José Mourinho took Claudio Ranieri’s job at Chelsea, he insulted him when the pair clashed in Serie A and there has been the assumption that the enmity has endured. When Mourinho takes Chelsea to face Ranieri’s Leicester City at the King Power Stadium on Monday night the suspicion and the bad blood between the managers has been considered a subplot.
It ought not to be. There will be no exchange of flowers but when Mourinho charted the evolution of his relationship with Ranieri and spoke with genuine admiration for the work he has done at Leicester – they were top until Manchester City’s late winner against Swansea, while Chelsea sit glumly in 15th – and it was clear the daggers that were once drawn, mainly by Mourinho, have long since been put down.
“Claudio deserves all the credit,” Mourinho said. “When things go wrong, it’s about managers and when things go well, it’s about players. But please make a compensation with what you do to managers in trouble and put Claudio where he deserves.
“Leicester are now in a position where only three things can happen to them. One, they can be champions, which would be amazing. Another would be to finish top four, which again would be a super achievement. And the worst thing that can happen to them is to finish top six, which would be a phenomenal season, too.”
Mourinho’s succession of Ranieri at Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2004 was a drawn-out and unsavoury affair. Ranieri came to be known as “dead man walking” and it was evident for some time that the owner, Roman Abramovich, did not regard him as the manager to fulfil the ambitions he had for the club. Furthermore Mourinho’s appointment had been extensively trailed.
“When it is the end of a period, I think it’s normal in football,” Mourinho said, with a shrug. “You finish a season, you finish a period. You are in a club three, four, five years … the club decides to change, to go in another direction.
“The manager is free to choose a different club, a different life. This is when you finish a cycle and another cycle opens. I feel sympathy when people lose their jobs in the middle of the season and another comes to replace him. In that case [with Ranieri], it was the end of a cycle.”
The relationship between them fractured when Mourinho went to Internazionale in 2008 and spent his first season in opposition to Ranieri’s Juventus. In Mourinho’s second and final season at Inter Ranieri was at Roma and the clubs contested the Serie A title. Mourinho and Inter won at the very last – but not before he had sparked a back-and-forth row with Ranieri.
Mourinho suggested that Roma would try to pay Siena to raise their game on the final day against Inter, to which Ranieri, understandably, responded in indignant fashion. Mourinho then belittled Ranieri, saying he had replaced him at Chelsea because the club considered him to be a “loser”.
Previously, in 2008, Mourinho had described Ranieri as having “the mentality of someone who doesn’t need to win”. He added: “He is almost 70 years of age. He has won a Supercup and another small trophy, and he is too old to change his mentality.” He criticised Ranieri’s command of English from his four years at Chelsea.
For the record, Ranieri was 56 at the time and he had won not only the Italian Supercup but the Coppa Italia, both with Fiorentina, plus the Copa del Rey with Valencia.
“When I was at Inter, Claudio was at the two rivals,” Mourinho said. “We cannot be the best friends. You have to exchange a few words. You have to say something, you must get an answer and Italy is a rich country at that level, so it’s difficult.”
Mourinho was asked whether he had any regrets with regard to his treatment of Ranieri. “No, no,” he replied. His attitude seemed to be that all is fair in love and war, even personal remarks that appear to cross the line, and the relationship between the two improved, according to Mourinho, when Ranieri went to Inter in 2011. Mourinho had moved to Real Madrid the year before.
“When Claudio went to Inter, I felt what I always feel, which is that I always want Inter to win – it doesn’t matter who the manager is,” Mourinho said. “Inter is a very special club for me and I spoke with him a few times during that period. I called him to wish him the best.
“We were a bit more in contact, a bit closer. We started a different relationship in that moment. I was in contact when he got the Leicester job, just a normal word of good luck. I always had respect for the man.”
