“I could write a book of 1,000 pages about my two years at Inter,” Jose Mourinho tells The Athletic.
When encouraged to do so, he pauses and thinks about it for a moment. “Maybe. But first I have to ask permission to the guys, because there are lots of forbidden stories,” he laughs.
Mourinho is wandering around the Hotspur Way Training Centre reminiscing about one of the biggest days of his life in football. Today marks 10 years since Inter Milan made history and became the only Italian team ever to do the treble and, as anyone who’s been to a derby at San Siro will know, as an achievement Inter fans lord it over their rivals with almost the same pride as the fact the club has never been relegated to Serie B; an ignominy AC Milan and Juventus have both experienced at some stage.
He is speaking to us between training sessions on a glorious summer’s day in London, the weather calling to mind one of the many rituals of that Inter team. Mourinho’s former assistant Jose Morais confided in The Athletic about the barbecues — “ooooh the barbecues” — that the squad’s Argentinian players put on for everyone. Javier Zanetti, Inter’s mythical captain, used to organise them. “Once a week,” Mourinho says. Esteban Cambiasso went and picked up the beef. Walter Samuel, the ‘asador’ or grill-master, turned the steaks over hot charcoal and Diego Milito lent his compatriot a hand with the cooking. “Milito ate and that’s it,” Dejan Stankovic mocked.
“The food was amazing,” Mourinho reflects. “But the meaning of these barbecues went further than the amazing Argentinian meat they were getting and grilling for everyone. It was much more than that.” It was a family, and one that has never grown apart. A decade down the line the bond between them is as strong as ever. Marco Materazzi, the World Cup-winning centre-back, an Inter ultra who just happened to play football, set up a team WhatsApp group which inundates Mourinho’s phone with notifications. Julio Cesar, the goalkeeper of that side, has said: “The most active guy on it, the one who is messaging and joking the most, is Jose.”
Elite sport is almost always about winning. Without the trophies Mourinho brought to Porto, he could not have presented himself at Chelsea as the “Special One”. Every bit as special to him though are the relationships and memories that are made along the way. “Nobody forgets the birthdays, the dates, a picture of the old times,” Mourinho says. “Nobody forgets to support each other. Everyone has a different life now but, as I used to say, it’s a little bit like family.
“Even if you are far (away from each other) you are always close and I feel even in my (current) job, I feel how close they are; the ‘Good luck’ before the game, the nice feedback after the good results, a positive word after a bad result. If now I switch off the phone with you and I sit in my office I for sure will have lots of messages in our WhatsApp group, and that for me is the most important thing. In my career, all the big achievements of my teams, all of them were teams with this kind of bond, this kind of mentality. Everything in a football team starts when you have this kind of empathy, and we had that.”
It all began around midnight on March 11, 2008. Liverpool and Fernando Torres had just eliminated Inter in the round of 16 of the Champions League and Roberto Mancini perhaps let his emotions get the better of him. To the consternation of those in the press conference, not to mention the home dressing room at San Siro, Mancini announced he had told Inter’s owner Massimo Moratti of his intention to leave at the end of the season. It took everyone by surprise. Mancini had only recently signed a new contract until 2012. Days later, after a cooling-off period, he admitted he had spoken in the heat of the moment. Mancini changed his mind and declared his intention to stay. But the damage was done.
He lost face within a team already diminished by a mounting injury crisis. Inter collapsed, frittering away an 11-point lead, turning, in desperation, to a half-fit Zlatan Ibrahimovic to come off the bench and rescue the title on the final day of the season in Parma. In the meantime, reports of contact with Mourinho grew and grew and Mancini began to fear the worst when Il Corriere della Sera’s Fabio Monti, the best-connected reporter on the Inter beat, wrote within 48 hours of Liverpool knocking them out of the Champions League that Moratti was moving to appoint the Portuguese coach. At the end of May, pictures emerged of a meeting at a restaurant in Paris, La Tour d’Argent, and the secret was out.
A matter of days later, Mourinho was unveiled to tremendous fanfare. As was the case the first time round at Chelsea, he immediately delivered an iconic, box-office line. An English journalist enquired if the rumours Mourinho wished to bring Frank Lampard to Inter were true. Mourinho didn’t want to talk about another team’s player. But he didn’t leave it there. His response left the media enraptured. “Io non solo pirla,” Mourinho said, using Milanese dialect. “I’m not an idiot.”
Winning over the press and even some sections of San Siro was a gradual process though. In Italy, with its Ivy League coaching school, Coverciano, it doesn’t matter how big your reputation is or what you’ve won before. You have to prove yourself all over again, particularly if you are an outsider. Mancini had won Inter their first league title in 18 years and by the time Mourinho arrived they had dominated for three seasons. The bar was very high. Expectation through the roof. All that remained for Mourinho to achieve was the extraordinary; victory in Europe, the treble. Winning the Scudetto by 10 points in his first season was not enough.
He was judged almost entirely on the Champions League and despite Ibrahimovic hitting the crossbar and Stankovic missing a gilt-edged chance, Inter lost to Manchester United and were out at the same stage as the year before. Moratti found it difficult to accept. In all his time at Inter, he conceded, it was “the angriest I ever got — and the time I really let my feelings known”. Mourinho could have departed that summer, just as Ibrahimovic did. Real Madrid wanted him to come and coach in Spain. “Moratti asked me to stay,” Mourinho says, “and I told him, ‘Yes, because the reason why I came here was to give you the dream of your life as a president’.”
The dream of which Mourinho spoke was the one Moratti had been pursuing since he brought the club back into the family in 1995.
The oil magnate’s mission was to emulate his father Angelo, the man who made Inter great in the 1960s when his own Mourinho-figure il Mago (“The Wizard”), as Helenio Herrera was known, guided them to two European Cup triumphs. Forty-five years had passed since they’d last tasted that success and in order to validate their domestic supremacy and consolidate that team’s place among Italy’s all-time greats, Inter needed to repeat or better it.
10 years of FIF
Nostradamus
Most Passionate Member
Forum Supporter
FIF Special Ones
