Jose Mourinho's downfall stems from believing he really is special

The Chelsea manager loves to lap up the accolades but has lost sight of the many factors behind consistent success

Jose Mourinho has refused to accept responsibility for Chelsea’s struggles and has instead turned on his players (Getty Images)

This is where hubris leads when the magic deserts you; dinner for one and an oligarch’s phone that goes straight to message when you ring. A decade ago when Jose Mourinho was at the head of the tactical curve he moved among us like a latter-day Rasputin, the mystic with all the answers.

Mourinho had clearly happened across a moment in time with a formula that worked. The mistake was to assume it was entirely because of his personal attributes and that it would last for ever. Of course, he had qualities as a coach but he was not the only factor in success, nor could he be. The mistake was to see it that way. And it is this essential conceit that always harboured the seeds of a reckoning.

There was a period in 2002 during Michael Schumacher’s Formula One dominance at Ferrari when the car was almost unbeatable in his hands. Ferrari won 15 of the 19 races that year, the championship was wrapped up by July. Three races in, I asked team principal Ross Brawn to explain the defining factors that made the car so special.

Were Brawn cut from the same cloth as Mourinho he might have entered upon a grand discourse of glorification. After all, he oversaw every one of Schumacher’s seven titles. His answer stunned me. Rather than associate himself with the fantastic outcome, he claimed he could not account for the car’s superiority in exact terms. They set out with a template, hoped it would be quick but would not know for sure what made it tick until they had time to unpick the details.

In other words there was an element of the unknown, of alchemy not easily understood. Indeed, Brawn went further, claiming it might be they would never be able to isolate from the whole the individual elements that made the car quick. They were just happy that it worked.

Unlike Brawn, who pulled together arguably one of the greatest design efforts in the history of Formula One, Mourinho allowed the accolades to fall entirely upon his sharp-suited shoulders when his Porto team won the Uefa Cup and Champions League in successive seasons. Deco apart, Porto were not obvious candidates for glory yet, through the trademark Mourinho characteristics of rigour, organisation and discipline, they prevailed. It was footballing serendipity, a juncture when important players in key positions found each other perfectly aligned.

Jorge Costa and Pedro Emanuel where like a pair of John Terrys at his peak, shoring up the Porto defence. Derlei couldn’t miss in front of goal and Deco pulled the strings.

With that European Cup victory in 2004 Mourinho was catapulted on to the many-roubled throne at Chelsea where he became the first real coaching beneficiary of an open cheque book at a club newly and fabulously enriched. Successive Premier League titles funded by Roman Abramovich, bringing in the likes of Michael Essien, Didier Drogba, Ricardo Carvalho and Petr Cech among others, polished his star.

That bunch would have mulched any opposition, yet Mourinho was seen as the catalyst and wasted little time trying to persuade us otherwise. There was no European triumph, but when he left prematurely in September 2007 it was seen as a failure of Abramovich to manage the Special One rather than a failure of his coaching. Not this time.

This is not an exercise in rewriting history or a treatise on the failings of Jose Mourinho. Rather a lament for a man who could never recognise his own shortcomings. If you are indeed the Special One then how else are you to account for nine Premier League defeats without blaming the players? It cannot, by definition, be Mourinho’s fault because he is a genius, right? Wrong. He is a coach who had some of the answers some of the time but, as Louis van Gaal is finding at Manchester United, football is a game that can pass a man by without his noticing.

Van Gaal is hanging on to coaching principles that served him well enough at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, but which seem outmoded and stale now. Mourinho was a pioneer of the counter-attacking movement that first brought Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to heel in the fascinating semi-final with Internazionale in 2010. Mourinho’s deployment of Samuel Eto’o, a centre-forward of some note at Barça, as a right-half in that match was a masterstroke, a brilliant example of his forensic attention to detail. It was peak Mourinho, you might say, and would deliver him a second European Cup.

He went on to stifle Barcelona in La Liga with Real Madrid in 2012 but it was his inability to realise the decima European Cup that suggested his Midas touch might have deserted him. Then, just as now, his third year at the Bernabeu disintegrated into accusations of betrayal and recrimination. So having steered Chelsea to the Premier League title last year following the purchase of Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas and Thibaut Courtois, Mourinho is not only powerless to halt his team’s decline, he is a major factor in it, isolating some, alienating others.

His departure thus appears inevitable, the dressing room a toxic mess of his own making. The board gathered today not to discuss how they might reconcile coach and players but to work out the terms of his departure. The end has become an accounting exercise. The only element keeping him in his post for now, it seems, is the absence of an obvious, ready replacement.