The former Chelsea defender Filipe Luís has claimed that José Mourinho’s public criticism of players can be damaging for the dressing room.
The Brazil international returned to Atlético Madrid in the summer after just one season at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea have struggled to replicate last season’s title-winning form, with Mourinho’s side in 16th place after 12 matches. Eden Hazard has been singled out for criticism by his manager in the past, with the Belgium forward’s workrate coming under fire. And Luís believes that Mourinho’s tactic does not always have the desired effect.
“He has his way of talking to the press, especially when the team loses, which can sometimes be damaging to certain players,” he told Yahoo. “Some players benefit from criticism but for others they don’t. Sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s not. Sometimes people think what he says is absurd and sometimes they agree with him. It’s the way he is and the way he works – I see it as normal.”
The former striker Didier Drogba has also had his say on Chelsea’s travails this season. In his autobiography Commitment, the former Ivory Coast striker admitted that Mourinho can struggle to “get his message through” after enjoying initial success.
“Things often come in three-year cycles – we’d arrived at the end of such a cycle,” Drogba wrote about the end of the Portuguese’s first spell at Chelsea. “By the start of the fourth season that José had been in charge, I think we had started to reach a point where it was harder for his message to get through. We wanted to hear it, we tried but somehow we had lost a little bit of what made us special.”
