A figure that produces brilliance, hilarity and
downright fury in equal measure, the entries below
will no doubt prompt smiles, shakes-of-the-head and
disbelief all in the space of one article.
Enjoy!
1 - Where better place to start when discussing
Mourinho's life than at the No.1. Upon arriving at
Chelsea in 2004 from Porto the talented coach gave a
press conference in which he said, "Please don't call
me arrogant, but I'm European champion and I think
I'm a special one,” much to the joy of the waiting
reporters. The self-proclaimed moniker has
accompanied him ever since.
2 - Mourinho led Real Madrid to the Liga title for the
first time in four seasons in 2011-12, and during the
campaign they broke a number of domestic records.
Their 100 points was the highest ever tally, as was
the 121 goals they scored. Their positive goal
difference of 89 was also a new high, along with their
16 away wins and 32 overall wins.
3 - The number of weeks Jose told the Italian press it
took him to learn Italian after agreeing to take the
Inter job in 2008.
4 - The 2011-12 Liga title represented a significant
milestone for Mourinho, as it meant he had won the
league title in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain,
each of the four countries in which he had coached.
5 - In a letter he sent to each of the Chelsea squad
soon after arriving at the club, he wrote an equation
at the bottom with five words in it:
"Motivation + Ambition + Team + Spirit = SUCCESS"
6 - In 2009, Mourinho received a doctorate from
Lisbon's Technical University for his
accomplishments in professional football. He had
graduated from the university more than 20 years
beforehand with a degree in physical education and
sport.
7 - The number of players Mourinho thought his Inter
side needed to beat Milan in January 2010. Wesley
Sneijder was sent off for Inter during the game,
although they still went on to win the derby 2-0.
Afterwards their coach said: "We were perfect. We
would have won this game even with seven men.
Maybe with six we would have struggled, but we
would have won with seven."
8 - When told by a Spanish journalist that he has
been named the ninth most influential person in
world by AskMen, Mourinho replied: "What position is
my wife in? Eighth, at least. That is crazy. I’m not
even in charge of my own home …"
9 - The number of years he went unbeaten at home
in league matches. Between losing 3-2 to Beira-Mar
as Porto coach in February 2002 and Real Madrid's
1-0 loss to Sporting Gijon in April 2011, Mourinho
had won 125 matches and drawn 25 in an
unbelievable run of games that lasted nine years and
one month.
10 - In the build-up to Real Madrid's Champions
League semi-final clash against Barcelona he stoked
the flames between the two sides by claiming his
team would practice playing with 10 men as referees
always sent his players off when he faced Barcelona.
"I have to train with 10 men [to prepare for the
Barcelona semi-final], how to play with 10 men,
because I go there with Chelsea, I finish with 10, I go
there with Inter, I finish with 10 and I have to train to
play with 10 men because it can happen again."
In the 2-0 first-leg loss at the Santiago Bernabeu,
Madrid had Pepe sent off.
11 - Mourinho won the inaugural Ballon d'Or Best
Coach award in 2010.
12 - He is reportedly paid €12.3m annually by
current club Real Madrid. His contract is set to expire
in 2016, despite rumours linking him with a move
back to England.
13 - According to his mother, Maria Julia, Jose did not
suddenly become a perfectionist when he started
coaching, having shown signs when he was very
young of his desire for things to be neat and
organised.
"He was a perfectionist from his early days," she
says. "At the age of five he would go to school with
all his pens, crayons and ruler perfectly ordered and
cased in his satchel."
14 - The percentage of possession that Mourinho's
Inter side had in the second leg of their Champions
League semi-final against Barcelona at Camp Nou in
2010. Inter lost that match 1-0, but progressed to the
final 3-2 winners on aggregate.
15 - Jose's mother, Maria Julia, wanted him to
become a businessman when it became clear he
wasn't going to succeed as a professional footballer,
and when he was 23 she signed him up for a
business school. He quit after a day.
16 - In 2007, Mourinho was issued a police caution
after allegedly refusing to allow police to quarantine
his pet dog, Leya. Having rushed home from an
awards ceremony following a tip-off from his wife,
according to eyewitnesses the then-Chelsea coach
freed the animal from the hands of the health
officials and encouraged it to run off down the street.
17 - Before he became a coach, Mourinho was a PE
teacher in Portugal. According to one of his former
pupils he was an immediate hit with female
students. "Until he arrived no girls ever wanted to do
PE, but suddenly nobody was asking for a doctor's
sick note," she recalled.
18 - According to Rui Faria, Mourinho's fitness coach
at Porto, Chelsea, Inter and now Real Madrid, the 50-
year-old learned a valuable coaching tip when
attending a course led by Andy Roxburgh at the
Scottish Football Association while he was still coach
of the youth team at Vitoria Setubal. Roxburgh
emphasised to Mourinho the importance of having
your players face away from the sun when talking to
them so they would not be blinded by the light.
19 - In 2005 he was selected as the New
Statesman's Man of the Year.
20 - Mourinho was fined and given a three-match
ban by the Italian Football Association in February
2010 after making a handcuffs gesture towards a
camera following the dismissals of two of his Inter
players in the first half of a Serie A match against
Sampdoria.
21 - The day after winning the Champions League
with Inter, Mourinho said he was "sad, as almost for
sure it's my last game with Inter." He went on to add:
"If you don't coach Real Madrid then you will always
have a gap in your career." A week later Real Madrid
announced Mourinho as their new coach.
22 - In 2005 he donated a jacket to be auctioned to
help raise money for Tsunami Relief and other
charities. Organiser Marc Thompson revealed that
one bidder paid €25,800 for Mourinho's coat at the
fundraiser, which was held at Stamford Bridge.
23 - His favourite actor is Anthony Hopkins, the star
of the Hannibal Lecter trilogy.
24 - The age Mourinho ended his playing career,
after making 94 appearances during spells at Rio
Ave, Belenenses, Sesimbra and Comercio e Industria.
25 - Upon being unveiled at Real Madrid, Mourinho
addressed his on-going feud with the club's Liga
rivals Barcelona. "If I am hated at Barcelona, it is
their problem but not mine. Fear is not a word in my
football dictionary," he said. In 24 matches against
Barcelona for Chelsea, Inter and Madrid the
Portuguese trainer does not have a brilliant record,
having won six, drawn eight and lost 10.
26 - Despite his current distaste for the Catalan side,
it was not always that way. Mourinho acted as
assistant to Bobby Robson and then Louis van Gaal
during a three-year spell at the club between
1996-99, and also applied to be coach in 2008 after
leaving Chelsea.
27 - The length in pages of the PowerPoint document
that Mourinho presented during his unsuccessful
interview for the Barcelona job in Lisbon in 2008.
28 - After taking the Porto job in January 2002,
Mourinho steered the club to a third place finish in
the Primeira Liga, then promised the club's hierarchy
that he would "make Porto champions next year."
Sure enough, they won the 2002-03 league with a
record points tally of 86.
29 - The age he became Sir Bobby Robson's
translator at Benfica in 1992. He would go on to work
with the former England manager at Porto and then
Barcelona.
30 - Mourinho does not have a good relationship
with the current Sporting Lisbon coach Jesualdo
Ferreira, after the two clashed a number of times
during his time in Portugal. One of the birthday boy's
most memorable early quotes likened Ferreira to a
donkey.
"One is a coach with a 30-year career, the other with
a three-year one. The one with 30 years has never
won anything; the one with three years has won a lot.
The one with a 30-year career will be forgotten when
he ends it; the one with three could end it right now
and he could never be erased from history. This could
be the story of a donkey who worked for 30 years but
never became a horse."
31 - When asked about how he would work alongside
the Chelsea chairman Roman Abramovich when he
joined the London-based club in 2004, he famously
replied: "I don't have to control Mr Abramovich. He
has to control me."
32 - Jose met his wife Tami when he was a teenager,
before they married in 1989 when he was 26. They
have two children, a daughter called Matilde and a
son called Jose Mario Jr.
33 - After being banned by Uefa for Chelsea's two-
legged Champions League quarter-final against
Bayern Munich in the 2004-05 season, it was claimed
that Mourinho arrived at Stamford Bridge early and
hid in the dressing room in order to give the pre-
match and half-time team-talk, before then being
wheeled out of the ground in a laundry basket in
order to avoid being seen.
34 - Upon winning his second Premier League title
with Chelsea in 2006, Mourinho threw his winners
medal into the crowd at Stamford Bridge. He was
given a replacement medal minutes later, but it too
suffered a similar fate. One of the lucky fans to catch
a medal later sold it at auction for €19,720.
35 - In 2009-10 during his second season at Inter,
Mourinho let the San Siro side to the first Italian
treble of Serie A, the Coppa Italia and the Champions
League. It was also the first time Inter had won the
European Cup since 1965.
36 - By winning that Champions League with Inter
he also became only the third coach in history to win
the tournament with two different teams, with Ernst
Happel and Ottmar Hitzfield the two others to
achieve that feat.
37 - Jose was born in 1963. Notable other moments
associated with football that occurred in that year
include the formation of the Bundesliga in West
Germany, and Santos' 5-3 aggregate Copa
Libertadores win over Boca Juniors. The Brazilian club
were inspired by a certain 23-year-old forward going
by the name of Pele.
38 - His father, Jose Manuel Mourinho Felix, was a
professional footballer and was capped once by
Portugal in 1972.
39 - Mourinho speaks Portuguese, Spanish, Italian,
French, English and Catalan.
40 - In recent years many figures in world football
have labelled Mourinho as the best coach in the
world, including Wesley Sneijder, Karim Benzema,
Deco, Iker Casillas and Cristiano Ronaldo. Legendary
AC Milan boss Arrigo Sacchi also described him as "a
phenomenon."
41 - "I could write a book of 200 pages of my two
years at Inter with Mario Balotelli," said Mourinho in
2012. Player and coach enjoyed a turbulent
relationship at San Siro, with the Italian striker once
being warned at half-time of a game against Rubin
Kazan not to pick up a second yellow card by his
coach, only to then be sent off in the 46th minute.
42 - In 2010 Mourinho was fined €40,000 by Uefa
after appearing to issue instructions via Jerzy Dudek
and Iker Casillas to Sergio Ramos and Xabi Alonso
that resulted in the latter two players being sent off
in Real Madrid's 4-0 Champions League win over
Ajax. Having been sent off the two were then
suspended for the last Champions League group
match against Auxerre with qualification to the
knockout stages already secured, and then had a
clean slate for the last-16.
43 - The 50-year-old tasted defeat outside football in
2004, when an unofficial biography about him called
O Vencedor - De Setubal a Stamford Bridge became a
bestseller in Portugal despite his attempts to stop it
being published.
44 - At the end of 2011 Mourinho was named
Rockstar of the Year by the Spanish edition of Rolling
Stone magazine and featured on the front cover of
their December edition.
45 - In August 2011 Mourinho managed to escape
punishment following an ugly melee at the end of the
Supercopa second leg against Barcelona, despite
being seen poking the eye of the then Barca
assistant coach Tito Vilanova. In the aftermath of the
incident he went on to call Tito "Pito", a Spanish
slang term for penis.
46 - Controversial Paris Saint-Germain striker Zlatan
Ibrahimovic, who played under Mourinho at Inter,
described the Portuguese coach positively in his
autobiography I Am Zlatan.
“Jose Mourinho is a big star…He’s cool. The first time
he met [my wife] he whispered to her: ‘Helena, you
have only one mission. Feed Zlatan, let him sleep,
keep him happy!’ The guy says what he wants. I like
him.”
47 - When Jose departed Inter to join Real Madrid he
was caught on camera wishing one of his most loyal
players, Marco Materazzi, a tearful farewell before
jumping in the back of a car and leaving Milan.
48 - In 2004, Mourinho revealed that four years
earlier he had turned down an offer from Sir Bobby to
be his assistant at Newcastle, even though the
Englishman also suggested he would step down after
two years to allow his friend to take over at St James'
Park.
"Since Bobby suspected I wouldn't accept it, he told
me it would only be for a year, two tops, and that at
the end of that time I would be head coach and he
club manager. I didn't take him up on his offer,
knowing sooner or later, my time would come."
49 - Mourinho's Spanish Supercopa victory in 2012
made him the first man to win the national Super
Cup in four different countries.
50 - The number of years that had passed since
Chelsea had won their last league title when
Mourinho led them to the 2004-05 Premier League.

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Nice record.......plus first to comment