Nothing says “congratulations on two decades in English football” quite like this:
The day after Arsene Wenger reached the twenty year anniversary of his appointment as Arsenal manager, this is the back page of the Daily Mail.
As we all know, Jose Mourinho and Wenger have never quite seen eye to eye down the years… unless it’s like this, that is:
Mourinho has referred to Wenger as a ‘specialist in failure’ in the not too distant past, so it’s quite clear he’s not a fan of the Frenchman. But what wasn’t clear was that the Manchester United boss fancied ‘breaking his face’.
Rob Beasley, a sports journalist who has had regular contact with Mourinho, claims in a soon-to-be released book that the former Chelsea boss’s views on Wenger are even more damning when away from the cameras and microphones.
‘A couple of times Jose even talked about wanting to physically fight the Frenchman,’ he writes. ‘That’s how bitter and basic their rivalry has become over the years.’
It was Wenger’s criticism of Mourinho’s decision to sell Juan Mata to Manchester United in 2014 that had prompted the “‘specialist in failure” comment. As Beasley explains, the Portuguese manager was still angered by Wenger’s words days later when he was in contact with him.
‘A few days later he was still pumped up about it all, telling me: ‘When Mr Wenger criticises CFC and Man United over the deal with Mata…I will find him one day outside a football pitch and I will break his face.”
Something tells us there’ll be no exchange of Christmas cards between the pair this winter.
Jose Mourinho: Up Close and Personal will be released on September 29 and is being serialised by the Daily Mail.
