Mourinho's Missed Opportunity at Manchester United
“Sliding doors.”
Inside Manchester United, that’s how more than one figure still describes the moment in 2013 when the club let Jose Mourinho slip away as Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor. A hinge point. A choice that sent the club down a very different road.
A new Netflix documentary on Mourinho, released on 11 August, finally pins down what had long been whispered. United had him. Then they didn’t.
The deal that was done – until it wasn’t
The courtship was not a whim. For weeks, senior United figures worked to line Mourinho up. Meetings in Madrid. Meetings in London. Ferguson, who liked Mourinho and admired his edge, stunned him by revealing he would step down at the end of the 2012-13 season.
Once that bombshell dropped, talks accelerated. Terms were discussed. An agreement, sources insist, was reached.
Then, within days, it unravelled.
Ferguson recalls the pivotal call in the documentary. “One night, he phoned me and he was crying and he says: ‘Alex, I can't take it. I've given my word to Chelsea and I'm not going to break my word’.”
Mourinho pointed to his family. He had a home in London, children settled there, and a promise made when he was first sacked by Chelsea in 2007 that he would one day return. His relationship with Roman Abramovich remained strong. Those around United heard the explanation. Some still don’t fully buy it.
What they do know is that, for a short spell, they believed Mourinho was theirs. And they still view his U-turn as one of the great turning points in the club’s modern history.
A giant leaves, and a vacuum opens
Ferguson was not walking away alone. Chief executive David Gill, hugely respected and deeply embedded in United’s structure, was also heading for the exit that summer.
The club knew it wasn’t just about finding a new man for the dugout. They needed to redesign the way United worked. Ferguson had been a one-man empire, controlling almost every aspect of football operations. No one could replicate that model. A new structure had to be built while the team kept winning.
Mourinho looked built for that moment. Big personality. Big ego. Broad shoulders. He would not have been intimidated by following Ferguson; he would have relished the challenge, convinced he could outdo even the Scot.
When he slipped away and Pep Guardiola committed himself to Bayern Munich, United turned to David Moyes.
Moyes shared some of Ferguson’s traits – discipline, work ethic, longevity at Everton – but not his track record at the game’s sharpest end. United unveiled him as “The Chosen One”. The banner hung at Old Trafford. The reality quickly shredded the slogan.
The Mourinho who finally arrived
Mourinho did, eventually, walk through the doors at Carrington, three years later in 2016. He replaced Louis van Gaal, sacked two days after lifting the FA Cup against Crystal Palace.
By then, everything had shifted.
The dressing room he inherited bore little resemblance to the group that had delivered Ferguson’s final title. Of the 18 players who started 10 or more Premier League games in 2012-13, only six – David de Gea, Phil Jones, Wayne Rooney, Chris Smalling, Michael Carrick and Antonio Valencia – would do so in Mourinho’s first season.
Mourinho himself had changed as well. He had returned to Chelsea and won another Premier League title, but his second spell ended in acrimony and implosion, dismissed in December 2015 with the champions marooned in 16th place, a point above the relegation zone.
His time at United still splits opinion.
On one hand, he delivered trophies and Champions League qualification. The Europa League and EFL Cup arrived in his first season. He took United to second in the league, 19 points behind Manchester City, and later called that finish one of the “best achievements” of his career. The 81 points they amassed remains the club’s highest total in any post-Ferguson Premier League season.
On the other hand, the internal damage was severe. He clashed with players, most notably record signing Paul Pogba. He railed against the board, furious that his wish to sell Anthony Martial and reshape the squad was blocked. When he left, the club felt fractured, the football joyless.
The great ‘what if?’
Inside Old Trafford, a belief has hardened with time: Mourinho, in 2013, would have been a very different proposition.
For a start, he would have walked into a title-winning dressing room, not a club already scarred by years of drift. The feeling is he would have demanded – and extracted – more from Ferguson’s last champions, who are widely accepted to have overperformed under the Scot and then crashed to seventh in Moyes’ solitary season.
Even the players have struggled to explain the scale of that collapse. Those who know Mourinho are convinced his presence would have driven them, challenged them, kept standards high.
His approach to recruitment would also have altered the landscape. Where Moyes hesitated, Mourinho is seen as decisive. Sources stress that Thiago Alcantara’s agreed move from Barcelona would have been pushed over the line under Mourinho. The farcical saga around Marouane Fellaini – signed from Everton for £27.5m on deadline day after United missed a cheaper release clause – simply would not have happened, they insist. Fellaini, they say bluntly, would never have been signed.
Mourinho had even gone as far as offering his views on specific targets, including Italy midfielder Daniele de Rossi. The image is clear: a manager ready not only to buy aggressively, but to squeeze more from the seasoned core he would have inherited.
Instead, United lurched into a new era with a manager learning on the job at the highest level, a confused structure above him, and a squad unsure of its own identity.
Tears, regret and a lingering shadow
In the documentary, Ferguson speaks with the clarity and steel that defined his reign as he recalls Mourinho’s emotional phone call, the tears, the insistence that he could not break his word to Chelsea.
For United, that conversation was a body blow.
The club has changed managers, overhauled departments and cycled through philosophies in the years since. Yet that night, that decision, still hangs over Old Trafford like an unanswered question.
What if the “Special One” had walked straight into Ferguson’s office in 2013, rather than three years too late?
