Beckham comes face to face with his spiritual descendents

The last time José Mourinho went to watch Chelsea, he noticed something curious. Though he had been sacked as coach in 2007, hardly anything had changed in his absence. “Even the warm-up is the warm-up they did in our time,” he remarked. He still knew almost all the players. This was still his Chelsea.

The Champions League this month will provide us with two reunions: Mourinho and his new club Inter Milan will meet Chelsea, while David Beckham and AC Milan play Beckham’s old team Manchester United. Facing United, Beckham should experience the same familiarity that Mourinho felt revisiting Chelsea. It’s seven years since the player left Old Trafford, yet he shapes today’s United. To a significant degree, both he and Mourinho will be playing against their own creations.

Crucially, Beckham emerged at United and Mourinho took over Chelsea just when each club was in flux. These clubs could have become almost anything. Beckham and Mourinho helped determine what they did become. When Beckham entered United’s first team 15 years ago, the club was just shedding the drink-sodden, unthinking traditions of English football. It was also just turning into a multinational enterprise: United’s matches had begun appearing on TV channels abroad, and people were buying the club’s replica shirts. Following Eric Cantona’s lead, Beckham helped define United. He was celebrity and office worker in one: an Andy Warhol portrait come to life, but also the most obedient of collectivists. “No one is ever allowed to get too big-time at United,” he wrote in one of his autobiographies. “All the big players leave and the club goes on, it will be the same when I move on.” These are clichés, but Beckham believed them. Match after match, year after year, he worked hard, said little, showered and got on the bus. He showed United how to reconcile shirt-selling celebrity with match- winning collectivism better than any other club. Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and all United’s future superstars are Beckham’s spiritual descendents.

Chelsea, too, could have become anything when Mourinho joined them in 2004. The Portuguese coach could have created an unforgettable team. The club’s billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, apparently expected him to. Abramovich gave him a list of great footballers and asked which ones he wanted. None, replied Mourinho. He preferred working with large, slightly less gifted but more collectivist footballers. Mourinho has recorded his thinking in a manual he calls his “Bible”. No outsider is allowed to see it, but it is known to contain rhetoric familiar from self-help literature, such as: “Motivation + Ambition + Team + Spirit = SUCCESS.” In short, Mourinho prefers perspiration to inspiration. Michael Ballack phrased the ethic succinctly: “Football is not possession on the ball or playing nice passes. Good football is winning games.” This is still Mourinho’s Chelsea, and it’s unlike any previous Chelsea. All great players today are collectivists, but Chelsea’s are more collectivist than others. When the Dutch manager Guus Hiddink briefly took over the team last year, he privately marvelled at how easy to handle these great players were.

Hiddink reminisced recently about the time he substituted Frank Lampard. “Be careful,” someone muttered, “Lampard’s never substituted.” Lampard did take a second to grasp that he was being taken off, but then trotted dutifully off and never mentioned the matter.

Didier Drogba was almost as easy. The striker had briefly got it into his head that he was a great playmaker, and kept dropping into midfield. Hiddink told Drogba he lacked the touch for that position. “Go up front. They fear you there,” the Dutchman urged. And Drogba did. Chelsea’s players are still Mourinho’s men, just as United’s are Beckham’s sons. It isn’t given to many people to shape a club, and that thought should console Mourinho and Beckham if, as expected, they lose to their creations.

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