as racism by Galatasaray, strongly denied on the other side.
This afternoon he faces the only other United manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, to have finished second with United in the post-Ferguson era. Solskjaer was his successor and is now manager of Besiktas. Fenerbahce need to win to have any realistic chance of staying in the hunt for the title against Galatasaray.
Turkish football is not good for the state of mind of anyone prone to believing that the world might be against them. It would take much too long to wade through the theories that Galatasaray, Fenerbahce’s deadly Istanbul rivals, benefit from a system set up to ensure they win.
Needless to say, it is a stressful life-choice to be a Fenerbahce fan. They finished with 99 points last season and that was still not enough to beat Galatasaray to the title.
Mourinho is still at it. Few have been more at it than him in 25 years as a manager. In many ways it started at virtually full speed, and a Champions League in his fourth year as a manager, with no playing career to speak of.
Sir Alex Ferguson won his first Champions League in his 25th year as a manager but largely his career grew ever stronger with every year. Mourinho’s has always been turbulent and there has been a notable fall-off in the jobs for which he has been in contention.
Even so, there is no sign of slowing. Turkish football, like any big European league season, is gruelling. The scrutiny is relentless and, in this particular club, second place is regarded as failure by any metric.
Mourinho does not have to do this. It is 30 years since his first league title as an assistant coach at Porto. Twenty years since his first Chelsea Premier League title. Twenty-one major trophies, excluding the various Community Shields and Super Cups. League titles in four different countries. The full set of Uefa trophies. The issue is that he just cannot stop.
It is not yet over this season for Fenerbahce, although the win for Galatasaray over Sivasspor on Saturday means they only need six more points to win the title.
After that the question will be what the Fenerbahce president Ali Koc, billionaire scion of one of Turkey’s wealthiest families, wants to do with his famous manager.
The smart money suggests that he will want Mourinho to see out the second and final year of his contract. If the pressure was significant this season, it will be enormous next time around.
A league title with Fenerbahce next season would rank up there with Mourinho’s greatest achievements – even that second place in the Premier League with United in 2018.
Perhaps that might be the basis for a return to the Premier League. He is certainly not about to retire anytime soon, however much some people would like him to do so.
He was right about the problems he faced at United and then later Tottenham Hotspur, who have both declined since in the kind of ways he predicted.
That might not be a source of satisfaction but, if he was right about that, some club owners will wonder, what else might he be right about?
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