Mourinho signed for Manchester United in 2013, phoned Ferguson in tears, and went to Chelsea instead

Thirteen years on, we finally have both halves of the story. Jose Mourinho signed an agreement to succeed Alex Ferguson at Manchester United in 2013. Then he rang Ferguson in tears to say he could not do it, and went to Chelsea.

The admission comes in a three-part Netflix documentary called Mourinho, made by the company behind Beckham, which lands on Tuesday. “When I left Real Madrid, I signed with Manchester United to go to Manchester United after Sir Alex,” Mourinho says in it.

Ferguson’s version is the one that hurts

Ferguson does not soften it. “He was offered a job, yes,” he says. “And then within hours, it changed.” Then the detail that turns a piece of transfer trivia into something else: “Evening he phoned me and he was crying, and he says ‘Oh, I can’t take it, I’ve given my word to Chelsea’.”

Mourinho’s own explanation is that he had come out of a bruising final year at Real Madrid and wanted to go somewhere he was already adored. He needed to feel that he was loved, as he puts it. He was confirmed at Stamford Bridge on 3 June 2013 and had a Premier League title there inside two seasons, so the logic held for a while.

He does not dress up the cost. “For me to lose the chance to be the coach to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson was dramatic,” he says. “But I don’t regret it because it was a decision that I made with my heart.”

What United got instead

Ferguson’s recommendation, once the Mourinho option evaporated, was David Moyes. United gave Moyes a six-year contract. He lasted ten months.

Then came Louis van Gaal, Mourinho himself, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag and Ruben Amorim, with caretakers filling the gaps, and now Michael Carrick, who took over in January and was made permanent after steering the club to third. The last time United won a league title, Ferguson was lifting it in May 2013. That is 13 seasons and counting.

It is tempting to draw the straight line here. One phone call in 2013, and everything since is the alternative timeline. I don’t buy it, and the reason is that we already ran the experiment.

United did get Mourinho, and it did not fix anything

He arrived at Old Trafford on 27 May 2016, three years later than planned, and it went about as well as any post-Ferguson appointment did. He won the League Cup, the Europa League and the Community Shield in his first season, which made him the first United manager to take two major trophies in a debut campaign. His win rate across 144 matches was 58.3 per cent, better than anyone else who has had the job since Ferguson left.

And it still finished the way they all finish. Seven wins in 17 games at the start of 2018-19, a running argument with the board about recruitment, and the sack on 18 December 2018.

So the sliding door is narrower than it looks. The 2013 Mourinho would have inherited a champion squad rather than a broken one, which matters. But United’s problem in the years that followed was never a shortage of decorated managers. It was that the club kept hiring them into the same conditions and expecting a different answer.

Where everyone ended up

Mourinho is back at Real Madrid this season for a second spell, at the club whose difficult final months sent him running to Chelsea in the first place. Ferguson, at 84, is talking about it on camera in a way he would not have done at the time. Carrick anchored the midfield of that 2013 title team and was voted United’s players’ player of the year for it. He now has the job Mourinho signed for and never took.

What makes the story worth an hour of your evening is not the counterfactual. It is that the biggest managerial appointment of the century in English football came down to a man who could not go through with it, and phoned his would-be predecessor at night to say so. Football decisions are made by people, and people are less rational than the transfer market pretends.

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