The fine art of management

Reading today's news: "Sporting coach Manuel Preciado has launched a stinging attack on Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho, claiming that the Portuguese is “a villain, and a bad companion”."

It is not well known but a large chunk of the football world has no respect whatsoever for Jose. Is it all sour grapes? Well, there are some things we have to consider.

The first one is how big sports, and most of all football, has become. Many years ago, a newspaper would dedicate one page to the world cup final and that was that. Today, each paper has to have a "sports" section of many pages, every day. Football has become a massive business, especially since television, but we all know that. A great business requires great marketing and the development of brands, one of them being Mourinho.

Let us make no mistakes, the guy is a good manager. Don't want to analyse his skills, it has been done a lot, he has a personality of steely determination that cannot be simulated in FM11 (where, as we said, the personality of the human player plays zero role in the teams performance).

His success though lies not only on his leadership skills but also (maybe mostly) on the fact that he has realised what is modern football and has put himself forward to become an icon, a brand. Football main shareholders love that, it is really the stuff that generates them money, and they are giving Mourinho 100% of their support. Would he have had the same success if he hadn't that support? Probably not.

So there we have it. The difficult art of management. Will that ever be simulated in FM11? As someone said in the past, it will take a leap of faith!

Unless you know Jose personaly i cant see whay any one would slag him off or question his ability to manage and get the best from a bunch of players.

Because he will never manage at lower league levels it's hard to say what he can achive from a bunch of 3rd rate footballers..

I think it wouldn't work so well for old Jose in a lower league team. His success has a lot to do with branding at a higher level.

Jose already managed a lower league team, Leiria, before he signed for FC Porto, where he won the Uefa Cup and Champions League in consecutive years, and at Leiria he got the best results of their lifetime, and most of the players from that season, like Derlei later signed to Porto where he achieved all the success we know.

When it comes to FM, we already have some options to interact with the other managers, and in my opinion, is quite good, we can build relationships of love/hate with any manager in the game, and that has effect on how easy/hard it is to sign/sell players from that team.

Very good but in the quest for a real football simulation, the manager's personality is key. How could someone be a Mourinho in the game? It is, of course, not possible.

Mourinho has had success at literally every club he's been involved in. Any criticism of him is pure nonsense. He's paid to manage clubs and he does so impeccably well.

Jose Mourinho has lost just ONE managerial game at home (way back in '02!) Now that is a great achievement no matter what club you are at.

Come on, this is an FM forum. Where's the relevance?

I have seen the cameras spend as much time on mourinho as the game itself irl. I think it would be possible to replicate a mourinho in football manager. Ime sure ive seen the "controversial manager" tag before on the manager homepage. Theres a lot of hidden stats involving managers, have a look in the editor.

I personally don't like Mourinho. He attracts a media circus and I'd rather not have that at my club.

Also since he has left Porto he has always had huge financial backing, yes he has made inspired signings (Sneijder) and shown that players respect him alot by playing out of position all season (Eto'o) but I'd like to see how he'd manage at a club with no world class players and no hope of bringing any in.

Also for my personal taste he is too much of a journeyman. He won everything in Portugaul, went to England won all there went to Ital won all there, left for Spain. I prefer managers to produce a legacy through long service, brining up youth players in the playing style they play etc.

Man Utd fan btw

Quote: "I think it would be possible to replicate a mourinho in football manager. Ime sure ive seen the "controversial manager" tag before on the manager homepage. Theres a lot of hidden stats involving managers, have a look in the editor. "

I think that is the problem. The game spent too much time in the past creating that massive big match engine, neglecting important factors of real life football management. When it realised what it had done, it quickly tried to fix it by assigning little tags calles "controversial manager" etc.

The fact is that is there is an FM player out there who has the same attributes as Mourinho - a) Leadership, b) Understanding football marketing - he is not able to apply them in the game.