Last Saturday, an unexpected and disappointing event occurred. No, I'm not talking about the announcement of The Roots as the Spring Fling band (seriously, no Wiz Khalifa?), but instead about an event that last happened over nine years ago: Jose Mourinho lost a league match at home.
The actual game, a 0-1 defeat of Real Madrid at the hands of lowly Sporting Gijon in the Santiago Bernabéu, was frankly a horrible game to watch. Sporting had one shot on goal (which happened to go in) and spent the rest of the game with 11 men behind the ball, looking only to "park the bus" and sit back to absorb the Real Madrid pressure.
But the game had much more significance than your typical, drab 1-0 soccer game. Mourinho, the tactical mastermind, the man who always pulls out the right move, the two-time Champions League winning coach, was finally defeated in his own backyard.
On its face, besides the record — nine years and 151 games without a home league loss — being broken, the defeat does not look like that big of a deal because it was only one game of a 38-game season. But not only does the loss leave Madrid eight points adrift of Barcelona (which Mourinho admits is an insurmountable total), it also signifies the end of an era in Mourinho's career.
Mourinho is regarded as the greatest coach of his generation and is truly unique among the top managers in the world. Sure, Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola, among others, have also had remarkable success, but both of those managers have stayed at one (giant) club through their careers. Mourinho, meanwhile, bounced from Porto to Chelsea to Inter, found the right mix of players each time, and took each club to the pinnacle of its respective league.
Thus, when Mourinho demanded his release from Inter to go to Real Madrid, everyone assumed he would do it again: Despite Barcelona's dominance of La Liga over recent years, the Portuguese mastermind would just break out his Midas touch and fix the problems of a club that has not won the league since the 2007-08 season despite spending billions of dollars on players.
But while the process was the same, the results have been starkly different: Mourinho has worked his usual magic, but Real Madrid now only has an extremely slim chance to win La Liga (they would need a Barcelona collapse). Surely, Mourinho's tenure at the Bernabéu has not been without success (he will almost surely send the club through to the Champions League semifinals), but his express aim when he left Inter was to win La Liga and dethrone the Catalans. Anything else should (and will) be a failure.
Mourinho himself recognizes this and has already hinted that he wants to return to England and leave Madrid in the near future, even though he has three more years left on his contract. Even though I don't think he would leave after just one year (he stayed at Porto, Chelsea and Inter for at least two years each), he realizes that if he does not win La Liga next season, he needs to cut his losses and get out of the Spanish capital before his reputation is damaged further.
At only 48, Mourinho still could have another 20 years of coaching ahead of him, and any club he goes to will have a chance to win major trophies. But as for his time at Real Madrid and his reputation as a talisman of automatic championships? That era is all but over.
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David McIntyre is a freshman who has yet to declare a major. He can be reached at David.McIntyre@tufts.edu.
