OPINION
This time five years ago, the prospect of anybody turning there nose up at Jose Mourinho would have been absolutely unthinkable.
The Portuguese manager, and self -proclaimed “Special One”, was, alongside Pep Guardiola and perhaps a couple of others, seen as the gold standard in football management, and could have walked into pretty much any club in the world and been welcomed with open arms.
How times have changed.
Make no mistake, Mourinho’s name alone is still enough to get most chairmen salivating, and there can still be no denying his record as a boss, which includes two Champions League titles and a points per game average of 2.12 across the six job he has held since taking the reins at FC Porto in January of 2002, as per Transfermarkt.
But Mourinho’s recent ventures have been somewhat damaging to his reputation, and acrimonious departures from Chelsea and Manchester United have left him on the periphery of the inner circle of elite management that he was once the nucleus of.
Because of that, it is not particularly jaw-dropping to see him mentioned in the same breath as clubs like West Ham, as Stan Collymore did on Sunday.
Mourinho was acting as a pundit on Sky Sports, and Collymore took to Twitter to suggest that he was using the opportunity as a chance to put himself in the shop window for clubs of the Hammers’ ilk.
Once upon a time, that would have sent fans into meltdown, and as reported by Forever West Ham yesterday, there are certainly those would take him in a heartbeat.
Football.London journalist Sam Inkersole is not so sure though.
Writing in a Q&A for his outlet (14.41), when asked whether he would take Mourinho over current boss Manuel Pellegrini, he said: “No. Not yet anyway”.
Now, that could well be that Inkersole doesn’t feel that Pellegrini has done anything to justify being replaced, and that much is unquestionably true, but the tone he takes suggests that he doesn’t believe Mourinho would be a good fit for West Ham at all.
You would have to agree with him.
The Hammers need long term stability and a manager willing to build a project as they push for European football.
Mourinho, for all of his plaudits, has a tendency to lose the dressing room after a couple of seasons, and hasn’t worked on a tight budget in quite some time.
Does that mean that he would do a bad job in east London? Of course not. But equally, does that mean he is the right man for the job? You can’t help feeling that the answer is no.
