The accomplished politician in Jose Mourinho emerged this morning as the Football Association issued a statement from him lauding the English game, to which he is pledged to return.
“To say congratulations to the English FA,” he declared, on the eve of the association’s 150th birthday celebrations, “is to say congratulations to football.”
He then proved himself a better diplomat than historian, however, by going on to claim that “they are most responsible for why football is what it is around the world”.
No serious student of the game would accept that cliche.
In the FA’s early years, a furious debate took place between those who favoured the English game — fighting over a ball, basically — and those who recognised that a more worthwhile form of football was developing in Scotland. Clubs then hired lots of Scottish players who were known as “professors” because of their role in teaching the value of sharing the ball instead of just chasing it until you ran into a brick wall.
Football “is what it is around the world” because the English pioneers, from Charles Alcock to Jimmy Hogan, favoured the style of the Scots.
This was what Lancashire-born Hogan, arguably the most influential coach of all time, took to Europe (Austria, Hungary, Switzerland and Germany) and, indirectly, South America. It included the magic ingredient of passing.
Pure English football would have died on its bruised and battered legs. It wouldn’t have got as far as Calais, let alone Barcelona, Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.
So why did the Scots get left behind in the refinement of their own game? That’s a good question for another time. Meanwhile, Mourinho might remind himself that, when he took his coaching courses, it was to Scotland he went, on advice that has proved pretty good.
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