Jose Mourinho meltdown: Is the Chelsea manager suffering from another bout of third-season syndrome

Chelsea’s remarkable demise this season may appear to be the most extraordinary in recent football history but veteran observers of the club’s Portuguese manager see it as simply following a pattern – with eerie parallels to his final season at Real Madrid

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho (Getty Images)

Are the Chelsea players revolting or are they not revolting? This is the question.

For all the public protestations of loyalty to Jose Mourinho by John Terry and other members of the Chelsea squad, many wonder whether the early season collapse of the reigning Premier League champions – seven defeats in 12 games – is at least partly down to the Portuguese manager having lost the confidence of his players.

The tantalising claim by BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Garry Richardson that a member of the team said he would rather lose than win for Mourinho may be balderdash. But it has served to encourage the suspicion that perhaps some of his players have decided the time has come, as they say in Spain, “to make his bed” – code for deliberately under-performing in order to get the manager sacked.

We do not know if this is exactly what the Real Madrid players had in mind during Mourinho’s third season in charge of the team but of this there is no doubt: well before the Spanish club asked Mourinho to leave in the summer of 2013 most of them were sick to death of him. As were almost all the Spanish sports journalists, who had come to regard him as a narcissist so locked into his self-referential world that he had no notion of the fool he continually made of himself.

The editor of the country’s most unapologetically pro-Real sports paper, As, would end up writing: “The truth is that Mourinho blew it at Real Madrid… He came to eat up the world and he ended up eating something else.”

The curious thing was, that at the start of the 2012-2013 season everything suggested that he would eat his arch-rivals, Barcelona, for breakfast; that a new era of Real Madrid domination had begun. Pep Guardiola had quit as Barcelona manager, Real had just won the Spanish championship and the road seemed clear for Mourinho to do what he had been signed to do: knock the Catalan club off its perch once and for all.

The cruel news in December 2012 that the new Barça manager, the late Tito Vilanova, had been diagnosed with cancer provided further reason to believe that the balance of power was shifting back towards the Spanish capital.

Yet quite the opposite happened, suggesting that those like Fabio Capello, who theorise that Mourinho’s teams burn out during his third season in charge, may be on to something. Barcelona won the Spanish championship, leaving Real trailing 15 points behind in second place. As if that were not humiliating enough, Real went and lost Mourinho’s last significant game in charge, the Spanish Cup final, against their noisy neighbours, Atletico Madrid.

The game was played in Real’s home stadium, the Bernabeu, where the dressing-room atmosphere had been poisonous since before Christmas.

Mourinho had begun to make a habit of blaming the players for poor results. Among a host of complaints by the Portuguese manager were that his team played with no heart, they lacked professionalism, they displayed minimal commitment.

To ram home the message, Mourinho punished a number of his stars – among them the goalkeeper Iker Casillas, the left-back Marcelo, the central defender Sergio Ramos and the midfielder Mesut Özil – by dropping them to the bench or subjecting them to the indignity of taking them off at half-time.

The players rebelled, either through veiled public comments or via leaks to the press. Ramos, today the Real captain, was the most outspoken. He questioned the decision to drop Casillas in an interview and he replied pointedly to one of Mourinho’s attacks on the players by declaring, “Here, we all win together and we all lose together”, meaning that the manager, who had a habit annoying to the players of claiming credit for the team’s triumphs in the first person singular, should take his share of the blame when things went badly.

Among the many stories that were leaked, one told of a confrontation in December 2012 in which Ramos told Mourinho that nothing had proved more damaging to the team’s performances on the pitch than his attacks on the players.

The word from the dressing room was that Mourinho had a blacklist of players he did not like, but Mourinho did not backtrack. Made increasingly paranoid by the media leaks, he continued to drop and to shun those he suspected of having it in for him, notably Casillas, who had captained Spain to victory in the World Cup in 2010 and the European Championship in 2012.

Mourinho let it be known that he believed Casillas was the dressing-room mole, turning a hardline pro-Mourinho faction of Real fans – a distinctly unpleasant bunch of fascist temperament known as los Ultra Sur – against the national team goalkeeper.

This did not help Mourinho’s cause, for the gentlemanly Casillas, the closest thing in Spanish football to a Sir Bobby Charlton, was well liked by his team-mates. As the second half of Mourinho’s last season at Real ground on, the player mutiny widened to include previously unconditional loyalists such as Pepe, the bruising but excellent Portugal centre-half.

It was not just the personal slights that made the players indignant, it was the depressingly cynical defensive playing philosophy Mourinho imposed upon a team that, on paper, was rich with attacking talent.

Jürgen Klopp, whose Borussia Dortmund knocked out Real in the Champions League semi-final, had echoed the words of the manager of lowly Betis, Pepe Mel, in saying that the best way to beat Real was to let them have the ball, as they had little clue what to do with it.

As for Capello’s point about third-season player burn-out, Mourinho’s motivational strategy of creating an all-is-fair-in-war mentality by sowing a climate of hatred against the Catalan enemy, his demeaning habit of letting the grass grow deliberately long at the Bernabeu before a “clasico” so as to hamper Barcelona’s fluid passing game, his propaganda obligation on players after the team lost never to give credit to their opponents and to back up his eternal complaint that the referee was to blame: all of this and more added to the psychological wear and tear on his team. An excellent book on Mourinho called “The Special One” by the El Pais journalist Diego Torres tells of a discreet poll of the Real players ordered by the club president, Florentino Perez, as the 2012-13 season drew to its miserable end.

To the question, should Mourinho continue as manager the following season, 15 of the 22 squad members said no and six of them said that if Mourinho stayed they wished to be allowed to leave.

In the two weeks before the Spanish Cup final against Atletico Madrid on 17 May 2013 the manager and the players had practically stopped talking to each other. The game itself followed a pattern reminiscent of Chelsea’s performances this season. Real Madrid scored an early goal, Atletico equalised, the Real players seemed to lose heart, Mourinho was sent off for abusing the fourth official and Atletico won the game.

With an irony that the fans of English clubs may be tempted to emulate, the Atletico fans’ celebrations included the chant: “Mourinho, stay!” Mourinho did stay – in the dressing room. He refused to go up to the collect his loser’s medal from the Spanish king.

In “The Special One”, Torres quotes a dressing-room witness to the mood at Real before that game, saying, in what could be another eerie echo of his present plight, that “the players didn’t mind losing because it meant that Mourinho lost”.

They minded less when he duly left for the league he said he admired above all others and the club he said he loved most.

In his last press conference as Real manager, Mourinho had said: “This has been the worst season of my career.” His current season is shaping up to be worse still.

Are his Chelsea soilders still loyal to him or will they make his bed? Does he still retain control or are things falling apart the way they did at Real? Will he be fired and replaced by someone like Carlo Ancelotti, to whose arrival at Real after Mourinho left the players responded with relief and joy?

We will know soon enough. But if Mourinho does go, Chelsea fans do not need to lose heart. The season immediately after Real’s 2012-13 débâcle the very same group of players went on to win the Champions League.

Mourinho's record

Jose Mourinho does not always remain with a club for a third season – but when he does it is usually less successful than the two that preceded it

(Here are the figures – only includes domestic league championship and major European competitions)

Porto (Jan 2002 – May 2004)

First season Third (in Primeira Liga)

Second season Champions, Uefa Cup winners

Third season Champions, Champions League winners

Chelsea (June 2004 – Sept 2007)

First season Champions (Premier League)

Second season Champions

Third season Runners-up (six points behind Manchester United) Fourth season Resigns in September with Chelsea fifth in table, without a Premier League win for three successive games

Internazionale (June 2008 – May 2010)

First season Champions (Serie A)

Second season Champions, Champions League winners

Real Madrid (May 2010 – June 2013)

First season Runners-up (La Liga – four points behind Barcelona) Second season Champions Third season Runners-up (15 points behind Barcelona)

Chelsea (June 2013 – present)

First season Third (in Premier League – four points behind Manchester City) Second season Champions

Third season Currently 16th (15 points behind leaders Manchester City)