Should the Jose Mourinho-Factor Make Manchester United Favourites for the Title?

“I’m not going to hide behind three bad seasons, three bad championships, behind two seasons not even with the fourth-place finish. I’m not going to hide behind that, I’m not going to hide also in that fourth is the target and everything better than that is amazing for us. No, I want to win the title.”

On Thursday evening, at the club’s base for pre-season preparations, Jose Mourinho gave his first interview with the British press as Manchester United manager from the team’s hotel in Shanghai, relayed by the Guardian’s Jamie Jackson. As ever in his honeymoon period at a new club, he was in ebullient form.

In a wide-ranging interrogation, among other topics, he held court on what Zlatan Ibrahimovic will bring to the party (an amazing body, apparently), Juan Mata’s future (he has one, perhaps), Wayne Rooney’s captaincy (not in question), his short-terms aims for himself (convincing the club’s owners he’s the right guy for the job) and long-term aims for the club (trophies, plenty of them).

On being appointed Porto manager in January 2002 he declared: “Next season we will be champions.” He stopped short of making such a bold promise, but only just.

David Moyes’ first dealings with the media were littered with references to “hope.” As if cowed by his new surrounds, the “Chosen One” less hit the ground running than never really hit it at all. It was no real surprise when he lasted just nine months into a six-year contract. He should have been suspicious when executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward asked him to sign it in pencil. Especially given it was one of those with a rubber on top.

Louis van Gaal was the alpha male supporters were always going to warm to after dithering Dave. The Dutchman could always talk the talk, and to be fair, his team could walk the walk—usually during matches, which didn’t always make for the most entertaining of spectacles.

It’s hard to get used to Mourinho in red, but then the devil always did have all the best lines. Like Miles Davis, he has nearly always been in one kind of blue or another, whether at Porto, Chelsea or Inter Milan. The pure white of Real Madrid never quite suited him.

There was nothing blue about his mood. In China’s most populous city, it seems there was only one man everyone wanted to listen to. Mourinho presents himself as infallible, a short man who has the presence of a giant and the rare gift of being able to hold a room just by being in it. With a punchy rhetoric, he delivered a clear message.

Manchester United may have finished seventh, fourth and fifth since Sir Alex Ferguson bid farewell to the dugout with a 13th Premier League title—the club’s 20th in total—but Mourinho has every intention of replicating what he did at Porto, Chelsea and Inter: winning the title in his first season.

David Beckham backs Manchester United to return to their former glories under Jose Mourinho. pic.twitter.com/08puFxByza

— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) July 21, 2016

After eight league titles in four different countries, along with two UEFA Champions Leagues, a UEFA Cup and a smattering of the domestic variety, his ambition of being one of the world’s finest tacticians has been fulfilled. He needs to reaffirm that fact on the back of the worse season in his professional career by some distance.

His critics will point out that in eight seasons after taking the Porto job he won six titles. Since 2010, when he took the reins at Real Madrid, just two more have followed.

As Jonathan Wilson pointed out in his superb essay The Devil and Jose Mourinho (a Blizzard piece republished by the Guardian), few managers last more than a decade at the top. Methodologies become tired. It’s hard to stay relevant when a new wave of manager auteurs are directing their sides in entirely different ways to their forefathers.

The Premier League will be full of them next season: Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino, Antonio Conte and Jurgen Klopp will each have sides in their own image. Mourinho must ensure he doesn’t look like the old dog in a pen of puppies, as Arsene Wenger has at times, in demonstrating a stubborn unwillingness to adapt principles he presumably chiseled into great stone tablets at the start of his career.

If he can add a ninth league title to his resume with Manchester United, it may be his greatest achievement yet. After three seasons in which the football on the red side of Manchester has matched the weather—grey and drizzly with the (very) odd sunny spell; an L.S. Lowry painting brought to life—Mourinho and United have converged in circumstances neither would have anticipated.

The British playwright Sir David Hare once wrote, “Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.” Only a fool would argue either Manchester United or Mourinho are ever overawed in times of prosperity, now they must prove they possess a high tide even in periods of adversity.

WATCH: @ManUtd keeping options open amid @paulpogba reports, says Jose Mourinho: https://t.co/0lfZ4NPPVL #SSNHQ https://t.co/8X3GVLuEn9

— Sky Sports News HQ (@SkySportsNewsHQ) July 21, 2016

Like a pair of down-on-their-luck recent divorcees, the pair have walked down the aisle over the summer with concerned parents Sir Alex and Sir Bobby Charlton in the wings muttering, “it’ll never last, they’re not right for one another” to anyone in earshot. It’s like Cheshire …

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