Mourinho: "Next Job At A Club with Right Structure - Don't Want Conflict"

In a recent interview to a newspaper, Jose Mourinho confirmed that he has already turned down a club despite a lucrative offer as the team doesn't quite fit his ambitions.

The manager, who is temporarily working as a TV pundit, revealed what he is looking for in his next job.

“I don’t know if it is a bad translation from Portuguese to English but focus on these two words, ‘structure’ and ‘empathy’. I want to work with structural empathy. A club is a structure, a complex structure where the manager is an important part of that structure but he is not the structure.

“I want to work in a club that understands there is a structure in place. I don’t want to work in a structure of no coincidence [unity] in the thinking. People sometimes say ‘this manager doesn’t like to work with a football director’; ‘this manager doesn’t like to work with chief scout’; ‘this manager doesn’t like to work with an owner’; ‘this manager doesn’t like to work with president’. During my career I have been working in every possible circumstance. The most successful situations are not because of the structure but because of the empathy in the structure.

“People who work well together. People who share the same kind of ideas. This is the fundamental thing. You now have a generation of players who are not just players but the whole package. You have the player, the family, the agent, the entourage, the director of communication. You sometimes have the individual’s medical people and in an extreme situation you even have what they call their ‘personal fitness guys’. When you have a player you have all these distractions. And if there is no empathy in the structure of the club you get into so many contradictions that it is really, really difficult to work.”

"I don’t want an internal conflict,” he said. “I want internal empathy. And then your conflict is on the pitch when you play against somebody who wants to steal your three points. That’s the moment of the conflict.”