Aura in sport performance is a funny old thing. It is rare. It has to be built over time (but how it’s lost is another matter). It comes from the sheer identity a team or person forges for themselves in sport, not the absolute certainty that they will win, but the style in which they will achieve victory. For example, in my era, sportspeople or teams with said aura would be the Australian cricket team, Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher and the developing aura of Usain Bolt. All winners down to the core, all with their own distinct image; remorseless, graceful, ruthless and likeable in that respective order.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes in sport management, aura is a completely different thing. It is different as a manager or a coach does not have the ability to hit the winning run or pass the chequered flag; the vast majority of the job is done before and after the proceedings on the pitch/track/court/track. It is about fostering a winning mentality and spreading it to every corner of the team you manage, in whatever sport. It is about creating a persona that transmits itself to the minds of not only your team, who take strength from it, but to your opponents’ minds who are weakened by it. It is about being an equally good psychologist and strategist. It is about having almost a mythical, otherworldly status about you.
For my money, only one current manager or coach or team director in sport can lay claim to that type of aura. Personally, I would discount coaches in individual sports as so much of the talent comes from the player, the coach is a polisher. Innovators in Formula 1 such as Ross Brawn have fine technical minds and wonderful skills when it comes to building winning machines, but perhaps lack man management of talent. No contemporary cricket coach can be considered (though Andy Flower looks like a possibility for the future) as cricket is a separate entity in that so much rests on the role of a captain in the sport. No team dominates rugby (union or league) enough to have a coach lauded as a genius, besides, I don’t follow rugby to the extent to be able to comment with enough knowledge.
Which leaves football and its long lineage of managers with aura going back through Shankly, Busby, Clough, Paisley to name but four in the English game. Personally, the only manager that has the aura is one Jose Mario dos Santos Felix Mourinho. He has the ability to give any team a winning mentality, seemingly in any language and any country, taking Bela Guttman’s advice at not staying at a club for more than three years to heart. If he rocked up at Northampton Town he would probably turn them into winners. He creates a kind of boogieman image for himself where he diverts all attention, from fans or the media or other managers, on to himself, leaving his team to get on with playing the game, almost like a Ferguson-esque siege mentality taken to its extreme. He takes on all-comers and beats them to confirm his authority, as was confirmed at Real Madrid earlier this year.
Unprecedented success is only part of the aura making but Mourinho’s list of achievements is quite incredible, especially for one only a decade into a coaching career. League titles in Portugal, England and Italy, cups in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain, two Champions Leagues, the incredible 150 match unbeaten home record (stretching across nine years and four clubs) and countless manager of the year awards. Probably the one thing lacking on his CV is building a club in the same Wenger as and rebuilding teams in the long term that Ferguson has.
Other managers are up there such as Ferguson or Wenger or Guardiola or Hiddink as they are all winners too but each has their own respective weakness. Wenger? Too flawed with regard to his obsession with youth and failure to recognise his team’s flaws, second to none as a club builder though. Ferguson? All the success in the world, master of rebuilding teams but lacks the otherworldy-ness of Mourinho (perhaps he lacks the mystique as he is not foreign to be honest). Guardiola? Enviously successful but works in an environment that he knows and is his comfort zone. Hiddink? World traveller with success in most countries though more focused on national teams than day-to-day work at club level.
For me, Mourinho is one of the few people in the world, not just in sport, who has an aura to him, as if he doesn’t belong to this world, when I see him talking on TV and I reckon I genuinely would go a bit weak at the knees if I saw him in the flesh. He is the managerial boogieman with the mystical aura.
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