The FIFA World Cup is to be hosted in Africa for the first time. Muyiwa Akintunde highlights the values of personality brands on success in football and lessons brand managers can draw from it, using brand Mourinho as an example
For 80 years, Africa waited while Europe and South America virtually appropriated the hosting rights of the global fiesta. Now the waiting game is over. The FIFA World Cup is finally here on the African soil. South Africa is the stage beginning on Friday, June 11.
On July 11 when the curtain falls on the 19th edition of the FIFA World Cup, which of the managers will mount the stage to celebrate the moment of glory with his team? Vicente Del Bosque has the commitment to end Spain’s nightmare as super flop, while Diego Maradona parades perhaps the best collection of in-form players the championship has ever witnessed. Or will the day belong to Dunga of the Brazil that is hoping to win it for a record sixth time?
Coaches are rarely celebrated in the game of football. But in recent time, a certain Jose Mario dos Santos Felix Mourinho has turned the convention on its head and, in the process, provided learning for brands competing on the edge. Simply known as Jose Mourinho – or by this brand name, the Special One, this polemical figure in football was the ultimate hero as Internazionale Football Club recently achieved the record of being the first Italian side to win Serie A, Coppa Italia and Europe’s top prize (Champions’ League) all in one season.
Self-styled or not, the Special One is the football manager with the Midas touch. Virtually every team he touches achieves gold. For the 47-year-old, two European Champions League titles, a UEFA Cup, six league titles and eight other domestic trophies within a 10-year career in indeed phenomenal. A former assistant coach at FC Barcelona to Sir Bobby Robson and later Louis van Gaal – the same man his Inter side triumphed over at Madrid on May 22 – Mourinho came of age as manager of FC Porto where, in his second season in charge, he delivered UEFA Champions League title. It was the first time a Portuguese club will have its name on the trophy. He had also won the UEFA Cup as well as back-to-back domestic leagues and cup trophies.
While the world was still applauding, Mourinho developed hunger for achievements in a new environment, prompting a move away from FC Porto to Chelsea FC, which Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich had just acquired in July 2003 at age 36 with a desire for instant success. He was hungry for result with a club that had won the domestic league only once – in 1955. A season later and with the side still ending up as also-ran, Abramovich knocked on Mourinho’s door. Mourinho keyed into the opportunity that would help him reinvent his brand and opened a relationship that transformed the London club into a team where being No 2 in the domestic league is now a sin punishable by summary dismissal, as Mourinho’s successors, Avram Grant and Luis Scolari can testify. The club seems to have become accustomed with success, despite the fact that when Chelsea celebrated its centenary in 2005 as English Premier League champions, it was its second league title in 100 years and Mourinho’s first season at Stamford Bridge.
Mourinho’s first EPL title was won with the highest points total and best defensive record in English top-flight history at the time. And although the club lost the UEFA Champions League semi-final to domestic rivals Liverpool, Mourinho added the Carling Cup to the club’s trophy shelf in his very first season. Indeed but for 2009/2010 historic double – Premier League and FA Cup by Carlo Ancelotti – 2004/2005 would have been the club’s most successful season ever.
Never someone to sit on his laurels, Mourinho strengthened the team ahead of his second season acquiring Michael Essien – a big miss at the 2010 FIFA World Cup – from French side Lyon, among other quality purchases. Chelsea quickly achieved result, racing away with a Premier League record of nine straight wins at the start of the campaign. Mourinho closed that season with Chelsea becoming the first London club to win back-to-back EPL trophies since the 1930s.
But Mourinho’s third season was different from the frontrunner experience of the previous two. Injuries to key players plagued the side which stumbled through the Christmas fortnight, a decisive period in the previous back-to-back title wins. As the casualty list lengthened, Mourinho was forced to play what he described as “survival football.” That strategy failed to deliver the third successive domestic league title and the club finished No 2. Chelsea lifted the FA and Carling Cups. In only three seasons, Mourinho had led the club to the full stretch of the domestic trophies available but his stay at Chelsea had only a few months to run. Barely two months into 2007/2008 season, Mourinho departed Chelsea under what the club called “mutual consent”, a euphemism for conflict of interests between the club owner and the club manager.
Mourinho stayed out of football for the rest of the season and signed for Inter in June 2008. In his first season, the Nerazzurri retained the Serie A title, a feat they improved upon in 2009/10 when they also won the Coppa Italia and the UEFA Champions League, becoming the first Italian football club to attain such feat.
The son of a Portuguese goalkeeper, Mourinho has developed into an iconic football brand. During his unveiling as Chelsea manager in June 2004, he launched the Mourinho brand deploying a subtle strategy hinged on publicity. He understands that the English media thrive on showmanship and therefore announced: “Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.” The media took a cue from that statement and robed him in a garb that would now define the Mourinho phenomenon, “the Special One.”
Despite his huge achievement with Inter, Mourinho moved on from the club largely because he couldn’t get the Italian media to buy into his stunts. He had managed to get himself on the wrong side of the Italian press more than once in his first year and even refused to deal with them in his more successful season. Italian football expert Gabriele Marcotti once commented that the Inter boss "overdid it a bit in terms of focusing on results" in his first season in Serie A.
For a man with a CV that bursts at the seams, few would deny Mourinho can be an inspirational, astute and effervescent coach; even fewer that he is one of the game's winners. If it's not his brash approach in the media, it's the accusation that he values substance over style. Despite his admirable credential, some are less convinced Mourinho upholds the values of "the beautiful game" or that his media performances do not occasionally lean too far towards football's dark arts.
James Eze, communications manager with Fidelity Bank, is not a Mourinho disciple. He says Mourinho’s win is a loss to football as the game is not only about result. Here is his assessment of the UEFA Champions League final: “Inter is such a poor image of the game. Look at the way Bayern completely dominated the first half. Inter just sat back and does every dirty thing possible to frustrate them. It is so cowardly and annoying. Mourinho’s cowardly approach to the game is a dampener. Picture this: one long pass, a header, a pass and a goal. And that was after a long spell of hapless defending. I could never love Mourinho. Never! It doesn’t matter how many trophies he wins. It is hard to imagine that he was once in Camp Nou.” Eze’s harsh views might have been coloured by his being a fan of FC Barcelona, which lost to Mourinho’s Inter in the UEFA Champions League semi-final.
On the flip side, Demola Olusunmade, Chief Operation Officer of Capital Media, a leading media independent, sees Mourinho as a brand that has delivered on promise. “There’s only one lesson, one single one from brand Mourinho: Match your brand communications with value delivery. Your value proposition should not be empty. It should deliver very tangible offerings. Act what you say! Imagine Mourinho with the current showman’s ‘swagger’ having nothing to show for his talk. The Mourinho brand will be empty without the streak of winnings he’s been recording.”
For Taye Ige, sports marketing professional and CEO of Hotsports Network, brand Mourinho offers learning for an ambitious brand, having delivered European title for an unlikely club, FC Porto and setting Chelsea on the high. “An ambitious brand at the bottom of the ladder has a few learning from Mourinho's trajectory to the top,” Ige begins. “Its managers must decide from the onset the place of their brand in the market and how they hope to get it to the top: by just being one of the products in its category and therefore achieving nothing extraordinary at the end of the day or by ordinarily doing things in a special way (like the Special One) to achieve extraordinary results. To do ordinary things in a special way involves a lot of strategy and managers of a brand intending to stand out like a Mourinho must be well equipped both intellectually and in terms of experience to achieve.”
Ige further analysed: “Managers of brands must specially care for the image of their brand in the market place. And it is not just perception, it must be perception based on substance. Mourinho's managers took time to groom him. But he too has something to offer. So at some point, perception meets substance and a super brand is created. The truth is that to become outstanding in the marketplace, a brand must truly have something beneficial to offer potential consumers. If in addition, its managers are able to create a unique, favourable perception for it, then a super brand or market leader is created.”
Mourinho’s own record has now become the measuring stick against which he and other ambitious managers at club and national levels will henceforth be judged.
This article can be found in M2, June 14, 2010 edition on pages 9 & 10. M2 is Nigeria's only Marketing and Management weekly published since 2004 (first as Brand and Products magazine). Its print version reaches over 20,000 professionals in Nigeria, while the online edition is accessed via www.m2weekly.com
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