Having seen José Mourinho slumped at a desk at Selhurst Park on Monday evening, looking as if he had been stuck on a coach for 72 hours at Dieppe, imagine my surprise when I got home and logged on to the RT YouTube channel. Yes, there he was, the Manchester United manager, clean shaven, in a fashionable fleece, and – could it really be – actually smiling. “Drop the cliché,” he joked as the voiceover announced The Special One was joining the channel as a World Cup pundit. The voiceover did as it was told. It will be José from now on.

As World Cup punditry revelations go, the Mourinho announcement crashes straight in at No 2. It sits right between Robbie Williams having his skillset critiqued by Martin O’Neill and the look on John Bond’s face as Brian Clough explained to him the true nature of Trevor Francis’s role in the England 1982 midfield. This summer the (second) most famous manager in world football will opine for a broadcaster that has rights to show precisely none of this summer’s tournament. But why? At first glance it just doesn’t make sense.

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Then you take another. You cast off your blinkers, pop a sweet red pill and start asking questions. Suddenly everything looks different. For some, RT may be a meretricious outpost that persists in putting food on George Galloway’s table. To the US Department of Justice, it is a “foreign agent” operating on behalf of the Russian state. But to more liberated thinkers it is a much-needed counterweight to US imperialist propaganda, with an extra hour of Alex Salmond on a Thursday. And whatever side you are on, no one would argue its sports coverage does not need beefing up.

So you look at RT and you start to make the connections. One field in which the channel is an undoubted leader is in the peddling of conspiracy theory. Whether it be local matters, such as the Russian invasion of Crimea actually being perpetrated by patriotic Ukrainians, or international happenings such as whether the CIA invented Ebola, RT breaks the story and breaks it big. That time it claimed the BBC faked a Syrian chemical weapons attack didn’t go so well (a report by Ofcom adjudged the broadcaster had “materially misled” its audience), but some of the segments on the poisoning of western minds by both chemtrails and fluoride in the water supply are pretty eye-opening.

What if I then told you Mourinho has been known to talk of conspiracy himself on the odd occasion? What if I was to say that not only has the United manager talked about conspiracy, but he has kind of made it his absolute thing following matches when his lavishly equipped side achieve underwhelming results and, sometimes, even whelming ones?

The conspiracies José has implied include the Uefa one that led to him having a man sent off pretty much every time his team were within reach of a European trophy. “I went to Inter and played a Champions League semi-final with 10 men against Barcelona,” he said in 2013. “I go to Real Madrid, I played again a Champions League semi-final with 10 men. Now I come back to Chelsea and played a Super Cup final with 10 men. Go to analyse the actions and make your conclusions. I’m unlucky. Just that.” To be clear, you could read those remarks as being delivered with an element of sarcasm.

The same applies to a more recent theory that suggested referees love to send him to the stands for mouthing off. “Yesterday one fourth official told a manager: ‘I enjoy very much your passion,’” he said last year, probably lobbing a grenade at Jürgen Klopp while he was at it. “Today I was told: ‘Sit down or I have to send you to the stands.’ Everything is different for me. So don’t ask me questions that put me in a difficult situation.” As if.

Oh, and we have time for one more. This time regarding the scheduling of his team’s matches during the Christmas period. “You television companies make the decisions and we have to accept,” he told one of them in January. “I believe you make the decisions but I also believe that some clubs, or some managers, have good friends in the right chairs and I don’t have them.”

Who is in possession of the right chairs? Where are they hidden? And are they stackable? These are the sort of questions José will at last be able to explore during the summer. There will also surely be some exciting new gimmicks drummed up – perhaps Mourinho will be given licence to gouge the eye of a fellow pundit for each of his four days with RT this summer. Oh, did I forget that bit? Yes, José is going to Russia for only four days at the beginning of the World Cup. He will also phone in (literally) his thoughts on the final. In return he will get a reported £1.7m.

So when it comes to the eternal question of “cui bono” the answer is José Mourinho. Just as he did when he signed endorsement deals with Heineken, Hublot, Jaguar, BT Sport, Adidas, Atlantis hotels, EA Sports and Lipton Tea (you won’t need reminding of his seminal #bemoretea campaign).

Yes, make no mistake, José is the beneficiary of this particular deal. Vladimir Putin and the Russian state come only second.