The presence of a mole at Real Madrid worried Mourinho so much that between 2011 and 2012 he ordered two sweeps of the hotel where the team stayed to search for hidden microphones. The investigations were unsuccessful. The Sheraton Mirasierra was apparently clean.
The control of information was another thing that deeply exercised Mourinho; he assigned a group of people to carry out a daily analysis of everything that the media said about him. Every morning Mourinho received a package containing the summary. His day began at 8am in his office at Valdebebas, studying videos, articles and broadcasts. He realised that he and his colleagues were not the only sources of the content, and that certain things that were being published did not exactly project an image of infallibility.
He began to suspect that there were leaks in his organisation. The proximity of the Clásico ramped up his sense of suspicion. According to club sources, the growing fear of leaks made Mourinho ask the directors to set up a study of the phone records of players and club employees. Some players were warned about this informally, as it was in their interest to be careful about whom they spoke to on their mobiles. The secrecy, however, did not prevent the boss’s intentions becoming widely known. In fact they were obvious in every training session.
At 5pm on 16 April 2011, shortly before Madrid’s home league match against Barcelona, the newspaper Marca reported in its online edition that Madrid would play Pepe in midfield, along with Khedira and Alonso. The team selection was unprecedented: Casillas, Ramos, Albiol, Carvalho, Marcelo, Pepe, Khedira, Alonso, Di María, Ronaldo and Benzema.
The 1-1 draw did not help the home team’s title chances but the crowd applauded their team off with a certain relief, Barça’s last couple of visits having ended with scores of 0–2 and 2–6, and filed out of the stadium reasonably content. Not so Mourinho.
He waited for the team in the dressing room before issuing a torrent of accusations and insults that distorted his face until he began to sob loudly: “You’re traitors. I asked you not to speak with anyone about the team selection but you’ve betrayed me. It shows that you’re not on my side. You’re sons of bitches.
“The only friend I have in this dressing room is Granero . . . and I’m not even sure that I can trust him any more. You’ve left me all on my own. You’re the most treacherous squad I’ve had in my life. Nothing more than sons of bitches.”
Casillas did not wait for the outburst to finish. He pretended that nothing was happening, turned around and went to the shower; he was not the only one who ignored the commotion. But Mourinho was filled with such intense emotion that he grabbed a can of Red Bull and hurled it against the wall. It exploded and drops of the sugary energy drink ran down the faces of those nearest to him.
Squatting on the ground — some say he was kneeling — he rattled off a further series of insults, then, getting up, he wiped the tears from his face and announced that he was going to speak with Pérez [Real’s president] and Sánchez [a director] because they would be able to find the mole. He promised reprisals and also made an analogy between martial law and football: “If I’m in Vietnam and I see you laugh at a mate, I’d grab a gun with my own hands and kill you. Now it’s you yourselves who have to look for the one that leaked the line-up.”
For everyone present it was difficult to work out if what they had seen was a real loss of emotional control or a piece of spontaneous theatre. By improvisation or calculation, Mourinho had ensured that everyone had been on edge. The team had been emotionally stirred up and he had adjusted the final details of his grand tactical plan. All his work, all his energy, the planning of more than nine months, were now focused on one goal: to reach a state of ecstasy in the final of the Copa del Rey in Valencia on 20 April.
The days were filled with impassioned talk until finally 20 April arrived. He talked about politics, about nationalism, about the inexorable division between the Castilian and Catalan peoples. He told the players that they had nothing in common with Barça. He knew, he said, because he had lived in Barcelona for many years, and was well aware of the local culture and the education that Catalan children receive. He explained that people like Puyol, Busquets, Xavi and Piqué had been taught from childhood to distance themselves from Spaniards such as Casillas, Ramos and Arbeloa.
He insisted that his players were wrong if they thought they had made friendships with the Barça players over their years together in the Spanish national team. The Barça players were not their friends because they took advantage of this supposed friendship by betraying the Madrid players, trying to snatch their prestige from them through their manipulation of the press.
They, the Madrid players, were not to participate in this charade any more. They must accept their role as bad guys and should refuse to acknowledge their rivals. Mourinho warned his players that if he saw any of them shaking hands outside of the formalities of the game they would be turning their backs on him — and on their team-mates. Anyone making any such friendly gesture towards the opposition ran the risk of becoming something very much like a traitor.
Real Madrid’s 2-0 home defeat in the Champions League semi-final, first leg against Barcelona in April 2011 was one of the most bitter of Mourinho’s career. He was sent to the stands for complaining about the dismissal of Pepe and, in the post-match press conference, launched an astonishing diatribe, alleging a Uefa conspiracy and insisting that it was impossible for Real to progress because of refereeing “scandals” . . .
Sunday 1 May. Upon reaching Valdebebas the players were summoned by Mourinho to the dressing room and all the support staff — kit men, masseurs and medical staff — were asked to leave and close the door behind them, as they were suspected of leaking information to the press. Only the coach, his assistants, the players and Zinédine Zidane remained.
The coach outlined his plan for the visit to the Camp Nou on Tuesday 3 May: “We’ll go out to play a calm game. To wait. We must defend very near the area with a low-block so the game ends 0–0. If it ends 0–0 we can say that the tie was decided by the referee in the first leg.”
The players exchanged looks of disbelief.
“At Barcelona we have three options: two impossible and one possible. The only possible option is that the game ends with a close result and we lose the tie. Of the two impossible choices, the first is that they thrash us. This must be avoided at all costs so we can blame the referees. The other impossible choice is to win the tie. If, in trying to preserve the 0–0 we end up going to the final by chance, then perfect. But the priority is to finish with a close score so that we can blame the referees. A 2–1, 1–0, a draw . . . this will be enough to say that we were robbed at the Bernabéu.”
Mourinho tried to convince his team that they should lose the tie in a calculated way. He invited them to turn the game into a dialectical argument — this would provide him with a propaganda weapon that, with his rhetorical powers, he could then wield to devastating effect.
Those who heard the speech and then reconstructed it described the situation as “incredible” and “amazing”, but did not dare say anything at the time.
The reaction of the players was mixed. Some tried to show that they had been moved. Pepe, Di María, Alonso and Granero seemed convinced, Granero saying approvingly, “How clever . . . ” There were also the sceptics and those who were indifferent, such as Adebayor, Carvalho, Lass and Khedira. A group remained that were outraged — Casillas, Ramos, Arbeloa, Higuaín and, above all, Ronaldo. They believed that Mourinho was prepared to chuck the tie out with the rubbish just so that he could justify 15 minutes of craziness in the press conference room at the Bernabéu.
Leaning forward, Casillas held the edge of the bench with his left hand as if to twist it off. He passed his right hand across his face while shaking his head. Casillas confessed to a friend in the club that he had never felt so embarrassed. He could not get out of his head the image of his former coach, Bernd Schuster, who was fired in the winter of 2008 for publicly saying, on the eve of a Clásico, that it was not possible to win at the Camp Nou.
For a long time afterwards, Madrid employees on this trip recalled Casillas’s distress in the bus on the way to the stadium. The captain called his team-mates to the back, then told them to try to win the game. Casillas said to his team-mates that they could tell the press what the coach had instructed them to say, but that on the pitch they should not surrender, adding that if they closed up shop they would look incompetent to the watching world. Huddled around him, everyone agreed.
