Jose Mourinho hasn’t wasted any time in falling out with certain members of his Tottenham squad. In particular, he took aim at the £54m man Tanguy Ndombele, who was substituted at half-time at Turf Moor after a dismal first-half performance.
"In the first half we didn't have a midfield," Mourinho told the media after the game. "Of course I'm not speaking of [Oliver] Skipp because he's a kid of 19 who's played two hours in the last few days. I don't criticise him at all.
"But I'm not going to run away and I have to say he [Ndombele] has had enough time to come to a different level."
Fallouts are nothing new to Mourinho. His career has been littered with power struggles, petty arguments and disruption in the dressing room, but perhaps he has been vindicated in some of these past arguments. Ndombele simply has not been up to the level required to play for Spurs this season and Mourinho is well within his rights to call out the Frenchman who joined for big money in the summer. Now it is up to the player to respond in the correct manner and not shy away from the challenge that the Portuguese manager has laid out in front of him.
At Manchester United Mourinho famously fell out with Luke Shaw. This peaked as the boss famously said after a game against Everton: "He had a good performance, but it was his body with my brain. He was in front of me and I was making every decision for him.”
Even when Shaw played well his manager was still critical of the youngster, who seemed a little bulky at the time.
For Shaw, his game struggled under the pressure of the criticism but he came out of the other side of it a better player. Now under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, he is playing well in the left centre-back role, although this could be down to the fact Mourinho left the club. Paul Pogba was another famous foe of Mourinho’s and perhaps he has yet again been proven right as the Frenchman has still failed to settle at the club.
Jose Mourinho presented a scathing assessment of Tanguy Ndombele 😬
At Chelsea, Mourinho was slightly better off during his second spell due to his past history with the club but that didn’t stop things ending on a sour note, as he blamed everyone but himself for the poor form of the team.
At Real Madrid, we got to see peak Jose Mourinho as he took his sharpened axe to the entire team. At one of the most prestigious clubs in the world, where tradition is held high and legends are able to establish themselves as senior members of the club, Mourinho was not happy. In Iker Casillas, he had a legendary captain he couldn’t stand. He famously sent a text to his former keeper Julio Cesar saying he could stop more shots with one arm than Casillas could with two. He took issue with his journalist girlfriend and the pair clashed on almost every topic possible, something that didn’t go down well with the head honchos at Madrid.
Sergio Ramos is the one man you cannot fall out with at Madrid. He is the essence of Real Madrid and unsurprisingly, Mourinho and the Spaniard did not see eye to eye. The biggest bad boy in the business once wore Mesut Ozil’s shirt in an interview after Mourinho controversially substituted him while he also ‘forgot’ who Mou was after a game. Classic. Mourinho’s tenure once again ended in sour fashion and the Madrid players were glad he was gone.
At Inter Milan and Porto there were few fallouts as Mourinho ran supreme. His team played for him, ran hard and believed in the system. It produced trophies, the Champions League and league titles but now Mourinho’s magic appears to have gone.
He may have been well within his rights to criticise Ndombele but the past has proven it usually doesn’t end well.
