Chelsea vs Manchester United: Why Blues are the least popular team in the league

The manager’s confrontational style coupled with his reversion to a functional style of football has won few friends

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho gestures to referee Mark Clattenburg (Getty Images)

There are few more intelligent people in football than those who run Chelsea. They understand the value of a good reputation, which is why when Jose Mourinho came back to Stamford Bridge in 2013, nine years after his first landing, they sat down with him to discuss what he told them was a desire to be seen no longer as the bad man, or enemy, of football. They advised him to pick his fights.

Though this elicited some concern – something to the effect of: “I won’t have the same success if I cut out the conflict” – club and manager agreed that things would be different this time. For his own good, and for theirs, he would try to avoid the cycle of negativity in which an opposition manager (typically Arsène Wenger) says something negative, journalists put it to Mourinho, Mourinho responds – and the public feel dislike.

It worked for a time. Wenger – not Mourinho – initiated a tie-pulling moment on the Stamford Bridge touchline with his adversary last year and the incendiary declaration from the Portuguese that Wenger was a “specialist in failure” – his response to the Frenchman’s talk of Mourinho’s “fear to fail” – is understood to have been a source of regret to him.

Yet though the club always knew that the softening was not permanent and that when the pips squeaked he would get the old tools out again, no one could have anticipated quite how he would put himself back at war with the world. The last three months go some distance to explaining why – despite Mourinho yesterday denying bad behaviour by means of some typically colourful quotes about the Stamford Bridge Cristal and lobster – Chelsea are the most unpopular team in the Premier League.

The Machiavellian Mourinho – nasty and sneaky when he wants to be, which is quite often – has been back with a vengeance in a period during which his vials of poison have been administered to Brendan Rodgers, accused of failing to appreciate his own goalkeeper; Graeme Souness, impugned for his managerial record; and Sky Sports, blackballed, before Mourinho commandeered their TV studio to launch an attack on a 25-year-old Burnley player, and on Friday Football Association delegate Steve Greaves. It’s always un pleasantly personal with Mourinho.

His habit of leaving the Stamford Bridge bench minutes before the end of matches – designed to give him the chance to call his wife with the result, according to those who would defend him – is no less insulting. Which is before we begin to discuss the victims of his lower level random bullying, like the Chelsea ball-boy who displeased him during January’s home draw with Manchester City. This pattern of conduct is transmitted to Mourinho’s players, who are the worst behaved in the Premier League when it comes to respecting referees, according to the Football Association. Few chief executives across football will envy Chelsea all this. “His method generates media conflict almost permanently and it is also a potential source of conflict within the club,” the Manchester City CEO, Ferran Soriano, has written of Mourinho.

Chelsea supporters generally take it as it comes. “I love him,” says one. “He’s like a Rooney – brilliant, and you just have to take what comes with it.” But more complex are supporters’ sentiments about the way that the club’s football has also reverted to type, too: a functional, utilitarian form of the game, which is Mourinho’s default mode. For clues to the underlying philosophy, just look at what Mourinho excelled at on his five-year sport science course at Instituto Superior de Educacao Fisica in Lisbon, from 1982. The “internal logic of the game” course was a strength. So, too, biomechanics, statistics and kinanthropology (the study of the human size, if you, too, were none the wiser.)

Jose Mourinho reacts during the victory over QPR (Getty Images)

Roman Abramovich wanted a football aesthetic, not the appliance of science, when he brought Mourinho back. He got a more expansive Chelsea football at the start of this season, with Cesc Fabregas and Oscar – untypical Mourinho players – spinning patterns. But the fragility of the team and its failure to keep leads against the big sides (Manchester City twice, Manchester United and Liverpool) brought that down. It was a football out of character for Mourinho, who found himself marooned between his innate philosophy and the football others wanted from him.

The gradual return to lock-down has been inexorable. “Finals are for winning, not for playing,” Mourinho said before the Capital One Cup final win over Tottenham last month, which was the ultimate example of football with the sparkle taken out and muscularity put back in. There was 6ft 3in Kurt Zouma in defensive midfield, six defenders in the team and a 2-0 win accomplished by two near own-goals. It was back to the pragmatism that left Real Madrid so glad to see the back of this man. There, Mourinho’s outlook for games against Barcelona was “why take two defensive midfielders out on to the pitch when you can take three”.

The arrival of Fabregas at the start of the season saw Chelsea play more attractive football (REUTERS)

The philosophy, as defined by the El Pais journalist Diego Torres in his book on Mourinho’s Madrid period, The Special One, is that “the game will be won by the team who commit fewer errors; football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition”; and “whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake; whoever has the ball has fear.” One-touch football created fear in his players, Torres suggested, but “the long ball brought calm”. Compare this with Louis van Gaal, the United manager and Mourinho’s early mentor, who reached esoteric realms yesterday as he defined how he wanted fast, one-touch, stardust United football. “They have to play in a certain way. You are capable but unconscious [as a player] and I want them to be capable and conscious. Then, at the end, they are unconscious-capable, that they are doing it from their stomach.” Impressive, if slightly incomprehensible.

Chelsea supporters seem split 50:50 between frustration over the return of the functional side who grind teams down and those who just want victories, to judge by one newsletter circulated around 100 fans. Older fans who had “20 years of Chelsea being shit,” as one puts it, take “a pleasure in watching them win, not watching them.” There’s also a view that Financial Fair Play has limited Mourinho’s options and left a squad running on empty, around the tough spine he has built. And that the five or six of Chelsea’s home-grown players only a few years away from team – including strikers Isaiah Brown, Patrick Bamford and Dominic Solanke and midfielder Nathaniel Chalobah – offer promise.

With the title all but locked up, Abramovich must yearn for some football for the world to love on the Stamford Bridge pitch tonight against Manchester United – a side whose philosophy demands pace and panache – and again at Arsenal a week tomorrow. But don’t bank on it. These are the moments when Mourinho most retreats behind his barricade. He will say that only trophies matter when he puts this one in the cabinet. But after all the insults and the protests and the warfare, there comes a time when a club wants to be liked, revered and copied, not just respected. There are many very good reasons why Chelsea are so far from that.