What is the true cost of the Jose Mourinho era?

Jose Mourinho brings short-term success but typically leaves a bigger mess then he arrived to. And that mess takes a LONG time to clean up.

Author’s note: Extensive research was done for this piece from books such as Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Done Deal by Daniel Geey, The Price of £ootball by Kieran Maguire, as well as interviews with people who work in player management.

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Ole Gunnar Solskjaer set Manchester United twitter on fire this week when he downplayed United’s ambitions in this summers transfer market. Not that he did anything, the last thing you want to do is let the rest of the world know you have a lot of money. That’s how the ‘United Tax’ was created. That’s how Ousmane Dembele and Coutinho became €100+ million players - because the selling clubs knew Barcelona were sitting on a huge pile of Neymar money.

Of course, rational thought isn’t for the masses. In 2021 if you’re not outrages about something then you’re not living. Solskjaer not coming out and saying United were pursuing the most expensive center back along with Erling Haaland was enough to send the online fans into hysteria about how the Glazers were going to use COVID as an excuse to not spend any money like the cheap bastards that they are.

Now look. The Glazers are capital B Bad owners. They’re not the worst owners as they live in the same universe as Stan Kroenke but they could certainly be better. They’ve saddled the club with debt (though this hasn’t really effected United’s operating ability), they take tons of money out of the club to their dividends (though this too hasn’t really effected the club), and they aren’t putting nearly enough money into maintaining, and improving Old Trafford.

But cheap? That’s the one thing they aren’t. It doesn’t take much research to see discover that.

The Glazers issue is far more about incompetence - they continually put the wrong people in charge - then not willing to spend money. Over the last five years United have the second highest net spend in Europe, trailing only Manchester City - who weren’t exactly following the rules. That’s a higher net spend than PSG who spent €402 million on just Neymar and Mbappe during that time!

This hatred of the Glazers goes all the way back to when they first took over the club and it’s understandable. After Sir Alex Ferguson retired, they started spending money pretty freely. That spending didn’t lead to success (because they hire the wrong people), so the narrative shifted to “they won’t spend money if United qualify for the Champions League.”

That’s come about because United had underwhelming transfer windows the last two times they finished in the top four, but it completely ignores the spending that they did the other two times United qualified for Europe’s premier competition.

I can’t argue that recently it doesn’t look like a pattern, but it doesn’t take a lot of digging to find out why it’s played out that way.

The problem didn’t start with Jose Mourinho, but Mourinho’s actions not only didn’t fix it, it made it so much worse in so many different ways that United are still picking up the pieces.

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To fully understand the extent of the damage Mourinho did we have to vaguely understand how football finances work. This isn’t like the video games where you’re just given a budget for one season and a new budget the next season. The decisions you make one year will effect you for years to come.

In the old days (and by old I mean not that long ago) a £4 million transfer fee was a simple transaction of one team giving the other £4 million. These days, virtually no transfers are handled in cash anymore. Most transfer fees are now spread out to be paid over the lifetime of the player’s contract. Some of them are divided evenly (£100 million over five years = £20 million per year), some have larger up front fees (£60 million in the first year, then £10 million a year for the remaining four), and occasionally (but rarely) you get a club demanding it all that season (Harry Maguire).

Regardless of how much money changes hands in a given year, the transfer fees are amortized in the club’s books over the lifetime of the contract. Therefore for bookkeeping purposes Harry Maguire’s fee goes down as £13.3 million a year (£80 million divided by his six year contract).

This gets confusing because the selling club marks down the transfer fee as one lump sum (Leicester reports an income of £80 million). This helped Chelsea out last summer when they received £50 million for Alvaro Morata as his original deal was a loan to buy. Delaying his payment until after their transfer ban was over was a fantastic accounting move.

Bookkeeping is (now) just as important to transfers as actual cash thanks to UEFA’s FFP laws. You can only spend what you bring in, which means even if you have money, if you didn’t manage your books correctly you can’t spend that money.

This is where United have run into roadblocks over the past few years. Fans love to juxtapose United’s revenue with how much they spend on transfer fees that year - as if spending more on transfer fees equals success (it’s not correlated at all, spending more on wages is). Comparing those two numbers leaves out a whole lot of context and doesn’t even remotely tell the story.

For starters, that’s only looking at the transfer fee, which in terms of all the other expenses you have, is just the tip of the iceberg. Since deals are no longer brokered between clubs and are done by third party agents, once the transfer fee is done you also have to pay an agents fee. Once that is settled you have to pay the player a signing on bonus, then you have to pay his wages. Then come the bonuses. When we hear about a player being on £75k/week, that’s just the base salary, it doesn’t account for win bonuses, appearance bonuses, goal bonuses, clean sheet bonuses etc that are baked into nearly every contract.

(Just a reminder. No contracts are publicly available. Everything we hear about a players wages is speculation).

On top of that you have to pay your coaches, the kit men, the backroom staff. Everyone that makes the club the club. Not all of those costs factor into FFP but you still need the money for them. When you see that number of £590 million in revenues and “only” spent £170m that second number isn’t the final amount of cost, but that first number is the entire amount that came in.

That brings us to good old Mourinho.

Jose Mourinho is a win now manager. He’s not here to build and develop your team for the future. He’s here for immediate success whatever the cost. As we know, that cost is pretty high.

To get his success, Mourinho has a very short term outlook in the transfer market. This isn’t all bad, but it could very easily go bad. Which is exactly what happened.

In his first summer Mourinho spent £146m* to sign Eric Bailly, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, and Paul Pogba. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with those three players. Pogba and Bailly were young players you could build around, Mkhitaryan was right in his prime.

He also added Zlatan Ibrahimovic on a “free” transfer. Make no mistake about this, there was nothing “free” about that transfer. Zlatan had a base salary of £367k/wk (over £19 million a year). That ended up being over £22 million thanks to Zlatan hitting his goal bonus. But that doesn’t even account for the signing on fee he received, the win bonuses, the bonuses for winning two trophies, or the hefty agents fee Mino Raiola received.

On top of all that, United were also paying additional £16.5 million yearly installments to Raiola for the Pogba deal. That’s a lot more than £146 million.

Again, on the surface this isn’t terrible. It’s what happened next that makes everything truly horrific.

Zlatan was 34 when he joined United, which means you’re probably only getting a year out of him before having to sign someone in the same position. That’s not a good plan for a team with multiple needs. After spending all that money on the ‘free’ transfer a year prior, Zlatan got hurt and United then had to spend £75 million on a striker just one year later! The other signings? Another centerback, and a 28 year old midfielder - who was needed, but his shelf life was only going to be three or four years (as we’re now seeing).

To make matters worse, Zlatan’s contract would have automatically triggered a one year extension had he made 50 appearances for the club. Thanks to his injury he only made 46, so his contract simply expired. When they decided to re-sign him that summer that’s a brand spanking new contract which just means more agent fees and another signing on bonus!

£145*+ million for two players in the positions you spent big money on a year ago, devoting even more money into two areas while the rest of the squad issues went ignored.

Then Mourinho decided he didn’t want Mkhitaryan and he’d swap him with Alexis Sanchez. Since it’s a ‘swap’ deal that means you’re not spending money right? Think again. As Kieran Maguire broke down in The Price of Football when all the costs were added up, if both players had played out their full contracts Sanchez would have ended up costing just £1 million less than Romelu Lukaku.

After two years Mourinho had spent £292 million plus two “free” transfers, plus a very expensive swap deal, and ran up a massive wage bill. What was his priority the next summer? A center back.

You’re kidding. The exact same position he said was the problem the past two years. It’s not about not spending money, it’s about spending money on the wrong people.

United barely spent the following summer - signing just Diogo Dalot, Fred, and Lee Grant. In fact they actually finished those deals in June so they were put into the books for United’s 2017/18 fiscal year, thus giving their books a year of rest. Remember they were still paying transfer fees for Angel Di Maria, Morgan Schneiderlin, Bastien Schweinsteiger, Anthony Martial, Pogba and others even though some were no longer at the club. They had to stop spending money because their costs were rising at a much higher rate then their incomes. It wasn’t sustainable.

From The Price of Football by Kieran Maguire

This wasn’t a case of United not backing Jose Mourinho. This was a simple case of Mourinho had already spent all the money!

United finished second in 2017/18 and the cost of that was so extreme that United are still feeling that to this day. Nearly every decision that was made that season has fucked the club long term.

The signings Mourinho made in 2016/17 weren’t particularly bad. Bailly was very good that season and only a year later did injuries start hitting him. That happens. Pogba has been very good even if he never lived up to the astronomical expectations that were set for him.

Mkhitaryan took a while to settle in to the Premier League, but scored six goals in 11 Europa League appearances including one in the final. A year later he got off to a hot start with five assists in the first three games. His game went down a bit once Pogba got hurt, but he still produced a 0.59 NP G+A per 90 with his time at United that season. Then Mourinho decided he didn’t want him.

Think about what happens if Mkhitaryan sticks around. I know it’s easy to say he would have failed because he didn’t fit in at Arsenal either, but that first half season at Arsenal his NP G+A per 90 was 0.68. The following year it was 0.55. That’s not bad, especially for someone who would have been a squad player. If Mkhitaryan were still here he’d give United an additional option that could play on the right side, an additional backup to Bruno. He’s putting up a 0.69 this season at Roma, and I get that’s Serie A, but even if he was putting up a 0.50 that would put him… fifth on this current United side. Behind only Cavani, Bruno, Rashford, and… Juan Mata. The man he’d be sharing time with. How badly have United missed Mata recently? Imagine if they had another one.

Financially United would be in a better place as well. Had Mkhitaryan stuck around that means Alexis never comes. They don’t waste copious amounts of money on bonuses, fees, and absurdly high wages on Sanchez (they paid him £10 million this year to leave! That’s likely what Mkhitaryan would have earned).

There was also the residual effect of Sanchez. David de Gea was in the midst of a historic year. He was easily United’s most important player, while Sanchez was doing nothing. He wanted to paid like United’s most important player and Sanchez’s wages were a good benchmark. By last year no other club was calling offering the kind of money United wanted to sign De Gea. They thought it was embarrassing to let him leave on a free, and it would have been more embarrassing to let him leave for £15 million. They gave him the contract.

A year later Paul Pogba was the most important player as he watched Alexis collecting money for doing NOTHING. He too wanted to be paid like the most important player. Ander Herrera was contributing far more than Alexis and he wanted his wages to reflect that. You can see how this got out of hand. Had Alexis never arrived, perhaps Herrera is still around?

Another effect of Mourinho. During the summer of 2018-19 Marouane Fellaini’s contract ran out. He wanted a two year deal, but United’s long standing policy for players over the age of 30 was a one year deal. Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Michael Carrick, Patrice Evra, Rio Ferdinand, all of them signed deals one year at a time.

Fellaini wouldn’t take a one year deal. Mourinho forced the board to relent and give him a two year contract. Six months later Fellaini was gone, but players over 30 still wanted more than one year deals. Now Juan Mata is on a two year deal, Nemanja Matic got three years! That makes it much harder to get wages off the books.

He gave new contracts to Jesse Lingard and Marcos Rojo. He somehow chose all those guys over Daley Blind (if Blind was still healthy he’d be such an asset for this United squad).

You can change the culture of the club in about a year, but some of the mistakes and precedents that were made during Mourinho’s two and a half year run will take much longer to fix.

Not all the players that Mourinho signed were bad, but the decisions he made sunk this club into a financial hole. Spending on a striker only to spend £75 million on another one a year later. Lukaku never really got going, scoring just 28 premier league goals over two years. If Lukaku was still with United they’d be in better shape, but his first touch wasn’t good enough to the be the #9 in Ole’s system, and when Ole arrived, he wasn’t playing well enough to force Ole to cater the system towards him.

Jose signed a centerback, then he signed another one. It’s fair to say that United did need two but neither of them were exactly right so when Ole came the big money first had to spent on another centerback. Sinking money into the same positions year after year.

Fans love to compare how Ole isn’t closing the gap to City but it’s a false comparison. City have had nearly a five year headstart! When Pep arrived he inherited Sergio Aguero, Kevin de Bruyne, David Silva, Raheem Sterling, and Fernandinho. In his first season he added attackers Leroy Sane, Gabriel Jesus, and Nolito as well as midfielder Ilkay Gundogan.

Since then the only attackers he’s added have been Bernardo (depth), Riyad Mahrez (depth), and Ferran Torres. The only midfielder he’s added was Rodri. All the other money has gone to the defense. It’s a lot easier to reinforce areas when you don’t need to worry about half your squad.

When Jose arrived in 2016 United needed a midfielder, defensive midfielder, striker, centerback, and right winger. Five years later United need a right winger, defensive midfielder, striker, centerback, and possibly a midfielder.

It’s like they’re running in circles.

When 2020-21 came around, United were still recovering from those financial mistakes. They were still paying transfer fees for Lindelof, Fred, and Lukaku (among others). On top of that there was now a pandemic. No one knew what their future revenues were going to be because no one knew when fans were going to come back. You can’t borrow money from future revenue if you don’t know what it will be. They still spent more money than everyone but City.

United balked at signing Jadon Sancho. It made them look cheap. From a football perspective that probably wasn’t a great move. From a financial perspective though - now that we know there won’t be fans all season and the price of Sancho is probably coming down - it was probably a good move.

Given less money would have come in, this could have potentially tied United’s hands a bit more next season. Instead, they let their books rest for another year. Contracts came off the books, older deals are getting paid off. When next summer comes around they’ll have more flexibility.

History says the Glazers will spend that money, you just have to hope they spend it wisely. They’re not cheap, they just spend it on the wrong people over and over again and don’t seem to care to put an actual football person in charge.

And that makes them terrible owners.