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The Special One is some special s***,” says Jose Mourinho, near the start of Netflix’s new three-part career documentary. The self-aggrandising sobriquet that’s trailed him since his early days at Chelsea was, he claims, the contrivance of “some guys in England”. It is then revealed that Mourinho is making this claim while standing in front of a huge mural of himself, inside his own home.
It is obvious from the beginning of Mourinho that the Portuguese tactician – a man who has spent the past 25 years magnetised to both silverware and scandals – is the perfect candidate for a documentary. Much like Netflix’s slick, hagiographic David Beckham doc (2023’s Beckham), Mourinho has a subject with an interesting, controversy-filled arc, full of rises and falls and fights against the world; unlike Beckham, it has a subject with a sharp sense of conversational showmanship. Mourinho, aware of the preposterousness of his own ego but never shy to indulge it, revels in his reputation. “What does it feel like to win?” he is asked at one point. “Normality,” he says. “That’s what I did my whole life… You don’t do a documentary with a guy that wins nothing.” Hatchets are left defiantly unburied: he shows no remorse when it comes to his feud with Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas and the “spoiled” Real Madrid galacticos he inherited in 2010. Or his bitter war of words with ex-Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, whom he claims was “as much as I am if not more guilty” of what he nostalgically describes as “that beautiful fight”.
And yet, for all the bluster on show, for all Mourinho’s (in a way, admirable) willingness to play the villain, Mourinho is not the documentary it should be. Three episodes, it turns out, is not really enough to cover his whole career in detail. His first stint at Chelsea – that paradigm-shifting, double Premier League/League Cup-winning stint from 2004 to 2007 – is given ample shrift (taking up the bulk of the first episode), likewise his historic treble-winning time at Inter Milan, the fractious spell at Real, and his return to Stamford Bridge in 2013. But much of what followed, the less gilded decade spent drifting around Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbahçe and Benfica, is sped through. You emerge from watching the series with only a partial sense of Mourinho’s actual career history, almost no insight into the tactical innovations that made him so successful, and – most frustrating of all – no real grasp of who he is, underneath the flashy facade.
Jose Mourinho, as seen in Netflix’s ‘Mourinho’ (Netflix)
It may be that documentaries like these are simply not equipped for the sort of deep-dive scrutiny that would make them truly worthwhile. Mourinho isn’t a puff piece in the traditional sense – he is presented as an egotist with (as one person says) something of a “god complex”, a man who seems to delight in pissing people off. (“I enjoy the negativity,” he says at one point – referring to the hostile atmosphere of big away games, but an admission that really applies to his whole life.) But his own active participation in the series allows him to dictate the conversation, and there are key areas that seem conveniently elided.
An interesting counterpoint might be something like Asif Kapadia’s 2019 documentary film Diego Maradona, which adopted a similar kind of propulsive, accessible approach, but dove more greedily into its subject’s personal life and dark side. It’s curious just how little time is spent discussing Mourinho’s life before Chelsea, and indeed any part of his life that doesn’t involve football. He does not discuss his political views – he never does – views that The Times claimed decades ago were “believed to be strongly right wing”. His background too, as the child of wealth, is breezed over; these things not part of the established Mourinho Myth, that of the self-made outsider. When he then makes pugnacious statements like, “Football belongs to people like me… the others are intruders, they don’t belong,” they pass by uninterrogated.
There is an inherent, unavoidable unfinishedness to this narrative: where Beckham followed its subject from his debut to retirement, Mourinho’s story is still ongoing. The documentary comes as the manager begins his second tenure at Real Madrid, the world’s biggest football club; it is an appointment that came as a shock to many, a return to the big leagues after years spent – with all due respect to Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbahçe and Benfica – slumming it with teams unable to compete at the very highest level of European football. It seemed, until recently at least, that the world had moved on from Mourinho’s antics, and from his brand of football: he was a tactical dinosaur with a meteor looming. But in Mourinho, this is left as postscript. While the fortunes of his comeback are still yet to play out, it would have been useful to dive into his decade-long nadir with even the same surface enthusiasm Mourinho applies to his spiky heyday. Has football left Jose Mourinho behind? I’m not sure. But this documentary doesn’t even consider it.
‘Mourinho’ is available to stream on Netflix