2023\u2019s Beckham<\/a>), Mourinho has a subject with an interesting, controversy-filled arc, full of rises and falls and fights against the world; unlike Beckham, it has a subject with a sharp sense of conversational showmanship. Mourinho, aware of the preposterousness of his own ego but never shy to indulge it, revels in his reputation. \u201cWhat does it feel like to win?\u201d he is asked at one point. \u201cNormality,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what I did my whole life\u2026 You don\u2019t do a documentary with a guy that wins nothing.\u201d Hatchets are left defiantly unburied: he shows no remorse when it comes to his feud with Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas and the \u201cspoiled\u201d Real Madrid galacticos he inherited in 2010. Or his bitter war of words with ex-Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, whom he claims was \u201cas much as I am if not more guilty\u201d of what he nostalgically describes as \u201cthat beautiful fight\u201d.<\/p>\nAnd yet, for all the bluster on show, for all Mourinho\u2019s (in a way, admirable) willingness to play the villain, Mourinho is not the documentary it should be. Three episodes, it turns out, is not really enough to cover his whole career in detail. His first stint at Chelsea \u2013 that paradigm-shifting, double Premier League\/League Cup-winning stint from 2004 to 2007 \u2013 is given ample shrift (taking up the bulk of the first episode), likewise his historic treble-winning time at Inter Milan, the fractious spell at Real, and his return to Stamford Bridge in 2013. But much of what followed, the less gilded decade spent drifting around Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbah\u00e7e and Benfica, is sped through. You emerge from watching the series with only a partial sense of Mourinho\u2019s actual career history, almost no insight into the tactical innovations that made him so successful, and \u2013 most frustrating of all \u2013 no real grasp of who he is, underneath the flashy facade.<\/p>\n
![\"Jose](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MOURINHO_n_S1_E3_00_51_20_05-copy.jpeg\")
Jose Mourinho, as seen in Netflix’s ‘Mourinho’ (Netflix)<\/p>\n
It may be that documentaries like these are simply not equipped for the sort of deep-dive scrutiny that would make them truly worthwhile. Mourinho isn\u2019t a puff piece in the traditional sense \u2013 he is presented as an egotist with (as one person says) something of a \u201cgod complex\u201d, a man who seems to delight in pissing people off. (\u201cI enjoy the negativity,\u201d he says at one point \u2013 referring to the hostile atmosphere of big away games, but an admission that really applies to his whole life.) But his own active participation in the series allows him to dictate the conversation, and there are key areas that seem conveniently elided.<\/p>\n
An interesting counterpoint might be something like Asif Kapadia\u2019s 2019 documentary film Diego Maradona, which adopted a similar kind of propulsive, accessible approach, but dove more greedily into its subject\u2019s personal life and dark side. It\u2019s curious just how little time is spent discussing Mourinho\u2019s life before Chelsea, and indeed any part of his life that doesn\u2019t involve football. He does not discuss his political views \u2013 he never does \u2013 views that The Times claimed decades ago were \u201cbelieved to be strongly right wing\u201d. His background too, as the child of wealth, is breezed over; these things not part of the established Mourinho Myth, that of the self-made outsider. When he then makes pugnacious statements like, \u201cFootball belongs to people like me\u2026 the others are intruders, they don\u2019t belong,\u201d they pass by uninterrogated.<\/p>\n
There is an inherent, unavoidable unfinishedness to this narrative: where Beckham followed its subject from his debut to retirement, Mourinho\u2019s story is still ongoing. The documentary comes as the manager begins his second tenure at Real Madrid, the world\u2019s biggest football club; it is an appointment that came as a shock to many, a return to the big leagues after years spent \u2013 with all due respect to Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbah\u00e7e and Benfica \u2013 slumming it with teams unable to compete at the very highest level of European football. It seemed, until recently at least, that the world had moved on from Mourinho\u2019s antics, and from his brand of football: he was a tactical dinosaur with a meteor looming. But in Mourinho, this is left as postscript. While the fortunes of his comeback are still yet to play out, it would have been useful to dive into his decade-long nadir with even the same surface enthusiasm Mourinho applies to his spiky heyday. Has football left Jose Mourinho behind? I\u2019m not sure. But this documentary doesn\u2019t even consider it.<\/p>\n
\u2018Mourinho\u2019 is available to stream on Netflix<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":734377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-734376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/734377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}