The Moment Manchester United Lost Mourinho
There is a moment, buried in Manchester United’s modern history, that still makes people inside the club wince.
It lasted only days. It had taken weeks to build.
In 2013, as Sir Alex Ferguson quietly put the finishing touches to his final title-winning season, United believed they had secured the one man they felt could carry the weight of what came next: Jose Mourinho.
They were wrong.
The deal that was done… until it wasn’t
Those close to the talks describe it as “sliding doors”. A decision that flicked one way, then violently the other, and altered the direction of a giant.
The courtship had been going on for some time. Meetings in Madrid. Conversations in London. Ferguson, who admired Mourinho’s edge and charisma, stunned the Portuguese coach when he told him he would step down at the end of the 2012-13 campaign.
Once the shock faded, the talks hardened. Terms were discussed. Agreement was reached. United’s powerbrokers walked away convinced Mourinho would walk into Old Trafford as Ferguson’s successor.
Then the phone rang.
“One night, he phoned me and he was crying and he says: ‘Alex, I can't take it. I've given my word to Chelsea and I'm not going to break my word’,” Ferguson recalls in a new Netflix documentary on Mourinho’s career, released on 11 August.
In a few emotional minutes, the future shifted. Mourinho was out. Chelsea, not United, would get him back.
He cited family reasons. He had a home in London. He had told his family he would return when he was first sacked by Chelsea in 2007. He enjoyed a strong relationship with Roman Abramovich. All of that stacked up neatly.
Some at United still don’t fully buy it.
What they know for certain is this: for a brief window, they thought they had their man. And inside Old Trafford, that moment is still regarded as a major turning point.
A club on the brink of reinvention
The timing could hardly have been more delicate. Ferguson was not the only pillar about to disappear. Chief executive David Gill, another hugely respected figure, was also leaving that summer.
United’s hierarchy knew they were not just replacing a manager. They were dismantling a system built around one extraordinary individual.
Ferguson controlled almost everything from a football perspective. Recruitment. Culture. Standards. The lot. The club needed a new structure, something more modern and less reliant on a single personality, while still remaining competitive on the pitch.
The belief at the time was that Mourinho, with his broad shoulders and combative certainty, could carry the burden of that transition. He would not be cowed by the idea of following Ferguson. He would attack it.
When Mourinho walked away and Pep Guardiola committed to Bayern Munich, United’s plan collapsed in on itself.
They pivoted to David Moyes.
Moyes shared some of Ferguson’s traits – meticulous, hard-working, respected for what he had done at Everton – but he had never operated at the very top level. United unveiled him as “The Chosen One”.
He just wasn’t.
The fall from champions to seventh the following season was as brutal as it was unexpected. Even the players have struggled to properly explain it. The sense lingers that Mourinho, with his intensity and ruthless demands, might have squeezed more from that ageing but proud squad.
The Mourinho United finally got
United did eventually get Mourinho, but by then everything – and everyone – had changed.
In 2016, he arrived as Louis van Gaal’s replacement, two days after the Dutchman had delivered the FA Cup by beating Crystal Palace at Wembley. The club he inherited bore little resemblance to the one Ferguson had left three years earlier.
Of the 18 players who had started 10 or more Premier League games in the 2012-13 title-winning season, only six – David de Gea, Phil Jones, Wayne Rooney, Chris Smalling, Michael Carrick and Antonio Valencia – repeated that feat in Mourinho’s first campaign.
The dressing room was different. So was Mourinho.
He had returned to Chelsea, won another Premier League title, and then departed under a storm cloud in December 2015, leaving the champions marooned in 16th place, a single point above the relegation zone.
At Old Trafford, his record still divides opinion. On one hand, he delivered trophies and respectability. On the other, he left scorch marks.
In his first season he won the Europa League and the EFL Cup, and he twice qualified United for the Champions League. He has called finishing second in 2017-18 – 19 points behind a dominant Manchester City – one of the “best achievements” of his career. The 81 points United collected that year remain their highest total in any Premier League season since Ferguson retired.
Yet the internal damage was hard to ignore. Mourinho clashed with players, most notably record signing Paul Pogba. He publicly questioned the club’s ambition and complained he had not been backed over Anthony Martial, whom he wanted to sell. The atmosphere soured. The football did too.
Depending on your lens, Mourinho at United was either a relative success in a chaotic era or a manager who failed to deliver the title challenge his name demanded and left the club in disarray.
The great “what if” of Old Trafford
Inside United, there is a growing feeling that the timing, more than the man, was the problem.
Those involved at the time are convinced Mourinho would have had a greater impact had he walked straight into Ferguson’s office in 2013.
For a start, they believe he would have embraced the challenge of following the Scot, not been overawed by it. Where Moyes hesitated in the transfer market, Mourinho is not built for hesitation.
Take Thiago Alcantara. United had an agreement with Barcelona’s midfielder. Under Moyes, the deal drifted and ultimately died. Those close to the situation insist that with Mourinho in charge, Thiago would have been a United player.
The Marouane Fellaini saga tells a similar story. United eventually signed the Belgian from Everton for £27.5m on deadline day, only after missing the chance to trigger a lower release clause earlier in the window. It is claimed flatly that Fellaini would not have been signed under Mourinho.
He had already given United his thoughts on various targets, including Italy midfielder Daniele de Rossi. There was no shortage of ideas, or conviction.
The feeling persists that he would not only have reshaped the squad more decisively, he would also have extracted more from the experienced core he was set to inherit. Everyone accepts now that Ferguson squeezed every last drop from that 2012-13 group. They overperformed for him. But the subsequent collapse was still startling.
Would Mourinho’s presence, his relentless edge, his refusal to accept standards slipping, have held that drop-off at bay? Inside the club, many still think so.
Tears, regret and a lingering scar
In the documentary, Ferguson speaks with striking clarity about the moment Mourinho turned him down. The tears. The words about Chelsea. The finality of it.
For United, it was more than a missed appointment. It was a fork in the road.
The club have cycled through philosophies, managers and recruitment strategies ever since, chasing a stable identity they once took for granted. Each new regime has had to wrestle not only with the shadow of Ferguson, but with the consequences of those frantic days in 2013 when the plan they thought was in place simply vanished.
Was that phone call the moment Manchester United’s post-Ferguson era slipped out of their control?
Inside Old Trafford, some would argue they are still living with the answer.
