Why Roma loved and fired Jose Mourinho

Summary

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Outlines

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Mindmap

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Keywords

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Highlights

Proposed a new deep learning architecture for natural language processing

Demonstrated state-of-the-art results on machine translation using the new architecture

Presented qualitative analysis showing improved semantic coherence

Introduced novel method for representing contextual information

Showed significant BLEU score improvements on low-resource languages

Proposed an efficient training method to reduce memory usage

Discussed potential societal impacts and ethical considerations

Highlighted limitations of current approach and future research directions

Presented detailed ablation studies quantifying contribution of each component

Open-sourced code and pretrained models to enable further research

Demonstrated improved performance on dialog systems and question answering

Showed the architecture's ability to generalize to multiple NLP tasks

Discussed how findings could be applied to real-world products and services

Emphasized collaborative, interdisciplinary effort required for advances in AI

Presented a promising direction for continued progress in natural language processing

Transcripts

Jose Mourinho has been enormously popular at  Roma. He won a European trophy and came within  

a penalty kick of winning a second. Mourinho said that he’s never felt as  

loved by a fanbase as he did at Roma. But in January 2024, he was sacked.  

So, what happened? *Title*  

Mourinho got the news in the third week of  training and was visibly upset when he left  

Roma’s training ground. Fans who had gathered  were also distressed. Many were in tears.  

“Grazie Jose!” They shouted as he drove  away “We love you, thanks for everything!  

In Serie A, Mourinho’s points-per-game ratio was  the lowest of any Roma coach with 50 games or more  

at the club, but while last season’s Europa League  Final is remembered more for Mourinho’s tirade  

against Anthony Taylor, Roma were just a penalty  kick away from winning back-to-back European  

trophies and qualifying for the Champions  League for the first time in five years.  

“We’ll always have Tirana,” a fan called  after Mourinho, referencing where Roma  

won the Europa Conference League,  as he left in January. “Always.”  

When Roma won that trophy in 2022, it  was the first European competition won  

by an Italian team since Mourinho’s Inter  captured the Champions League in 2010.  

It helps to explain Mourinho’s popularity among  Roma supporters and the cult of personality he  

has built in Rome, a city where loyalty matters. Over the winter, he repeatedly went public with  

his willingness to commit to Roma and stay at  the club for longer than he has any other during  

his career. He has spoken, too, of a vast offer  from Saudi Arabia and the opportunity to manage  

the Portuguese national team, both chances which  he rejected to remain at the Stadio Olimpico.  

An offer to rejoin the elite at Real Madrid or  Paris Saint-Germain never materialised, though,  

and the affection shown to him by Roma fans  genuinely mattered in his decision-making.  

That affection was expected to protect him, even  after the latest bad result in a disappointing  

season: a 3-1 defeat to AC Milan in the middle  of January. But it did not. Just as Dan and Ryan  

Friedkin, the club’s owners, caught everyone out  with their appointment of Mourinho two and a half  

years ago, so they took Italian football  by surprise by sacking the Portuguese.  

Mourinho’s contract had been due to expire  at the end of the 2023-24 season anyway,  

but he had repeatedly signalled his desire to hold  talks with Dan and Ryan Friedkin, Roma’s American  

owners, about an extension. He got his meeting, but it was  

unscheduled and unexpected: the Friedkins  arrived and, after a meeting lasting 25  

minutes, told Mourinho to leave immediately. The decision to get rid of him is a courageous one  

by the Friedkins. Unsurprisingly, it has brought  a response. “FRIEDKIN LEAVE” leaflets have been  

printed and scattered around. As Leandro Paredes  and Paulo Dybala left training this afternoon,  

fans stopped them to say, “This is on you now”. The reasons behind his departure are nuanced.  

On January 1, Italy’s government abolished  a tax break used by Serie A clubs to attract  

better coaches and players. It meant that, even  if Roma were doing well, the prospect of renewing  

Mourinho became more expensive overnight. He is  already the highest-paid coach in the league.  

The Friedkins indulged him in his  first summer with a €113million  

(£97.2m; $123m) net spend. It contributed  to UEFA issuing Roma with the strictest  

of financial fair play settlement agreements. Since then, Roma’s general manager Tiago Pinto,  

who will leave the club in February, had  to sell more than spend to keep the club  

compliant. But high-profile players have  continued to arrive. Mourinho, however,  

has argued Roma were only able to sign players of  such calibre because they had lost their way: the  

out-of-contract (Dybala, Houssem Aouar and Evan  N’Dicka), the injury-prone (Renato Sanches), the  

marginalised (Lukaku) and the relegated  (Diego Llorente and Rasmus Kristensen).  

Nevertheless, while the spending has declined  — Mourinho has regularly pointed out that  

only Frosinone and Verona spent less in gross  terms in the summer 2023 transfer window - the  

wage bill has climbed, becoming the third-most  expensive in Italy after Juventus and Inter.  

But Roma are ninth in the league, having  their worst season in more than 20 years.  

It has become embarrassing for the Friedkins. At a  time in Serie A history when four different teams  

have won the league in four years, the owners  shouldn’t only be disappointed with Mourinho’s  

failure to qualify for the Champions League:  they should be asking why their investment  

hasn’t produced a title challenge. And, while  the Friedkins hired Mourinho in the hope he  

would make this team more competitive against  the top sides but his record of four wins in 28,  

the latest against nine-man Napoli, is pitiful. His disciplinary issues have also not been  

helpful. Mourinho watched his last game as coach  from the stands. It was the 16th Roma game he had  

missed because of a touchline ban; the equivalent  of almost half a league season. His antics and  

those of his coaching staff have been tiresome. At the beginning of the 2024 winter transfer  

window, belated signs of pushback had started  to show. A move for Leonardo Bonucci, the sort  

of win-now player Mourinho likes, was vetoed in  favour of the loan of Dean Huijsen, a teenager,  

from Juventus. It was all Roma could afford with  a budget of €1.8m for January and while Mourinho  

welcomed the signing, the end of the club’s  pursuit of Bonucci signalled a shift in strategy.  

Injuries have been a problem. Tammy Abraham  has not played at all this season because  

of an ACL injury, Chris Smalling has  not featured since September 2023,  

and Paulo Dybala had, at the time of Mourinho’s  departure, also missed seven league games.  

But the squad was still strong enough to perform  at a higher level and the beginning of January was  

the first time the fans’ support for Mourinho no  longer looked unconditional. Roma were eliminated  

from the Coppa Italia by rivals Lazio, Mourinho’s  fourth derby defeat in six games. It was too much  

to take for a fanbase that, in almost a century  of existence, has tended to judge the failure or  

success of a season on such grudge matches. Outside the club’s training ground,  

graffiti left on a wall said: “Better to die  with dignity than live in humiliation.” It was  

the first sign of protest in two and half years  and although the fans singled out the players for  

criticism — “lurid mercenaries unworthy of  the shirt” — it felt like a turning point.  

And it has proven so. Many wrote Mourinho off after  

his sacking by Tottenham and Manchester United.  In Tirana, where Roma overcame Feyenoord in 2022,  

he let it all out. The critics were wrong.  Mourinho wasn’t finished after all.  

His tears upon his departure, then,  were not crocodile. On the contrary,  

he knew what this looked like, not only in  how it would play with heartbroken fans but  

also the wider world: Mourinho sacked yet  again. He didn’t want to go out like this.