If you accept the principle that in order to become the complete football manager it is necessary to master all parts of the role, then José Mourinho really is putting in the hard yards right now. Expert at winning trophies. World-class defensive organiser. It turns out Mourinho is also the master of being publicly and painfully not-quite sacked. There may have been more vitriolic and drama-ridden shuntings towards the edge in elite level English football than Mourinho’s current long goodbye. But not many. And none that spring to mind.

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Dynamo Kyiv are next up at Stamford Bridge night in what is effectively a must-win game for Chelsea’s Champions League season. And while it should be remembered that for now Mourinho is going nowhere, that he remains the manager of the Premier League champions, it is hard to avoid the feeling of symmetry, of some seductively hackneyed narrative of rise and fall.

“In May 2004 I said that, one day in my career, bad results would come,” Mourinho said on Tuesday at his pre-match press conference. “One day the bad results will come and I’ll face the bad results with all the same honesty and dignity that I’m facing now as a European champion. May 2004. So, 11 years later, I resisted well to the nature of my job and the nature of football. Eleven years waiting for this.”

Natural cycles, human frailty, 10-year lifespans: if Mourinho’s thoughts have turned to such things it is perhaps with good reason. From a certain angle the events of the past few weeks look like the exact inverse of his famous touchline sprint at Old Trafford all those years ago.

Against Liverpool at the weekend Mourinho was stuck half in half out of in the tunnel fuming about timekeeping as Philippe Coutinho scored the kidney-punch equalising goal. For Saturday’s trip to Stoke City he will be banned not just from the touchline but from the stadium, pretty much as far from performing a celebratory Age of José knee-slide as it’s possible to get.

For some it has been tempting to look back, before the visit of Dynamo, to that famous 1-1 draw with Rosenborg, the final instalment of Mourinho’s first spell at Chelsea. Albeit the two occasions are more notable for their striking contrast. In 2007 Mourinho departed mourned by glum-faced senior players, still the brightest young managerial star in European football with Chelsea two points off the top of the Premier League table.

This time around there is something salutary in his inability to address a decline in performance that began around the time of the 1-1 draw with Liverpool in January. Since when, even while hoovering up the Premier League title, Chelsea have won 17 of 39 games in all competitions.

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Mourinho may have his own a long list of exculpatory reasons why this has happened, from refereeing covens to club hierarchy failings. But taking the wider view, there is another, less accusatory story here. Perhaps the reason Mourinho has stuttered is simply that he is human after all, subject to the normal rules of gravity that suggest even the most compelling managers tend to get no more than a decade of outright, untouchable success.

There is no obvious reason why the current crop should buck the trend, not least when the demands have never been so great. Ten years, give or take: this has been the most common career trajectory. If we take as the measure of headline success the number of league titles and European trophies won, the pattern is fairly clear.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest José’s Mourinho, then of Porto, embarks on his famous touchline celebration at Old Trafford in 2004, in the early stages of his 2003-10 golden age. Photograph: Reuters

Louis van Gaal won eight major trophies in the golden LVG years 1992-1999. Since when he has a pair of league titles in Holland and Germany. Fabio Capello won seven league and European titles in the years 1992-2001, one league title since. Bill Shankly rebuilt Liverpool from the ground up, then set off aged 50 on nine years of cups and titles. All of Arrigo Sacchi’s nine top level trophies came between the years 1988-1990. Marcello Lippi won all seven of his main League and European titles between 1995 and 2003 (and a World Cup three years later).

There are of course exceptions. Giovanni Trapattoni stands out, a Serie A title winner with Juve in 1977 and an Austrian Bundesliga champ with Salzburg 30 years on. Plus of course there is the amazingly sustained run of Alex Ferguson, a Cup-Winners’ Cup winner with Aberdeen in 1983 and a Champions League winner with Manchester United 25 years on. Albeit even these two giants had a break now and then (Ferguson went eight trophy-less years in his prime). Pep Guardiola, four years (sorry Pep fans) without a European trophy, will surely benefit in the long term from his decision to take that sabbatical year.

What, if anything, does this tell us about Mourinho? Perhaps simply that he is just one of many special ones to have come and gone, subject like everyone else to the natural limits of human capacity. Mourinho created three thrillingly successful teams in his peak years to date, 2003-2010. Porto had some luck en route to winning the Champions League in 2004, but this was high grade, thrillingly enacted opportunism. Chelsea 2004-05 were a wonderful, free scoring, defensively rigorous machine. Internazionale’s 2010 Champions League winners are, at least in some ways, the manager’s own favourite José team.

In those peak years 2003-2010 Mourinho won nine league and European trophies. In this decade, 2010-2015, he has two league titles and a pattern of gathering toxic contagion at both Real Madrid and Chelsea, a sense of a manager whose methods have become increasingly exhausting both for his players and himself. Capello, who has his own blind spots, has pointed to Mourinho’s oddly debilitating presence. “Mourinho burns out his players after a year and a half,” Capello said this week. “I had already heard it when he was in Madrid and now we have confirmation in London.”

There is perhaps a degree of built-in obsolescence about Mourinho’s successes. A team powered by rage, by the refusal to accept defeat even in defeat, seem far more likely to burn out, to collapse like a black star. There is a disturbing relentlessness to Mourinho’s need to win, a curdled energy his constant siege mentality (even victory is a siege, even lifting a trophy is a siege).

This is another extrapolation, another narrative of rise and fall, albeit one based on observable behaviour, the career outlines of others who have burned brilliantly in the same profession. The 10-year rule makes sense in many respects. Sport never stands still. New degrees of control and excellence emerge. The world adjusts and catches up, just as the individual pioneer gathers a little scar tissue over the years. The greatest challenge is to stay fresh, perhaps even find a new edge.

Mourinho’s methods have always been more about personality and detail than any great tactical or technical innovation. It is these same qualities that will dictate his ability to survive the storm. To push on from here, to operate once again near his own peak level of success will require a little more. Not least the ability to subvert, as others have occasionally, that well-worn 10-year cycle.