José Mourinho, born January 26, 1963, in Setúbal, Portugal, is a highly renowned Portuguese football manager with a storied career. Known for his tactical acumen, charisma, and sometimes controversial antics, Mourinho has managed some of the biggest clubs in Europe. He gained prominence with FC Porto, leading them to UEFA Champions League victory in 2004. Mourinho then moved to Chelsea FC, where he won multiple English Premier League titles. His success continued with Inter Milan, where he secured the treble in 2010, including the Champions League. Mourinho also managed Real Madrid, winning La Liga, and Manchester United, capturing the UEFA Europa League and League Cup. His tactical approach often emphasizes defensive solidity and counter-attacking football. While his managerial style has garnered both praise and criticism, Mourinho’s record of success has solidified his status as one of the most accomplished managers in modern football history.
José Mourinho Quotes
01. “I won’t say we have to win. I won’t put that pressure. But we can’t lose.”
— Jose Mourinho
2. “You don’t have to love me. You don’t even have to like me, but you will respect me.”
— Jose Mourinho
3. “It’s not important how we play. If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car, to beat you in a race I have to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank.”
— Jose Mourinho
4. “You have to work hard AND well. There are a lot of people who work hard but not well.”
— Jose Mourinho
5. “Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.”
— Jose Mourinho
6. “In my teams, when we win, we all win, and when we lose, I lose.”
— Jose Mourinho
7. “But the most important part of everything is to be happy.”
— Jose Mourinho
8. “Dogs bark and the caravan goes by.”
— Jose Mourinho
9. “Pressure? What pressure? Pressure is poor people in the world trying to feed their families. There is no pressure in football.”
— Jose Mourinho
10. “Football is a game about feelings and intelligence.”
— Jose Mourinho
11. “We all want to play great music all the time, but if that is not possible, you have to hit as many right notes as you can.”
— Jose Mourinho
12. “I enjoy the work, I enjoy every minute of my professional life.”
— Jose Mourinho
13. “You win by effort, by commitment, by ambition, by quality, by expressing yourself individually but in the team context.”
— Jose Mourinho
14. “I am Jose Mourinho and I don’t change. I arrive with all my qualities and my defects.”
— Jose Mourinho
15. “The world is so competitive, aggressive, consumive, selfish and during the time we spend here we must be all but that.”
— Jose Mourinho
16. “The moral of the story is not to listen to those who tell you not to play the violin but stick to the tambourine.”
— Jose Mourinho
17. “I hate to speak about individuals. Players don’t win you trophies, teams win trophies, squads win trophies.”
— Jose Mourinho
18. “Money does not guarantee success.”
— Jose Mourinho
19. “Look at my haircut. I am ready for the war. The objective is to win the Premiershp. I don’t want to dominate, to finish without defeat, record points or goals or consecutive wins. The Premiership is so difficult you cannot be focused on that. I just think about winning.”
— Jose Mourinho
20. “Eleven against eleven they never beat us.”
— Jose Mourinho
21. “Football is a game based on emotion and intelligence. Anyone can be clever, the trick is not to think the other guy is stupid.”
— Jose Mourinho
22. “To be the ultimate team, you must use your body and your mind. Draw up on the resources of your teammates. Choose your steps wisely and you will win. Remember, only teams succeed.”
— Jose Mourinho
23. “Unhappy is a nice word.”
— Jose Mourinho
24. “He’s a specialist in failure.”
— Jose Mourinho
25. “Without emotional control you cannot play, influence; you cannot react. You have to know what you have to do and not react. You have to be cool.”
— Jose Mourinho
26. “Fear is not a word in my football documentary.”
— Jose Mourinho
27. “Football is a more beautiful game in high definition.”
— Jose Mourinho
28. “If Messi is the best on the planet, Ronaldo is the best in the universe.”
— Jose Mourinho
29. “In five years I have never had a match where my team has had less possession than the opponents.”
— Jose Mourinho
30. “I think boring is a team that plays at home and can not score a goal.”
— Jose Mourinho
31. “Look, I’m a coach, I’m not Harry Potter. He is magical, but in reality there is no magic. Magic is fiction and football is real.”
— Jose Mourinho
32. “If I wanted to have an easy job, working with the big protection of what I have already done before, I would have stayed at Porto – beautiful blue chair, the Uefa Champions League trophy, God, and after God, me.”
— Jose Mourinho
33. “With all the stones being thrown against me you could build a monument!”
— Jose Mourinho
34. “Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists.”
— Jose Mourinho
35. “If you want me to rule out ever being Manchester United manager, I can’t. Special clubs need special managers, so in theory it could work.”
— Jose Mourinho
36. “Especially when you play at home, you need a good atmosphere behind you.”
— Jose Mourinho
37. “Drogba is a fighter. He is the kind of player I would say ‘With you I could go to every war.’”
— Jose Mourinho
38. “People don’t know about football. They think they know about it but they don’t know much.”
— Jose Mourinho
39. “If I am hated at Barcelona, it is their problem but not mine. Fear is not a word in my football dictionary.”
— Jose Mourinho
40. “As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal.”
— Jose Mourinho
41. “When I face the media, maybe I don’t feel it now, here with you, because it’s a different sort of interview, but when I face the media before or after the game, I feel it as part of the game.”
— Jose Mourinho
42. “I followed an Italian manager and it cannot be easy when you follow a manager who thinks very differently.”
— Jose Mourinho
43. “Maybe next season we can race.”
— Jose Mourinho
44. “For me pressure is bird flu. I’m serious. I’m feeling a lot of pressure with the problem in Scotland. It’s not fun and I’m more scared of it than football. Football is nothing compared with life. For me bird flu is the drama of the last few days. I’ll have to buy a mask.”
— Jose Mourinho
45. “The title race is between two horses and a little horse that needs milk and needs to learn how to jump.”
— Jose Mourinho
46. “I’m not a defender of old or new football managers. I believe in good ones and bad ones, those that achieve success and those that don’t.”
— Jose Mourinho
47. “I remember the first time I saw him play. It was for a Sporting CP youth team. I told my assistant, ‘There goes Van Basten’s son.’ Ronaldo had great technique. He stood out.”
— Jose Mourinho
48. “It’s a pity we can’t play in two or three days as I like to play straight away after a bad game.”
— Jose Mourinho
49. “It is like when you go to war: we have to know how our enemies attack and defend.”
— Jose Mourinho
50. “Everybody can be smart.”
— Jose Mourinho
51. “There is no pressure at the top. The pressure is being second or third.”
— Jose Mourinho
52. “In the same way that I had to follow an Italian manager here, I can imagine that it was not easy for an Italian manager to follow me at Porto.”
— Jose Mourinho
53. “Everyone has a right to an opinion. I can arrive in England and express my opinion. If criticism were ferocious and without intellectual objectivity they should show me the way to their airport. It is important to have an opinion and not be afraid to express it, knowing there will be criticism.”
— Jose Mourinho
54. “So when they have Mourinho and Benitez joining the Premiership they should say it’s good for us, maybe these guys have something new to give.”
— Jose Mourinho
55. “At the very least we should be given a bit of credit and a little bit of space, and maybe the media should think we could help them discover why English teams do not win European competitions.”
— Jose Mourinho
56. “When I saw Rijkaard entering the referee’s dressing room I couldn’t believe it. When Didier Drogba was sent off, I wasn’t surprised.”
— Jose Mourinho
57. “I would rather play with 10 men than wait for a player who is late for the bus.”
— Jose Mourinho
58. “I don’t have to be jealous of Barcelona because they have 100 years of history and have won the European Cup once. I have only been managing for five years and I have the same amount of Champions League trophies to my name.”
— Jose Mourinho
59. “When I go to the press conference before the game, in my mind the game has already started.”
— Jose Mourinho
60. “Yes, Manchester United are the best team in England, but you have to ask how good has the Premier League been since I left? If I was at a top club in England I think the title race might have been a lot closer this year.”
— Jose Mourinho
61. “I was nine or 10 years old and my father was sacked on Christmas Day. He was a manager, the results had not been good, he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day, the telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch.”
— Jose Mourinho
62. “If you’re not a big club, you choose one competition and you fight in that competition and forget the others. Big clubs – we cannot do this.”
— Jose Mourinho
63. “If Messi is the best in the world, it’s only because Cristiano is from another planet.”
— Jose Mourinho
64. “You see how Spanish, Italians, Portuguese play football. I don’t say they are perfect, I say English football has a few things to learn from them in the same way they have a lot of things to learn from English football.”
— Jose Mourinho
65. “Facing the press is not easy, but because you have to go, you have to try to take a lot of positive things for yourself from these face-to-face meetings.”
— Jose Mourinho
66. “You have to win and especially, as I have, you have to win a trophy for the first time.”
— Jose Mourinho
67. “I must try to hide my emotions. I have to live with both the victory and the defeat.”
— Jose Mourinho
68. “If Roman Abramovich helped me out in training we would be bottom of the league and if I had to work in his world of big business, we would be bankrupt!”
— Jose Mourinho
69. “The team is completely close. Anything you say outside, there is no chance it will go inside. So the team is really strong and compact. We know what we want and how to achieve it on the pitch.”
— Jose Mourinho
70. “When I was at Porto my team also played in the UEFA Cup final against a Scottish side – but it was Celtic. I’ve never seen such emotional people. It was unbelievable!”
— Jose Mourinho
71. “It is like having a blanket that is too small for the bed, you pull the blanket up to keep your chest warm, and your feet stick out. I cannot buy a bigger blanket because the supermarket is closed. But the blanket I have is made of cashmere. So it’s good.”
— Jose Mourinho
72. “Do you have a brother or cousin in Ivory Coast, because I don’t have the money to bring you to Porto.”
— Jose Mourinho
73. “Look at the way teams play against Arsenal. They don’t believe they can win. They don’t believe.”
— Jose Mourinho
74. “I fell a bit in love with Celtic, because the atmosphere was amazing and the crowd was magnificent, the way they behaved with the Porto fans.”
— Jose Mourinho
75. “I don’t say we are a defensive team. I say we are a strong team in defensive terms, but at the same time lacking sufficient fluidity in attack because that will take time to come.”
— Jose Mourinho
76. “My history as a manager cannot be compared with Frank Rijkaard’s history. He has zero trophies and I have a lot of them.”
— Jose Mourinho
77. “If you look at revenge we are still winning three one you know, so I don’t think it is a question of revenge, is a question of a personal thing.”
— Jose Mourinho
78. “I want to congratulate again Mike Dean. I think his performance was unbelievable and I think when referees have unbelievable performances, I think it’s fair that as managers we give them praise. So fantastic performance.”
— Jose Mourinho
79. “My family love living in London. It is a fantastic city and a city such as this deserves to host the Olympic Games.”
— Jose Mourinho
80. “The dog is in Portugal and the city of London is safe.”
— Jose Mourinho
81. “So if one day the result becomes 3-3, for me it doesn’t change my mind, because it’s football, it’s normal. What is not normal is that we haven’t been scoring enough goals playing such good football as we’ve been playing in the last few weeks.”
— Jose Mourinho
82. “If I had wanted to be protected in a quiet job, I could have stayed at Porto. I would have been second, after God, in the eyes of the fans even if I had never won another thing.”
— Jose Mourinho
83. “The negative side of football. The negative side of our society. People sometimes go to football and bring to it the negative aspects of our society.”
— Jose Mourinho
84. “The problem with Chelsea is I lack a striker. I have Samuel Eto’o but he is 32 years old – maybe 35, who knows?”
— Jose Mourinho
85. “If a player is not performing, there are two ways of looking at it. You wait for performance to come, or maybe the moment has arrived where you have to change. I could go either way.”
— Jose Mourinho
86. “The Porto players were with me for two and a half years, they believed in me, in my methods, in the way we do it. The next day I go and a manager arrives who works completely differently.”
— Jose Mourinho
87. “If at the end of the season I’m leaving the club, you have the right to come to me and say: ‘Jose, you are a liar’”
— Jose Mourinho
88. “For Chelsea, I would turn down every job in the world.”
— Jose Mourinho
89. “A player who dives and wins a penalty in Portugal, or Spain or Italy is considered clever, experienced, cunning, someone who understands the game. In England a player who wins a penalty like that is a cheat.”
— Jose Mourinho
90. “Would you phone the president of Ghana?”
— Jose Mourinho
91. “The best way to stop Messi is when you play with 11 men and then you can double mark him, one player to stay on him and the other to help out. If it is 11 against 10 then you have almost no chance of stopping him.”
— Jose Mourinho
92. “The way I use to develop an aerobic condition is three against three, man to man, in a square 20 metres by 20.”
— Jose Mourinho
93. “But I think it’s more normal for my team to have no success than it is to win two consecutive European cups.”
— Jose Mourinho
94. “It gave the title to Manchester City – it’s as simple as that.”
— Jose Mourinho
95. “Everybody was waiting for Chelsea not to win every game and one day when we lose there will be a holiday in the country. But we are ready for that.”
— Jose Mourinho
96. “Arsenal have won that advantage, nobody gave it to them. By playing fantastic football and by winning matches and by winning trophies, they won that respect that the opponent has for them.”
— Jose Mourinho
97. “We are on top at the moment but not because of the club’s financial power. We are in contention for a lot of trophies because of my hard work.”
— Jose Mourinho
98. “No club moves me from Chelsea until Chelsea wants me to move because I want to be where I am loved.”
— Jose Mourinho
99. “So I know all about the ups and downs of football, I know that one day I will be sacked.”
— Jose Mourinho
100. “The only thing that we cannot control is our supporters.”
— Jose Mourinho
101. “I know the questions will be around the money, the amount Chelsea had to spend to bring him here but that’s the reality of modern football. Big teams only want big players, big players are in big clubs, big clubs want to keep their big players.”
— Jose Mourinho
102. “Three years without a Premiership title? I don’t think I would still be in a job.”
— Jose Mourinho
103. “Brendan’s chihuahua doesn’t do that. During the week it sleeps, eats and trains a little bit. So I have to say his chihuahua is a privileged one.”
— Jose Mourinho
104. “Wenger has been Arsenal’s coach for 15 years but he hasn’t won even a Carling Cup for six years. Benitez hasn’t won a league title in six years but they continue to keep him as Liverpool’s coach. This is not the Italian mentality. To stay here I must continue winning and do well.”
— Jose Mourinho
105. “And I think because of the passion of every English player and every English supporter, and every English journalist for the game, most of the game is played with passion, love for football and instinct, but in football you also have to think.”
— Jose Mourinho
106. “I feel I have a lot to learn from English football and I am completely open to good influences in my way of thinking football. But I also have things to give them.”
— Jose Mourinho
107. “If Ashley Cole is ready we have 15 players for the final. I’ll have to choose between Hilario, who’s not bad playing forward or I’ll bring in one of the kids.”
— Jose Mourinho
108. “I think the best place to work in football is England.”
— Jose Mourinho
109. “Let slip the dogs of champions.”
— Jose Mourinho
110. “I think it’s clearly the result of something that looks like a campaign.”
— Jose Mourinho
