IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS since Jose Mourinho arrived in the Premier League and announced himself as ‘The Special One’. Throughout the decade, he’s established himself as a supreme football manager, winning trophies wherever he’s gone. But since returning to the top-flight, one odd and unsettling aspect of his management has come to the fore: an apparent suspicion of bringing in younger players and allowing them forge a role for themselves in the first-team.
The peculiar nature of how Mourinho has dealt with Romelu Lukaku has inevitably led to bigger questions. Does Mourinho only have an issue with the attacker or does it run deeper? How many young players have come through the ranks at Stamford Bridge? In a summer when smaller clubs have been handsomely rewarded for developing their own products (Everton and Ross Barkley, Southampton with Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana and Calum Chambers), what does it say about Chelsea’s future, especially with the imposing presence of Financial Fair Play casting a substantial shadow across Europe?
With other high-profile Premier League teams looking long-term regarding their investments, Chelsea have refused to do likewise. Last season, in the midst of major attacking problems, Mourinho shunned a proven goalscorer in Lukaku and signed a veteran in his early-30s instead. The Belgian showed impressive maturity and kept his head down, turned in another sterling season on loan with a different club but was still ignored. This summer, Mourinho made the same play, luring another old flame back to his place to try and re-kindle the same passion and intensity as before. But, instead of attempting to recreate the past, he should really be trying to shape the future.
The average age of the Chelsea squad is 25.7. To put it in context, Southampton’s is 26.2. But dig a little deeper and a slightly different picture emerges. Let’s start with the current crop of first-choice Chelsea youngsters. Thibaut Courtois is just 22, Oscar the same while Eden Hazard is a year younger. None were signed by Mourinho. He did bring in centre-back Kurt Zouma from Saint-Etienne in January for £12.85million but he was immediately loaned back to the French side and hasn’t played for Chelsea yet. Last summer, Mourinho signed 21 year-old Marco van Ginkel and immediately handed him some first-team action, usually from the bench. But the Dutch midfielder damaged his cruciate ligament in only his fourth appearance for the club and was ruled out for the rest of the campaign.
Van Ginkel is very much in the minority though. Over the last decade, Jose Mourinho has handed over transfer funds for twelve players aged twenty or under. A large portion of those signings were made during his first spell in England and he reaped some rewards – the deal for Arjen Robben was done during Claudio Ranieri’s spell as manager but he officially became a Chelsea player under Mourinho. He was launched straight into the first-team and lasted three seasons under Mourinho’s management. Lassana Diarra was given minimal opportunities to shine as a youngster in the Chelsea midfield before being shipped off to Arsenal while Mourinho only got one full season from both John Obi Mikel and Salomon Kalou before he acrimoniously parted company with the London club. Around the same time, a sixteen year-old Serbian, Slobodan Rajkovic, was signed from OFK Beograd for £4.5m. Over the following five years, he was loaned everywhere: back to Beograd, then to PSV, then to Twente, then to Vitesse before he was finally sold to Hamburg in August 2011 for £1.76m.
Ever since that initial splurge on young talent, Mourinho has cooled his interest in spending money on unproven, raw potential. At Inter, the focus was solely on experience and he thought nothing of bringing in the likes of Diego Milito and Lucio – both in their thirties at the time and Samuel Eto’o, who was then twenty-eight. But such a strategy was also an extension of the Italian league, where free-spirited younger players have rarely prospered. The setup was different at Real Madrid and Mourinho quickly stumped up the cash to land 21 year-old Mesut Ozil and Angel di Maria, then 22. But, in the case of Sergio Canales, there was a sign of things to come.
Bought from Racing for just over £5m, the nineteen year-old featured ten times for Real in his debut campaign. But, he was sent on loan at the end of the season and never returned. It was ruthless from Mourinho but it’s a tactic he’s deployed since, especially prevalent in the cases of Kevin de Bruyne and Lukaku – the initial impression may not be great and so the young player is usually banished to another club, temporarily at first, before a permanent exit strategy is negotiated.
Since being back at Stamford Bridge, Mourinho has overseen the arrivals of a couple of young players – Stipe Perica, a Croatian centre-forward spent last season on loan with NAC Breda but if Lukaku can’t get a game, it’s tough to see the nineteen year-old being given a chance to shine. Another Croatian teenager, Mario Pasalic, was signed in July and will spend this season on loan at Elche in Spain. And despite impressing for Ghana at the World Cup in Brazil, the 22 year-old winger Christian Atsu is likely to be picked up on a long-term loan deal and will be forced to impress Mourinho that way, instead of being called into some match-day squads or granted the odd League Cup game to try and offer something.
Certainly, the likes of Andre Schurrle and Mohamed Salah have hit the ground running in terms of their fledgling Chelsea careers and Mourinho has reaped the rewards of granting them immediate opportunities. But overall, he does it far too infrequently. Perhaps, as he’s developed into a gun-for-hire, short-term manager over the last ten years, moving consistently from pillar to post and never putting down roots, he feels he doesn’t have the time or the interest to engage in youth development. For such a pragmatist, Mourinho probably feels it’s not his remit and that if a club wants to invest in long-term youth projects, it’s an assignment for a technical director, not a coach. But, as he claims to be ‘The Happy One’ now that he’s back ‘home’, maybe it’s time to change his approach. He could surprise himself.
