A sad fact of life is that there are few great soccer novels. There are many reasons: In soccer, the true drama is enacted on the pitch; great players, whose success is reliant on repetition and discipline, are cads at best, colorless characters at worst; the managers comply with the stereotype of the fatherly figure. The only serious runner for a great soccer novel is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, narrated by someone who never gets into the fray—a committed fan.

But how is this for an early chapter of a gripping narrative: a brilliant young soccer manager from the Portuguese provinces is summoned to London by a Russian oligarch, who rapidly progressed from selling rubber duckies from his Moscow flat to blowing a chunk of his billions on the venerable English club Chelsea. The oligarch is impressed by the young man, recognizing a kinship of ruthless ambition. At his unveiling as the new Chelsea manager, the young man wears a suit a size too big and, on its sleeve, an ambition many times oversized. To the press accustomed to self-effacing Englishmen, the young manager offers: “We have top players and—excuse me if I’m arrogant—a top manager. Please don’t call me arrogant, because it’s not true. I am a special one. I’m a champion.” The following day a tabloid blazes with a headline: “The Ego Has Landed.” The British/global public is mesmerized by his fondness for confrontation and ubiquitous conspiracies, by the ease with which he coats the truth in layers of half-truths and outright lies, by his unrestrained desire to win. He’s charismatic and undaunted; he’s pepper-haired and wears a cashmere coat; he’s a master manipulator and thrives in conflict. He’s known as The Special One, his banner and his bane. The soccer salons are abuzz: Is he as special as he thinks he is? Is his ruthlessness his mask or his essence? Will his wax-and-feathers wings melt?

As any soccer fan knows, The Special One is none other than Jose Mourinho, presently managing, Real Madrid, the most illustrious Spanish and European club. Mourinho is a novelistic character par excellance—an English journalist living in Spain, described him to me as “half Dickensian character, half buffoon”—and his story is as narratively compelling as any.

Mourinho managed Chelsea between 2004 and 2007, when he abruptly resigned, having discovered that the oligarch—Roman Abramovich—liked meddling far too much. In 2008, the special ego landed in Italy, where he spent two seasons at the helm of Inter Milan, winning the 2010 Champions League, the most prestigious of European soccer club competitions. He’d already won it in 2004 with Porto, the Portuguese club he’d managed before Chelsea, so that he became the third and youngest manager, at the age of forty-one, to win the CL with two different clubs. On its way to the ultimate victory, Inter had to beat the mighty Barcelona—the antagonist crucial to the Mourinho plot.

The rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC is so enormous as to appear eternal.

The two semifinal games between Inter and Barca deserve their own chapters: the first one featured a deus-ex-machina in the shape of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjalla. Its cataclysmic eruption had grounded European air traffic, forcing Barcelona on a fourteen-hour bus ride to Milan the day before the game. Inter blitzed the tired Barca and won 3-1. In the second leg, a group of determined men defied a much stronger enemy: The Milanese lost a player to a red card early, then withstood Barca’s siege in a tactical formation Mourinho had specifically devised for playing with ten men. After Inter went on to defeat Bayern Munich in the finals, its owner Massimo Moratti was eager to keep Mourinho, the triumphant general, at any price. But then came a plot twist: Real Madrid came calling for The Special One, tickling his humongous hubris glands. They made him an offer that made the mighty ego soar: coaching the most famous and successful club on the planet.