MANCHESTER, England — José Mourinho has never sought points for style. Throughout his career, he has positioned himself at every turn as the standard-bearer for substance, a man at war with soccer’s legion of self-appointed, self-identifying aesthetes.

At Chelsea, he railed against soccer’s “philosophers,” those who cast themselves and their teams as apostles of beauty in an ugly world. After Manchester United’s victory in the Europa League last season, he pointed out that “there are a lot of poets in football, but poets do not win titles.”

He once described Arsène Wenger, not just his longstanding nemesis but in many ways his polar opposite, as a “specialist in failure.” As Real Madrid manager, according to the author Diego Torres, Mourinho laid down his seven golden rules: Among them were the credo that “whoever has the ball, has fear,” and the dogma that “football favors whoever provokes more errors in the opposition.”

In that curious, idiosyncratic blend of arrogance and insecurity of his, he has, of course, barely tried to hide his disdain for those who dare to criticize the way he asks his teams to play. His weapon of choice, though, has long been the only thing in his purview that matters: results.