José Mourinho has insisted Diego Costa remains committed to Chelsea despite the striker’s occasionally despondent on-pitch demeanour this season, his apparently petulant reaction to being an unused substitute for the goalless draw at Tottenham and his admission in an interview that he could be tempted to return to Atlético Madrid.
When asked by the Spanish radio station Onda Cero last week whether he might return to the club where he made his reputation before moving to London for £32m in 2014, Costa said “you never know” and “life is full of surprises”.
“He never said he’d like to go back, he said that in football you never know,” Mourinho insisted. “Atlético is a great club, Madrid is a great city, La Liga is a great league, so why shouldn’t a player, 27 years old, think that in football it is possible to be back? I don’t see that as a problem. Diego is happy here, he likes to be here. He has three more years on his contract. I see him staying at Chelsea for three more years, no problem.”
Costa has scored only three league goals this season (Chelsea have won every match he has scored in, and just one of 12 when he has failed to hit the target), leading to him starting the past two domestic games on the bench. A much improved performance in last week’s 2-0 Champions League victory over Porto should, however, usher him back into the starting XI for Monday night’s visit to Leicester.
The match pits Mourinho against an old adversary in Claudio Ranieri, who managed Juventus and Roma during the Portuguese’s two years with Internazionale between 2008 and 2010.
He described Ranieri’s achievement of coaxing the Foxes to the top of the table in mid-December as “something magnificent” and praised the Italian’s “long career, an accumulation of experiences and clubs”. He also said that in recent years it has become too easy for overseas managers to find work in the Premier League even without such an impressive CV.
“The Premier League was quite a closed space for foreign managers, and to come here was not easy. To come here you had to do something serious,” he said. “I think I did enough to deserve to be here. You come to a country that is No1 in European football, to the No1 championship, and you feel you have to deserve to be here. I think at the moment it’s too easy. In this moment the number of foreign coaches in the Premier League, even in the Championship, is too big compared with the number of English or British managers. Yes, I speak against myself but I think it’s true.”
Garry Monk’s sacking by Swansea means that British managers currently occupy only six of the 20 Premier League coaching positions, with four of those teams currently in the bottom five. Mourinho insisted that Britain boasts “lots of good coaches, no doubt about it”, expressed his sympathy for their plight and encouraged them “not to cry – to work, to get the opportunities and when you have the real one, the big one, the one where you can make a real impact, to take the chance in front of you with both hands”.
“Something has changed here in the last decade,” he said. “Some people say it’s a little bit of an effect of what happened with me – Portuguese, young, makes Porto champions, champions again, Champions League, success here, and people start believing and start giving chances. And if they do well then comes another one, and then another one, and now we have [Portuguese coaches] at Monaco, at Olympiakos, at Zenit, at Fiorentina, we have Carlos Carvalhal at Sheffield Wednesday doing very well too. It’s an effect.”
Mourinho says as he started his coaching career he didn’t dream of managing at any particular club, simply of providing for his young family. “I wanted to win things in Portugal, I wanted to do well in Europe, to try one day to get a chance to leave my country and to go to a different sphere. I was thinking about my career, my life, my wife, two babies and a life to build,” he said. “At Porto, I had an offer from a top Turkish club, I didn’t go. I had a good French club, I didn’t go. I had a good, not top, good Spanish club, I didn’t go. I gambled a little bit. I lost some good opportunities to leave. I was lucky enough to impress really winning the Champions League with Porto, and then I had English clubs – and when you have English clubs you don’t think twice.”
