Is Jose Mourinho still ‘box office’? His latest Man Utd revelation shows he can be

Is Jose Mourinho still ‘box office’?

It’s the phrase that has followed him around over the past decade, during which the prior flow of trophies has turned into more of a trickle. It is trotted out whenever he does something weird, or obnoxious, or genuinely entertaining, or really anything vaguely ‘Jose’, that makes us think of the manager we once knew.

Often though, these things aren’t really ‘box office’, and if anyone else did them, they would be dismissed as a minor eccentricity.

It is difficult to deny, however, that there is continuing fascination with the man, despite his apparently waning powers — he has not won a league title in 11 years, nor a trophy of any kind in four. The interest in him stretches from internet comment sections, through journalism and filmmaking, right up to the president’s office at Real Madrid.

The question of whether he is still ‘box office’ might have already been answered by his reappointment this summer for a second spell as Madrid manager, 13 years after the first one ended.

But it will potentially be stress-tested further, in a more literal sense, by the new Netflix documentary ‘Mourinho’, made by John Battsek (producer of Oscar-winning documentaries ‘One Day In September’ and ‘Searching For Sugar Man’, as well as the recent Netflix film about David Beckham) and director Joe Pearlman (mostly known for films about music acts Bros and Lewis Capaldi).

The documentary is in three parts, and the juiciest and most interesting stuff is saved for the third.

Discussing the end of that first three-year stint at Madrid, Mourinho pauses, gives the knowing look of a man who is trying to live up to being ‘box office’ and says: “I go to Chelsea in 2013, but in that period there is something nobody knows. I think I can say, without hurting anyone with the truth. I think the objective of this work we are doing is to tell the truth.”

He then goes on to reveal he agreed to take the Manchester United job in summer 2013, to succeed the retiring Sir Alex Ferguson, before Everton’s David Moyes was offered the position. However, he says he changed his mind, and followed his heart back to Chelsea for a second spell there because, “after Real Madrid, I needed to feel love”.

At first, you think he’s hamming it up, but then Ferguson appears to confirm the story, revealing Mourinho was offered the job and accepted before performing a U-turn, saying the Portuguese called him in tears to say he had changed his mind.

That will be the headline revelation from ‘Mourinho’. And fair enough: it’s new, and seems to contradict the accepted narrative of his dalliances with United before he eventually arrived there in 2016. But it’s not the most interesting thing about the three-part series.

Mourinho first started taking meetings about being the subject of a documentary in 2022, when he was managing Italian side Roma.

“I think he was ready to try to set the record straight,” says Pearlman, “and to say to everyone, ‘I’m Jose Mourinho, remember what I did, and this is what I’m going to do’. That’s the person I thought I met. That changed over the years, but when I met the man, it felt like it was a score to settle.”

There is some of that in the show, notably some bitterness about being sacked by Chelsea (twice), the odd drive-by at those who belittled him in his early career on the staff at Barcelona and what we have to describe as a ‘thinly-veiled’ dig at one former foe, Pep Guardiola: “Don’t talk to me about sabbaticals,” he says. “To me, sabbatical means weakness.”

There’s also plenty of fairly standard stuff you would expect and want from a documentary of this sort: there are the talking heads from his past — John Terry, Frank Lampard, Iker Casillas, most of his former assistants — telling stories you know the gist of. There are the clips from his glory days. There are some nice anecdotes, like the one from his first spell at Chelsea about being asked to go to Sardinia to coach a team of staff from Roman Abramovich’s yacht.

But the really interesting stuff, arguably the heart of the whole thing, is how the film exposes Mourinho’s vulnerability.

Blubbing on the phone to Ferguson is one example, but we’ve seen him cry before, albeit usually in the afterglow of victory: when Inter won the treble under him in 2010, for example, and he left their celebrations early, because he said he would not have taken the Madrid job that summer had he stayed with his players.

Jose Mourinho, then at Inter, goes head to head with Sir Alex Ferguson in 2009 (Andrew Yates/AFP via Getty Images)

The vulnerability is more present and authentic in the moments when Mourinho talks about his family, admitting at one stage he thinks his children “enjoy life much more without me”. Or when he talks about his early years, when he was part of the game but always on its fringes, from being a professional footballer’s son to being dismissed as a ‘translator’ when an assistant at Barcelona.

He has seemingly never lost that chip on his shoulder, the idea that he has still never been accepted (despite now twice being appointed manager of the biggest club in the world) by football, which at least in part explains why he is like he is.

It’s probably a cliche to say this, but most of the interesting stuff centres around his relationship with his father, Felix.

“He is the opposite of me, because everybody loved him,” Mourinho says at one point, which almost makes you feel sorry for him until you consider another quote — “I’m not nice, that’s just the way it is. I do it with pride. Anything to get your players not to lose” — which suggests to one extent or another he chose to be the opposite of his old man. “I don’t want to change,” he says later. “It’s too late.”

Maybe the killer line in the whole thing comes when Pearlman is asking about his dad, and Mourinho says: “You are pushing me to speak about myself, which I don’t want to.”

Taken on face value, this could look like one of the more absurd statements in the history of language: Jose Mourinho not wanting to talk about himself?

But what he actually means is he doesn’t want to talk about his real self, as opposed to his persona, the character that he created nearly a quarter of a century ago, the one who always feels the need to be ‘box office’. The one that, over the years, has probably become entwined with the actual person, but still isn’t the genuine Mourinho.

If you get him to talk too much about his father, he can’t help but reveal his real self.

“I think we got as close as anyone’s ever got,” says Pearlman, when asked how near he thinks they got to the real Mourinho, over countless hours of interviews that stretched from just after leaving Roma in January 2024, across his 13 months at Fenerbahce and into his recent second spell at Benfica.

“People think they know me, but they don’t know me,” Mourinho says at one point. “I don’t care.” Just the sort of thing that someone who is participating in a multi-part documentary about themselves would say.

If the show has a weakness, it’s that it’s either too short or too long. That sounds like a pretty silly critique, but the series is in three parts: the first broadly focuses on the initial spell at Chelsea, with some origin story thrown in; the second is Inter, the pinnacle of his career; the last is Madrid part one, plus everything else, including most of the vulnerability and the discussion of his family.

There are a couple of other possible films in there. They could have made a shorter character study, one that broadly ignores the nostalgia and the historical beats of his time in football, and treated it as a concentrated look into the soul of the man. Or they could have really stretched their legs and made it six, seven or eight episodes, going into every bit of his career in more detail.

In the end, we have a mix of the two, and it certainly works and entertains and brings out some unexpected stuff from Mourinho, but you are left wondering about the other versions that could have existed somewhere.

Mourinho was recalled to the Madrid job as the finishing touches were being put on the film, which gives it a fairly satisfying narrative arc.

“You see a version of the descent of the man,” says Pearlman, “and then he does what Jose Mourinho does — he arrives back at the place he says he deserves to be.”

So is Mourinho still ‘box office’? He thinks so. Madrid’s president Florentino Perez thinks so. This show thinks so.

All of that makes him an inevitable subject for a documentary, and the surprise is it has taken this long for one to be made.

‘Mourinho’ will be available on Netflix from Tuesday, August 11