Associated Press

It read like something a child might have written. A sign hung on FC Porto's dressing-room door when Jose Mourinho was manager stated: "Here, nobody is allowed in...except us." It is the language of a gang. At once both inclusive and excluding. That's how gangs work.

Mourinho has built his career around dressing rooms in which its inhabitants read that sign and walk straight in. Those who reach the door but have to ponder the ambiguity of the message are quickly weeded out. In Mourinho's world, there are us and them and nobody in between.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba probably wouldn't even notice the sign. That's why Mourinho signed them. With the majority of Manchester United's players, though, it seems he is still making up his mind. If this is a gang, it's one with the most stringent of vetting policies.

The manner in which Mourinho has gone about his work in Manchester makes the United job arguably his most fascinating to date. From his first managerial position at Benfica, where a clash with the club's president led to his resignation, he has always held the sanctuary of the dressing room with a quasi-religious regard.

Perhaps it was his experience at Benfica that shaped a view whereby outside parties are something to be endured, never encouraged. Nobody is allowed in "except us."

Like his spiritual if not chronological predecessor, Sir Alex Ferguson, the Portuguese erects a ring fence around him and his players. Them and us. Repeat.

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In Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography, when discussing criticising his own players, he wrote:

Sometimes a manager has to be honest with the supporters, over and beyond the players. They are not stupid. As long as you don't criticise individual players in public, admonishing the team is fine, not a problem. We can all share in the blame: the manager, his staff, the players. Expressed properly, criticism can be an acceptance of collective responsibility.

Except that's not what is happening with Mourinho at Manchester United. Quite the opposite, in fact. Any ring fence has been blown down by the winds of change at Old Trafford. In terms of criticising his own players, it's Roy Keane's policy he's following, not Ferguson's.

To Mourinho's detractors, the autocratic doctrine he has dished out from day one at United is little more than self-serving narcissism. A benevolent dictator with an ego and a persecution complex, some argue, is no better than your garden-variety dictator. How Mourinho has treated Luke Shaw, Antony Martial and Marcus Rashford has led to comments that a familiar Achilles' heel, an inability to coax the best from young players, is flaring again.

It's not a view shared by all. Just a solitary defeat in 24 matches in all competitions is compelling evidence in Mourinho's defence. Sunday's victory at Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup to book a tasty looking quarter-final tie with Chelsea was United's 13th victory in 16 cup games this season. The end is justifying the means.

While still a work in progress, there's a sense this United side is a good one in the making. Cutting their teeth in cup competitions, where success is possible in each of the FA Cup, League Cup and Europa League, has echoes of the 2005-06 United side, spearheaded by Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. They won the then-League Cup that year before the Premier League title the season after.

A run of eight wins and three draws from their last 11 Premier League matches has taken United to within two points of Tottenham Hotspur in third and only four points behind Manchester City in second. United don't play in the league until March 4 because of Sunday's EFL Cup final against Southampton, but it's Mourinho's side gathering a head of steam coming into the business end of the season.

Tough love has become the rule rather than the exception for Mourinho in Manchester. Fifty Shades Darker has nothing on the Portuguese, who has been 50 shades of pitch black at times this season. He has a tongue that stings more than any bullwhip. The only consolation for those players who feel they have been singled out for criticism is that those who haven't are in the minority.

When the club went through a run of just two victories in 11 Premier League matches between September 10 and December 4, it looked almost like an act of self-sabotage. In taking aim at fish in a barrel, he just as often ended up shooting himself in the foot.

In the middle of that run, when United failed to unlock Burnley's defence at Old Trafford, despite having 71 per cent possession, 19 corners and 38 shots, United's supporters may have spotted Henrikh Mkhitaryan in his suit in the stands and wondered whether Francis Bacon might have had a point when he said: "The remedy is worse than the disease."



When you have a player whose touch is so good he makes the ball blush, it doesn't half seem a waste that it took Mkhitaryan so long to win back his manager's faith. To be fair, his performance in September's Manchester derby was so bad the ghost of Ralph Milne stirred in the bowels of Old Trafford.

The nature of Mourinho's criticism of individuals, for the large part, seems fairly well-reasoned and isn't particularly shocking. It's more the quantity and spread of it.

It's as though he assessed the squad he inherited and quickly arrived at the conclusion an acceptance of mediocrity had indoctrinated his players to such an extent normal methods of motivation would not suffice.

By my reckoning, in Mourinho's six months or so at the helm, all of the following at one point or another have been out of favour to the point they may have considered their futures at United: Mkhitaryan, Rooney, Martial, Rashford, Shaw, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Juan Mata, Michael Carrick, Ander Herrera, Chris Smalling, Matteo Darmian, Ashley Young and Daley Blind.

Even perceived teacher's pets Ibrahimovic, Pogba, Eric Bailly and David De Gea have been inculpated from time to time. As Mark Hughes, Paul Ince and Andrei Kanchelskis will testify, having all been let go in the summer of 1995 to make way for the Class of '92, ruthlessness is what kept the cogs turning and trophies coming in under Ferguson.

Every single player under the Scot knew they would be out just as soon as they stopped being useful or became difficult for the manager. Keane, Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy and David Beckham all have their own stories to tell.

Had Mourinho bought Lionel Messi over the summer, he'd have likely signed off his unveiling by having a quiet lament about his new boy not being Brazilian. It's hard to think of a manager who has previously called out just about every one of his players before Valentine's Day.

The knowledge executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward would probably have to sack himself should he ever have to do likewise with Mourinho, given this is his third attempt at finding Ferguson's successor, affords a certain amount of leeway with regard to how vocal the incumbent can be over the performance of his squad.

Given when Mourinho agreed to succeed Louis van Gaal the club had endured three seasons of such acute abjectness that DVDs of each campaign had been donated to research centres for insomnia, perhaps it's no surprise a man with his own professional point to prove would look to shake things up with no little gusto.

Still, that's some list.

After the drizzle of David Moyes and grey skies of Van Gaal, Mourinho has been a tornado in comparison. United might end up not making the top four this season, but no one in the crowd will attempt to slip into a self-induced coma watching them try.

Going to watch United over the past three seasons had become almost a chore, like visiting the in-laws with the kids on a Sunday afternoon. Now it's the highlight of the week again, even if there's no guarantee there won't be the odd blue Monday from time to time. That's what you get with works in progress.

Keeping criticism in-house has always been football's received wisdom, but Mourinho might just be doing something brilliant at Old Trafford. It's as though he's putting his charges through the psychological equivalent of Brian Clough making his Nottingham Forest players run through stinging nettles. Now that probably would send Martial over the edge.

He has picked on too many individuals for it to be personal. It's more all encompassing than that. This first six months has been about creating a ground zero at Manchester United. It's about showing his players that in English football's biggest circus, there is only room for one ringmaster.

Dropping his captain, Rooney, and new signing Mkhitaryan was his way of telling his players they would effectively have no influence on his decision-making. The players were bigger than Moyes and, for all his bombast, ultimately bigger than Van Gaal. That was never going to be the case with Mourinho. Not after Chelsea.

He's deconstructing United's squad like a smart-arse Michelin-starred chef might a cheesecake. You might not know exactly what you are eating, even less so whether you like it, but it's hard not to admire the sheer chutzpah of the work involved. In their own way, each player he has inherited, or even bought in the case of Mkhitaryan, has been stripped back and challenged to prove himself.

Herrera is a classic example of a player who quickly accepted Mourinho can make a career just as quickly as he can break one. Rather than sulk about what his new manager might do with him, having seemingly not initially been impressed, he presented himself as a willing blank canvas. An absence of ego, despite being a firm favourite with the United faithful, will have endeared him to his manager.



He's now an integral cog of United's machine, a trusted lieutenant at the base of Mourinho's midfield. Better to be a guard dog than compete with Pogba for best in show and inevitably end up chained to a bench without a rosette.

"We have a saying in Spain, you catch the liar before you catch the lame man," Herrera told the Daily Mail's Pete Jenson in November. "It's true in life and even more so in football. If a coach is not straight, players soon find him out. Mourinho is very straight. He says what he thinks, and he says it to your face. He says it when it is something we will like, but he also says it when it is something we won't like."

For all the handwringing over Mkhitaryan being football's answer to Jane Eyre, left to rot in the red room, when the Armenian was asked whose fault it was he wasn't playing, he confessed it was his own. To go against Mourinho's insistence that he is "protecting" those players he has sidelined would be about as advisable as licking raw chicken, but still, there's no doubt player and manager are enjoying a fully functioning relationship.

Mourinho's career, and ever-evolving philosophy, is perhaps best explained when split in two.



Mourinho: Mark I is Porto, Chelsea (2004-05) and Inter Milan; Mourinho: Mark II is Real Madrid, Chelsea (2013-15) and Manchester United.

Mourinho: Mark I is Deco, Frank Lampard and Wesley Sneijder; Mourinho: Mark II is Iker Casillas, Eden Hazard and Paul Pogba.

Mourinho: Mark I is a smirk; Mourinho: Mark II is a sneer.

Mourinho: Mark I is running down the touchline past Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford; Mourinho: Mark II is poking Tito Vilanova in the eye.

Mourinho: Mark I is a brother to his players; Mourinho: Mark II is a distant stepfather.

Mourinho: Mark I lights up a room; Mourinho: Mark II draws the curtains.

Mourinho: Mark I is charismatic and calculating; Mourinh: Mark II is calculating.

Mourinho: Mark I tells his players like it is; Mourinh: Mark II tells the press like it is.

Mourinho: Mark I may have been a character of his own design; Mourinho: Mark II almost certainly is.

That's not to say Mourinho hasn't been successful during the second half of his managerial career, or indeed wryly amusing. Most managers would die happy with a CV boasting title wins at both Real Madrid and Chelsea, but there's no doubt his experience in Spain changed him.

One only has to watch the video of Marco Materazzi and Mourinho sharing a tearful embrace in the knowledge their time together at Inter was over or recall Lampard discussing how his old manager would text him every day after the death of his mother to realise he is able to forge bonds that go far beyond the usual parameters of coach and player.

If Porto, Inter and Chelsea players, at least in his first stint, would have run over hot coals for him, Real Madrid's would have reported him to health and safety.

A manager famed for having Malcolm Tucker levels of political savvy found his match at the Santiago Bernabeu, as Madrid's cartel of Spanish players made House of Cards' Frank Underwood look naive. His falling-out with Casillas and Sergio Ramos, among others, broke a bond of trust Mourinho has always held sacred between a manager and players.

The discord that led to his departure from Real Madrid after his third season in Spain became even more palpable on his return to Chelsea. Saying his players had betrayed him was the beginning of the end for him in west London second time around, but not before he had won a third Premier League title for the club. Third-season syndrome may have been diagnosed again had he not offed club doctor Eva Carneiro earlier in the campaign.

As the American playwright Arthur Miller once said, "betrayal is the only truth that sticks."

Whether perceived or otherwise, it's stuck with Mourinho to the extent it has changed him as a manager. What he has retained, though, is an insatiable appetite for success.

And for Manchester United, that's more than enough for starters. Even if there will be tears along the way.

After all, love is tough.