Roma’s management sacked Portuguese coach José Mourinho on Tuesday, two days after the 3-1 defeat suffered at San Siro against AC Milan. Daniele De Rossi, former Roma midfielder and captain, was hired in his place. Mourinho arrived in the summer of 2021, a few months after being sacked from the English team Tottenham: in these two and a half years Roma won the Conference League in 2022, the third most important European trophy, and in 2023 they reached the Europa League final (the second continental trophy). But if the results at European level were in some ways exciting, in the Italian Serie A championship Mourinho’s Roma struggled much more, reaching two sixth places and therefore never qualifying for the Champions League, the most important European cup. , to which only the top four teams in the rankings enter.
In the current championship things were going even worse: Roma are ninth with only 29 points obtained in 20 games, 22 less than the first in the standings, Inter. Furthermore, last week Roma were eliminated in the quarter-finals of the Italian Cup by city rivals Lazio, always a very heartfelt match. The derby lost 1-0 was the fourth in a row in which Mourinho’s team had failed to score a single goal (they had lost three 1-0, while the fourth, last November 12, ended 0- 0). In the Europa League, however, the team is still in the running, but came second in the group behind a less popular opponent such as Slavia Prague, a Czech team.
In short, Roma’s results this season have so far been below expectations, especially considering that Mourinho was the highest paid coach in Serie A (with 7 million a year in salary, like the Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri) and that Roma has the third highest “wage sum” – i.e. the sum of all the salaries received by its players – in the championship: only Inter and Juventus spend more, and are first and second in the standings respectively. Naturally there is no exact correspondence between the money spent on footballers’ contracts and sporting results, but such a clear discrepancy can be a sign of poor performance.
In the last five championship games, Roma had obtained just four points, losing against Bologna, Juventus and Milan, drawing against Atalanta and winning only against Napoli, another team that is going through a very negative period.
In the last two years, José Mourinho had created the conditions to bring Roma back to winning a trophy, the Conference League obtained in 2022: at a national level they had not won one since 2008, the Italian Cup, and in Europe even since 1961, when they won the Fairs Cup, the third most important European trophy at the time. He had succeeded by creating a very solid team, which risked little and knew how to defend itself even for long stretches of the match. But Mourinho, who was one of the most important coaches in the world in recent decades and had won 25 trophies before arriving at Roma, had brought an exceptional enthusiasm to the fans with his mere presence, as demonstrated by the long series of sold outs recorded from the Olympic stadium when Roma played at home.
This collective exaltation had also led to various results in the direct elimination matches, the European ones, played with excellent defensive application and a very high level of concentration, especially away from home. In the round of 16 of the last Europa League, against the Spanish team Real Sociedad, after winning 2-0 at home Roma had drawn 0-0 in Spain despite conceding 22 shots (and making just 3). In the semi-final against the Germans Bayer Leverkusen they had instead won 1-0 at the Olimpico and then held out in the return match with another 0-0 despite the 23 shots made by the German team (Roma had only made one).
In short, Mourinho’s best Roma was a team that found it very difficult to score goals and that knew how to exploit the few favorable moments that occurred to them in a match, often scoring from “set pieces”, i.e. corner kicks and free kicks, and in the last minutes.
This year, due to some injuries, Roma had been deprived of important players, above all the English defender Chris Smalling, and had lost its defensive solidity: Mourinho was unable to find alternative solutions to recover one of the strengths of previous years. Focusing on a defensive game, with a very essential offensive proposal, proved to be an ineffective choice in the long run.
In the last two summer transfer market sessions, two very talented and already decisive attackers have arrived in Serie A: the Argentine Paulo Dybala, purchased in 2022 after seven years at Juventus, and the Belgian Romelu Lukaku, who formally arrived last summer from English club Chelsea but spent last season on loan at Inter. Several journalists who regularly follow Roma in recent years have pointed out that Mourinho’s charisma probably had a role in convincing both of them to go to Roma, a team a little less ambitious than those they had played for before. Despite their arrival, however, Roma did not improve their offensive game much: they tried mostly to rely on the individual actions of these players, without ever putting them in a position to perform at their best collectively.
Mourinho and Dybala (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
Injuries have certainly penalized Roma in recent years: Dybala himself has missed several matches due to various physical problems. The American Friedkin group, owner of the club, has also often had to fall back on “zero transfer” purchases, i.e. players whose contracts with other teams are expiring and whose transfer therefore does not involve costs for the new team, in addition to the salary to be paid . The reason for the zero parameters is that Roma have well-known budget problems, inherited above all from the management prior to that of the Friedkins, which are preventing them from spending large amounts of money to buy new players. These are problems that are also common to other teams, however, and the expectations towards Roma were still higher than the results obtained this season.
It is the fourth consecutive time that the relationship between Mourinho and the team he coaches ends with a sacking, after those suffered at Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham, all English teams. Of the 26 trophies won in his career, only two were obtained after 2015, the 2017 Europa League with Manchester United and the 2022 Conference League with Roma: a sign that Mourinho has probably found it increasingly difficult to adapt to the changes that football has gone through in recent years.
Even on a communication level, Mourinho’s expedients have lost effectiveness with the passage of time, to the point of becoming predictable and repetitive. Since his arrival in Italy, when he became Inter coach in the summer of 2008, and even before that in his successful experiences at Porto and Chelsea, Mourinho had distinguished himself as much for his sporting results as for his style very direct, clever communicator, able to exploit the media to his advantage. Those were the years in which Mourinho was nicknamed Special One (“the special one”) and he managed to get the most out of all the teams and players he coached.
In particular, in his relationship with the outside world he was very good at identifying precise communication targets from time to time (referees, opponents, journalists) and attacking them in press conferences and interviews to divert attention from any team problems . At the same time this attitude created a feeling of being in the players a single group against everything and everyonewinning despite adversity, making them more close-knit.
Over the years at Roma, however, these outings have become above all a way of defending himself, rejecting criticism of his play and the team’s disappointing results. For the first time, the Portuguese coach went so far as to attack his players and the club directly on several occasions, more or less explicitly accusing them of not being up to his ambitions. In October 2021, for example, Roma lost rather sensationally against the modest Norwegian team Bodø/Glimt 6-1, in a match in which Mourinho had fielded players who had until then been little used and who were usually reserves . Mourinho said: «We lost against a team that has more quality than us. If I could always play with the same ones I would, but I think it’s risky because we have a significant difference in quality between one group of players and another.”
This way of doing things has led to very controversial exits this season. Before the championship match against Sassuolo last December 3, for example, Mourinho said he was doubtful about the emotional stability of the designated referee, Matteo Marcenaro, who in his opinion was not suitable “for a match of this level”. He had not given too many explanations about it, and the prosecutor of the Italian football federation had opened a sporting investigation for harmful statements against the referee. After that match he then answered the questions of an Italian journalist from the sports broadcaster DAZN in Portuguese, provocatively saying that perhaps his Italian was not good enough to make himself understood.
In the last period Mourinho had often attacked his own management, implicitly accusing them of not having provided him with an adequate team: these criticisms may have contributed to the club’s decision to sack him.
Furthermore, the continuous search for “enemies” could have influenced the growing nervousness of the players and all the people linked to his work: in the two and a half years as Roma coach Mourinho was sent off seven times, a notable number, and in total the members of its staff they received 28 red cardsa negative record in Serie A.
Despite all these problems, the Roma ultras, that is, the most avid fans who watch the matches from the South Curve of the Olympic stadium, have never criticized the coach: not even in the last period, when a good part of the fans began to complain about the game and of the team’s results. The ultras’ protest had involved the players and the team’s ownership, but never the coach. On 10 December 2023, on the occasion of Roma-Fiorentina, the Giallorossi’s Curva Sud displayed a banner with the words: “The eyes intoxicated with Giallorossi, the soul pervaded by Romanism: José Mourinho, a Romanist for life”.
In the sporting field, the exemption is not equivalent to a dismissal: Mourinho’s contract with Roma will expire on 30 June 2024, unless he agrees on a contract with a new team in the meantime.