Mourning Mourinho

Mourinho got fired by Abramovitch for not winning the Champions' League. Abramovitch can do that, he can do other stupid things such as believe that it is possible to win the Champions League regularly.  He owns Chelsea, while the members own the social clubs Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, while Juventus and other club trade on a stock exchanges.

It's wonderful this tripod of governance models for running football clubs, much more fun than worrying over the failed governance models that screw up most countries and have had me writing mournful posts of late.

That's why we love professional sports. It's all strategy with no real risk apart from some broken body parts, most suffered by wealthy young men who will receive the best orthopedic care available. It's just football, and if some super-rich owner gets a bug up his nose and fires the most successful coach in the history of Chelsea, fires the most successful European coach of the decade ... well he can, and it's too bad if the fans don't like it.

The Chelsea fans think the club somehow is theirs, at least in their hearts, and most of them are mourning Mourinho, declaring undying love to "the special one" and spewing epithets against the interloper Abramovitch, who is not even British, but a Russian magnate, one of those Russians who have bought up a big piece of central London. As The New York Times reported "Agents estimate that 20 percent of all London-area houses that sold for more than $10 million last year were bought by Russians; for sales over $30 million, that portion climbs to 50 percent."

Abramovitch ought to face up to facts: die-hard Chelsea fans don't really like him. Abramovitch is foreigner, and they assume that he is a thief, which actually is a nicer term than Russian President Putin usually uses for the Russian ex-pats who have installed themselves in London. Abramovitch and Putin, however, have a good relationship, cemented by Abramovitch's decision to sell much of his oil business to Gazprom. For his loyalty, Putin has helped make Abramovitch the richest man in England. Some say, Abramovitch is like a son to Putin.

Putin's love has not helped the richest man in England to establish reasonable objectives for Chelsea. Contrary to Mr. Abramovitch's stated goals, Chelsea will not win the Premier League every year (Mourinho won twice, and came in second last year), and they will win the Champions League no more than once or twice a decade, as there are some 6 to 8 teams with a reasonable chance to win the Champions League. This group hardly changes, though Mourinho won the Champions League as coach of Oporto, which following its victory was dismembered by the rich clubs, signing its best players to big contracts, and then its coach. In sum, it appears that Mourinho is a bit more likely than the other top coaches to win championships. He may be, after all, "the special one".

No wonder the fans mourn Mourinho, who will end up coaching at another of the big clubs and being successful there to. Mourinho will be successful whereever he goes, assuming that the budget is sufficient to buy outstanding players. By the way, the same top players rotate between teams, helping to make their agents rich and giving us all something to write about in the off-season. The coaches rotate, too. Fabio Capello, who won the 2006-2007 Spanish League Championship for Madrid with only the fourth best team, was fired as a reward for exceptional service. The fun part is that he had won a League Championship for Madrid actually a decade earlier and soon after was gone. Given that Capello is now over 60, it seems unlikely that he will get a third chance at Real Madrid, but there is always hope.

Yes, the fans mourn Mourinho and if Chelsea does badly this year, they can call for the head of Abramovitch, but that won't do very much. Abramovitch will fire coaches and shuffle the roster until the team wins again, and when Chelsea wins he will congratulate himself for being a brilliant team owner. And why not? Being Vladimir Putin's favorite son and richest man in England ought to account for something.