Chelsea: Jose Mourinho didn’t endanger his players, and that worries people

Chelsea hired Jose Mourinho because he was an arrogant maverick who would lead the club into a new era of fresh thinking. Nearly 20 years later, he is the same man who may be doing the same for civic society.

Yes, yes, yes, to our families and in the eyes of our respective deities (as applicable) we are all equal and, other than a few stone-hearted dismal scientists (those would be economists, for you neophytes) producing public policy papers no one will ever read, you can’t put a numerical value on human life, but at least to employers and insurers some lives are, in fact, more costly than others in the event of their untimely expiration. When a club like Chelsea or Tottenham pay millions of pounds for their players and managers before paying millions of pounds to their players and manager, everyone involved as a raw financial interest in those individuals’ health and well-being.

For the last 30 years, Jose Mourinho has been entrusted with not just the health and well-being but the peak human performance of his players. It’s not enough for him to keep them mostly healthy and somewhat fit. They have to be the pictures of health, and it would be grievous professional malpractice for him to risk their physical and medical conditions.

So when Jose Mourinho leads two of his players in a training session against the government’s restrictions on social interaction, we shouldn’t question his actions or motivation: we should question those restrictions.

Some people are angry at Mourinho, Tanguy Ndombele and Ryan Sessegnon because their actions fit the stereotype of the entitled, above-the-law footballer.

Those are the same people who say footballers should all take a pay cut because they make too much money, without ever saying what the proper amount of money would be. They are also the ones whose first response to a rich person’s act of charity is to whip out their phones and do a quick division so they can say “That’s only X% of his net worth / salary! That’s not enough!!” Pleasant folk, all around.

The others who are angry at the Tottenham trio are those worried that the general population will realize that Mourinho is not dumb nor reckless, that he would never endanger his players’ health, and therefore that those three were quite safe outside, and therefore it would be quite safe for other people to be outside exercising or socializing in small moderately distanced groups. Maybe even for more than an hour at a time.

The government and the governing bodies who carry the government’s waters are worried that someone will look at Mourinho’s informal three-man session on Hadley Common and realize that when it comes to the social restriction regime, the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Not even a face mask.

The stereotype of the hard-drinking, hard-partying, socially smoking and occasionally brawling footballer is pretty outdated. The only players who step forward every once in a while to conform to that image are people like Chelsea flotsam Danny Drinkwater.

Players are not out taking unnecessary risks. They know the public is always watching, and they know that their coaching staff have a lot of technology at their disposal to monitor what they’ve done to their bodies.

Coaches will take even fewer risks. They’re the adults in the room, and much more easily removed than the players.

So if a coach leads his players in doing something, you can be sure that it poses little risk to the players’ health, fitness and overall well-being. Mourinho didn’t endanger himself, Ndomble or Sessegnon. It was not his intention, but he did put a two-foot, studs-up Ashley Barnes-style sliding tackle through the panic pandemic’s excess restrictions.

The football world spent much of the last 20 years imitating Jose Mourinho so they could catch up to his achievements.

At a time when people need an iconoclast to spur them to think and act for themselves, they could do worse than to follow his example on Hadley Common.