Alex Hess: Not special any more: Jose Mourinho, Manchester United and an uneasy marriage

For 26 years, Manchester United deluded themselves into believing they were not a sacking club. Now, with two sackings in three seasons, it has surely dawned on everyone at Old Trafford that any club is a sacking club if the wrong manager is in charge, and Manchester United, as it transpires, are no different.

Over the past weeks Louis van Gaal has been subject to an execution that’s made William Wallace’s look brief and discreet, but as shoddily as his departure has been handled, there can be little doubt that he was indeed the wrong manager for United. The leaks that flowed freely from the club’s inner ranks over the weekend have confirmed this: tales of unstinting conservatism on the training pitch, of scornful judgments being dished out behind his back, of bizarre acts of paranoia, of horribly misjudging team dynamics and, ultimately, of creating a near-mutinous dressing room.

In a sport where unity is paramount, it’s clear these revelations do not make good reading for Van Gaal. The belief of important figures within the club that his laboured playing style clashed with the fabled ‘United Way’ has also been a running theme for some time. What’s less clear is quite how the introduction of Jose Mourinho into the equation will resolve all these harmful tensions and realign the club with this noble self-image.

Perhaps the anecdote about Van Gaal’s management that’s caused the most surprise and amusement is the one, outlined by the Guardian’s Daniel Taylor, about his monitoring his players’ email usage to make sure they were paying sufficient attention to the performance feedback he sent through to them (this step having been taken after his face-to-face critiques, his preferred medium, had been abolished on account of their morale-crushing severity).

Any United fans disturbed by the story of a manager planting bugging devices on his colleagues to sate his own paranoia should perhaps steer clear of the chapter in ‘The Special One’, Diego Torres’s expose on Mourinho’s time at Real Madrid, in which he details how the manager became so unhinged by the intensity of his rivalry with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona that “his growing fear of leaks led to Mourinho asking the club directors to set up a study of phone records of players and club employees”.

In fact, they should probably steer clear of the book altogether. The various episodes of dressing-room bedlam it recounts are unlikely to inspire visions of Van Gaal’s fractured squad being miraculously reunified, nor will the motif of the Madrid team’s sneering disparagement of Mourinho’s preference for a trivote midfield – the deployment of three holding players together – quell any misgivings about the Dutchman’s sedate playing style.

Mourinho’s dogmatic prioritisation of his sides’ defensive architecture on the training pitch does not seem the surest means of restoring the buccaneering football that supposedly comprises the United Way, or of offsetting the players’ reported grievances that Van Gaal’s methods deadened their attacking flair. “The players complained that Mourinho would reproduce the same configuration over and over again,” writes Torres. “Throughout the summer he did not devise a single plan for sustained attacking.”

Despite what the romantics claim, though, aesthetic ideals can generally be compromised if there’s a trophy at the end of it (United’s route to the 2008 Champions League, for instance, was anything but buccaneering). The biggest issue is whether a man as chippy, rancorous and wilfully divisive as Mourinho is the right man to bring trophies to United – which may, given both Mourinho’s track record and United’s own revered recent managers, seem like a stupid question, but the Portuguese’s astonishing penchant for ill-judged animosity in recent years surely makes it a valid one.

It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always this way. The twinkly-eyed manager who swept into the Stamford Bridge press room in the summer of 2004 won over his audience with disarming levels of charm, charisma and wit. Those were the qualities that made him seem a world away from his Premier League peers like Bryan Robson, Chris Coleman and Nigel Worthington, and stirred memories of the smooth-talking greats of English football’s past, like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough.

The misbehaviour was always there of course, but then it often carried a sense of theatre and even an element of endearment – as when he smuggled himself into his changing room via a laundry basket to deliver a half-time briefing. Even his baseless post-match outbursts were done with a wily turn of phrase, as when he introduced English football to the notion of ‘parking the bus’.

But while the Mourinho of 12 years ago was a playful scamp bursting with unspent energy, the greying, latter-years Mourinho has seemed increasingly bitter, unpleasant and lacking in the self-awareness that redeemed much of his poor-me routine back then.

The man we have since come to know is one who hounded Andres Frisk into an early retirement; who alienated swathes of Italian football with his unrelenting victim complex; who sunk a finger into an opposing coach’s eye socket; who invented a UEFA conspiracy in favour of Barcelona and a media ‘campaign’ against Chelsea; and, most unforgivably of all, who demoted and publicly shamed his club doctor for simply doing her job.

Maybe, now he has finally got the job he has apparently seen his entire career as building towards, that glimmer will return and we will once again see a man who enjoys his work, rather than a man who enjoys the warfare his work brings but despises everything else the world has to offer him.

Of course, there will be plenty who believe that a healthy dose of tyrannical belligerence is precisely what’s needed from a successful United manager, especially after the bleak era of Moyes and Van Gaal. Indeed, there’s a good chance that Mourinho’s longstanding perception of himself as Alex Ferguson’s heir apparent has convinced him of this dogma that angry management is good management.

But while Ferguson may have been a man of endless and unmatchable rage, you also sensed that he never lost the capacity to derive fun from his job, and to pursue winning for its own sake rather than as another notch in the eternal struggle between him and the rest of the world. Mourinho might be well advised to rekindle some of that old mischief and some of that joy, if he can. After all, he may think he’s special, but his new employers are not: they’re a sacking club just like any other.