“I have big emotional connections with Chelsea,” he said shortly before returning to west London for a second spell in 2013. “One day I think I have to go back to English football, to Chelsea or another club. Chelsea are in my heart.”
He has ended up doing both, cementing his position as the Blues’ most successful manager of all time with the 2015 Premier League title before a calamitous defence of the trophy led him towards the Manchester United job he now occupies. Sunday’s Premier League clash between the two clubs is new territory for all parties.
“Working in England, staying in the Premier League, I knew that sooner or later I had to play against Chelsea and I had to go to Stamford Bridge,” he told journalists on Thursday. “The computer has decided that it is now, and here we go.”
Before the 1-0 victory which would confirm Inter’s place in the Champions League quarter-finals on his previous visit to the opposition dugout, the charismatic Portuguese could boast an incredible record at the Bridge.
“Mourinho does not lose at Stamford Bridge,” he proudly boasted after a 2-1 first-leg win at San Siro. “We can go there with a legitimate ambition to go through.”
But even a manager as bolshie and self-confident as the 53-year-old knows that he returns this time as a very different man thanks to the slipping of his crown during that tumultuous 2015-16 campaign which saw him sacked by Christmas.
“When I played there with Inter, before that I had never lost a match at Stamford Bridge because I had that home record,” he added on Thursday. “Now I have lost already a few matches at the Bridge, last season I lost two or three matches in the Bridge so I cannot use the same words because now I lost there.”
Thursday’s 4-1 Europa League win over Fenerbahce had somewhat occupied Mourinho’s mind this week. There has been little chance for sentimentalism in a busy week which also sent his United side to Liverpool on Monday in a cagey Premier League battle. He arrives in SW6 to take on Antonio Conte’s outfit as a man who on the surface has paid Chelsea no further regard than he would any other opponent.
“I don’t have to analyse their start to the season. You just look at the table and you see where they are, and they are in a good position. So their start to the season cannot be bad if they are where they are.”
But Mourinho has always been about the bottom line, as once again driven home by the approach asked of his players in Monday’s 0-0 draw at Anfield, and on Sunday the bottom line is three Premier League points.
After United’s indifferent start a loss would threaten to cut them adrift somewhat in the early title race, but a win could paint them in a far more glorious light than they have appeared since the back-to-back losses to Manchester City and Watford in September which originally exposed their flaws.
Much will be said and written in the next couple of days about Mourinho’s relationship with Chelsea, once the most overt of English football’s love affairs. But on Sunday he becomes just another Manchester United manager looking to pilfer points from the capital.
A new chapter in the Mourinho-Chelsea best seller is about to be written.
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