Fans had gathered on the bumpy side road outside the Fulvio Bernardini training ground in Trigoria.
When a Lexus pulled out of the car park and the security gate lifted, they clustered around it to stop it from leaving. The passenger window hummed down to reveal an anguished Jose Mourinho. “Grazie, Jose! Thanks for everything. We love you,” grown men sobbed, their voices trembling. Mourinho was also visibly upset.
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Throughout his career, he never felt as loved by a fanbase as he did at Roma. The depth of feeling was expected to stay the hand of the Friedkins, the club’s owners, even as results deteriorated. He wore the warmth shown to him by supporters like a protective cloak. Nessuno scossone in vista was the analysis of insiders after Sunday’s 3-1 defeat to Milan at San Siro. Nothing seismic such as a sudden dismissal.
But if there’s one thing that has distinguished the Friedkins’ time as Roma’s custodians, it is their ability to catch everybody out. The surprise of Mourinho’s appointment two and a half years ago has now been matched by the shock of his ousting.
Such is his personality cult in Rome that Mourinho seemed untouchable. But while he knows that nothing can be taken for granted in football — even his friend Carlo Ancelotti, a coach he respects hugely, gets sacked — this decision caused him profound hurt. Mourinho memorably broke down in tears when Roma won the Europa Conference League at the end of his first season. It is UEFA’s least significant trophy but it was the club’s first in 14 years. It meant everything to the fans who had been desperate for something to celebrate and everything to him at that moment in his career.
Mourinho had been sacked by Chelsea, then by Manchester United and then by Tottenham Hotspur. Many wrote him off. Mourinho carried all of that with him. In Tirana, where Roma overcame Feyenoord in 2022, he let it all out. The critics were wrong. Mourinho wasn’t finished after all.
Tuesday’s tears outside Trigoria were not crocodile. On the contrary, he knew what this looked like, not only in how it would play with heartbroken fans but also the wider world: Mourinho sacked yet again. He didn’t want to go out like this.
🚨JOSÈ #MOURINHO ESCE DA FRIGORIA E SI FERMA CON I TIFOSI
IL MISTER EMOZIONATISSIMO SI BATTE IL CUORE❤️🐺@calciomercatoit pic.twitter.com/8XQAqo9rUD— Francesco Iucca (@francescoiucca) January 16, 2024
Roma, after all, was his redemption until it wasn’t.
After repeatedly signalling his desire to hold talks with the Friedkins over a new deal to replace the one that was due to expire in June, Mourinho finally got his meeting. It wasn’t scheduled, nor was the outcome the one he wanted.
The Friedkins kept it brief. In the space of 25 minutes, Mourinho was told to leave with immediate effect. His interim replacement, the World Cup winner and Roma legend Daniele De Rossi, had already been chosen. De Rossi was on his way to Trigoria to sign a contract until the end of the season. So enthusiastic was De Rossi, there were no conditions to his acceptance other than a bonus should Roma qualify for the Champions League.
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“We would like to thank Jose on behalf of all of us at AS Roma for his passion and efforts since his arrival at the club,” Dan and Ryan Friedkin said in a statement. “We will always have great memories of his tenure at Roma, but we believe that an immediate change is in the best interests of the club. We wish Jose and his assistants all the best in their future endeavours.”
Maybe Mourinho should not have been surprised. In nearly four years at Roma, the Friedkins have wished to create the impression they are not like other absentee American owners. They go to games at the Stadio Olimpico and have spent a lot of time on the ground. But lately, they have kept their distance, if not from the city itself, then from Trigoria. Mourinho spoke to chairman Dan Friedkin after the last Rome derby in the league, a 0-0 snoozefest in mid-November. He made no secret then that communication was at best intermittent, and almost non-existent.
In hindsight, Mourinho could and maybe should have left after last season’s Europa League final. He had led Roma to back-to-back European showpieces for the first time in their history and, in spite of a penalty shootout defeat to Sevilla, his stock was arguably at its highest in years. An offer to rejoin the elite at Real Madrid or Paris Saint-Germain never materialised, though, and the affection shown to him by Roma fans genuinely mattered in his decision-making.
In Budapest — and at Roma’s final game of last season against Spezia — he delighted and surprised supporters by pointedly gesturing his intention to stay on for the last year of his contract. Over the winter, he has repeatedly gone public with his willingness to commit to Roma and stay at the club for longer than any other throughout his career. Loyalty matters in this city. Francesco Totti turned down Real Madrid in order to spend his entire career with his hometown club and while Mourinho isn’t from Rome, he knew how to push the buttons of Romans.
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He told a story about the Portuguese FA contacting him about the national team job after the 2022 World Cup and how he turned it down for Roma. He then claimed a Saudi delegation visited him in London last summer and made him the biggest salary offer a coach has ever received, which he rejected. It endeared him to the fans, many of whom believed his loyalty should be rewarded with a new deal. The Friedkins never reciprocated. The more Mourinho talked about a renewal, the more deafening the Friedkins’ silence became.
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On January 1, Italy’s government abolished a tax break used by Serie A clubs to attract better coaches and players. It meant that, even if Roma were doing well, the prospect of renewing Mourinho became more expensive overnight. The 60-year-old has not been cheap to keep. He is already the highest-paid coach in the league. The Friedkins indulged him in his first summer with a €113million (£97.2m; $123m) net spend. It contributed to UEFA issuing Roma with the strictest of financial fair play settlement agreements.
Since then, Roma’s general manager Tiago Pinto has had to sell more than spend in order to keep the club compliant. Doing that and keeping a coach as demanding as Mourinho on side has been a delicate balancing act. Busts such as Matias Vina (€13m) and Eldor Shomurodov (€18m) — mistakes that Pinto has owned — have not helped. Even Rui Patricio, for whom Roma paid €11.8m when he had only a year left on his contract with Wolves, compounded matters. The stars continued to arrive, though; stars who would not have signed without Mourinho. First, Paulo Dybala on a free transfer in 2022. Then Romelu Lukaku on loan from Chelsea late last summer.
They were fallen stars.
Mourinho has argued Roma were only able to sign players of this calibre because they had lost their way: the out-of-contract (Dybala, Houssem Aouar and Evan N’Dicka), the injury-prone (Renato Sanches), the marginalised (Lukaku) and the relegated (Diego Llorente and Rasmus Kristensen). While the spending has declined — Mourinho has regularly pointed out that only Frosinone and Verona spent less in gross terms in the last transfer window — the wage bill has climbed, not just with the arrivals of Dybala and Lukaku, but players such as N’Dicka, who chose to join Roma over AC Milan on a free transfer from Eintracht Frankfurt because the salary offer was almost double.
The renewals of captain Lorenzo Pellegrini, a Roman born and bred, and Mourinho hardliner Gianluca Mancini have swollen it further, and therein lies the disconnect. On the one hand, Mourinho believes teams such as Fiorentina and Monza have better squads, saying in what turned out to be his final press conference that Roma were “not among the teams who should be finishing in the top four. They must think I call myself ‘Jose Harry Mourinho Potter’.”
On the other hand, Roma’s wage bill is Italy’s most expensive after Juventus and Inter. But they are ninth in the league, having their worst season in more than 20 years. It has become embarrassing for the Friedkins. At a time in Serie A history when four different teams have won the league in four years, the owners shouldn’t only be disappointed with Mourinho’s failure to qualify for the Champions League: they should be asking why their investment hasn’t produced a title challenge.
At the beginning of this winter transfer window, belated signs of pushback started to show. A move for Leonardo Bonucci, the sort of win-now grizzled player Mourinho likes, was vetoed in favour of the loan of Dean Huijsen, a teenager, from Juventus. It was all Roma could afford with a budget of €1.8m for January and while Mourinho welcomed the signing, the end of the club’s pursuit of Bonucci signalled a shift in strategy.
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Next came the news that Pinto would be leaving at the end of this transfer window and, unlike Mourinho, on his own terms. De Rossi’s return to the club as an interim appointment means Pinto’s replacement will no longer have renewing or sacking Mourinho as their first order of business. Instead, they will have time to conduct a robust search for a replacement.
The timing of Mourinho’s dismissal coincidentally came the day after the €12m buy-out clause in Dybala’s contract for January expired, protecting Roma, perhaps, should a foreign club have tried to take advantage of the turbulence and lure him away.
How Mourinho could have used the silky Argentinian playmaker on Sunday in Milan. It was the seventh game Dybala has missed through injury in the league this season. Without him, they’re a different proposition. Mourinho could say the same about Chris Smalling who has been missing since September. Tammy Abraham, a revelation in Mourinho’s first season, hasn’t featured at all since tearing the ACL in his left knee in the last game of last season.
The casualty list does not explain Sunday’s 3-1 defeat to Milan. Mourinho started two European Championship winners (Leonardo Spinazzola and Bryan Cristante), a World Cup winner (Leandro Paredes) and a player who, over his career, has fetched €340m in transfer fees (Lukaku). He could bring on a player with more than 100 goals in Serie A (Andrea Belotti) to partner him. “We’ve maybe touched the bottom,” Belotti said on Sunday. “We can’t go any lower than this.”
Mourinho’s bench, for all his complaints, has allowed him to rescue games, even if he hasn’t always been on it himself. On Sunday, he was in the stands in a funereal-black puffer jacket and beanie, pulled over his snowy hair, as he braced himself against the cold. It was the 16th Roma game Mourinho has missed because of a touchline ban; the equivalent of almost half a league season. His antics and those of his coaching staff have been tiresome.
Last week was the first time the fans’ support for Mourinho no longer looked unconditional. Roma were eliminated from the Coppa Italia by rivals Lazio, Mourinho’s fourth derby defeat in six games. Too much to take for a fanbase that, in almost a century of existence, has tended to judge the failure or success of a season on grudge matches like these. Outside Trigoria, graffiti left on a wall said: “Better to die with dignity than live in humiliation.” It was the first sign of protest in two and half years and although the fans singled out the players for criticism — “lurid mercenaries unworthy of the shirt” — it felt like a turning point.
Until recently, Lazio have been as underwhelming as Roma in the league but five wins in a row has put them back in the mix for the Champions League. It has been tough to watch for Roma at a time when they keep getting beat, adding yet more pressure ahead of the Milan game.
The loss at San Siro summed Roma up. It was a sixth away defeat in 10 this season and another capitulation against a team Roma measure themselves against. The Friedkins hired Mourinho in the hope he would make this team more competitive against the top sides but his record of four wins in 28, the latest against nine-man Napoli, is pitiful.
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The decision to get rid of him is a courageous one by the Friedkins; one few believed they had the nerve to make such is the cult of personality Mourinho has built in Rome, where he enjoyed Emperor-like status. As with the legendary former captain Totti, it has at times felt as if supporters lost all context and supported him instead of Roma. Unsurprisingly, the decision has brought some heat to these cold winter days. “FRIEDKIN LEAVE” leaflets have been printed and scattered around. As Paredes and Dybala left training this afternoon, fans stopped them to say, “This is on you now”.
As such, De Rossi is the only person the Friedkins could have turned to. As a player, he is the Roman fans related to most. De Rossi was and remains one of them — unlike Totti, who is out of this world. Only one of this Romulus and Remus duo could keep the fans on side after the dismissal of the most popular coach in Roma’s history.
But De Rossi’s appointment doesn’t come without risk. The case for keeping Mourinho is that if he didn’t make top four, fans might have been in a position to accept the decision not to extend his contract. Now, there will be a debate about whether he could have turned it around, especially as the Champions League places are only five points away and the fixture list is about to get easier.
Flaming out De Rossi won’t go down well either. He served on Roberto Mancini’s staff when Italy won the Euros and then coached SPAL in Serie B only to get the sack after taking 15 points from 16 games, a record that left the team in the relegation zone. His dream job with Roma has arguably come too soon.
If De Rossi does OK rather than well, there will still be a clamour for him to stay and that could befuddle any plans a new sporting director might have to bring in their own guy. He could, on the other hand, emerge as a talented young coach who aligns with a club in need of a leaner, more sustainable, analytics-led recruitment process than one that has been short-termist and star-driven.
As for Mourinho, he will always be made to feel welcome in Rome. By Laziali, because their team nearly always got the better of him. And especially by Romanisti to whom he is eternal. As disappointing as Roma were in the league — Mourinho’s points-per-game ratio was the lowest of any Roma coach with 50 games or more at the club — it’s worth pausing to reflect on that night in Budapest last May.
Unfortunately, it is remembered more for Mourinho’s tirade against Anthony Taylor and his match officials than how close this project was to a transformational moment as Roma were just a penalty kick away from winning back-to-back European trophies and qualifying for the Champions League for the first time in five years.
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“We’ll always have Tirana,” a fan called after Mourinho’s car on Tuesday. “Always.” Whether Mourinho’s cream Vespa was stowed away in the back of the departing Lexus is unknown. The Friedkins gifted him one after the artist Harry Greb left graffiti on the city walls depicting him as Gregory Peck in the film Roman Holiday.
Greb, as with many Roma fans, did not take the sacking well. “An amateurish club,” he wrote underneath Roma’s Instagram post announcing Mourinho’s dismissal. But it’s time to roll the credits. Mourinho’s Roman Holiday is over.
(Top photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)
