triumph of accountancy

Thinking about it, the most fully realized character in David Peace’s amazing The Damned United wasn’t Brian Clough. It was Leeds United itself: Dirty Fucking Leeds, in all their malignant glory. People still hate Leeds today because of that team, but I’d half forgotten what it was to hate Leeds so that you could taste it, the only football team ever organized as though to confirm the classical idea of evil.

A few years back, Chelsea looked like they were going the same way. A Russian oligarch buys a club and hires a manager, a stylish youthful brute with family connections to the Salazar dictatorship. Money and management shape a ruthlessly effective winning machine. Forget about competition, uncertainty, ambiguity, chance, luck, transcendence of limitations, desperation, inspiration, happenstance and all that good stuff. Money rules, totalitarian style. Let the big dogs eat - first, last and always.

But it never quite worked out. Perhaps it was down to a basic meanness of spirit, but Mourinho’s teams never got the death grip on the league they wanted, and got found out in Europe. They were never big enough to be evil, Leeds style. There was too much of a brute conception of efficiency at work. They hired in stylish mercenaries and set them to midfield toiling, as though auditioning for the Republic of Ireland.

Abramovich, who in truth doesn’t strike me as such a bad sort, seemed to realize this. But Mourinho never got the point. Get big money and build a big machine. Watch championships fall into your lap. Doesn’t work? Keep pulling the levers and pressing the buttons.

It seems now like Abramovich had enough and sacked Mourinho. It’s hard not to blame him. Chelsea must be the most forgettable dominant team ever, their championships triumphs of accountancy and so paradoxically a bigger waste of a billionaire’s money than if it had been spent on frank and open failure. Football’s generally an ugly spectacle these days, but it’s still one of the only sports where you can’t just erase the romance.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

Wrong. It was Mr Revie.

[jamie]

Nah, he was just part of the whole: i thought Johnny Giles was the most demonic appendage, but they all bled into the general Leeds U homunculous.

[ejh]

Another view would be that Mourinho really was too much his own man for Abramovich, who likes to know that the people below him are scared of him.

However much money he had to spend, Chelsea won't find a better manager than Mourinho (not least because of the reasons give above) which is good, since it will do them damage. There's not a football club in England with a smaller proportion of their fans coming from the locality than Chelsea, not even the club that plays at Old Trafford. I loathe them so much I even wanted Manchester United to beat them for the Double in 1994.

But Mourinho made me laugh for a while. "Here we do not have so many goals in the five-a-side matches", or whatever he said after Arsenal won 5-4 at Spurs, suggesting that teams that conceded four goals a game don't win the league. And he was right.

[Igor Belanov]

And plenty of people like Leeds because of that team. My Dad wasn't a Leeds fan, but he speaks very highly of the ability of that team and would contrast them very favourably to Mourinho's dreary Chelsea 'machine'.

That machine was starting to fall apart, and having lost its efficiency could hardly offer style as a mitigating factor. Like Ejh above, I've a lot of contempt for the Chelsea fans cheering Mourinho's name, they seem to epitomise the kind of 'gloaters' who pay £1000 for a season ticket just to taunt rival fans when they get back to work after the weekend.