The Mourinho Missed Opportunity for Manchester United
There is a moment, buried in Manchester United’s recent history, that still haunts people inside the club.
Not a missed chance. Not a lost final.
A phone call.
The night Mourinho said no
In 2013, as Sir Alex Ferguson prepared to walk away from Old Trafford, United believed they had done the hard part. They had found the only man with the ego, the edge and the armour to step into the most intimidating job in English football.
Jose Mourinho.
For weeks, United had worked on it. Quietly. Delicately. Meetings in Madrid. Meetings in London. Ferguson, who admired Mourinho and enjoyed his company, stunned the Portuguese coach by telling him he would retire at the end of the 2012-13 season.
The message was clear: this is your time.
Talks quickly moved from possibility to practicality. Terms. Structure. Control. One source describes the eventual reversal as happening in “days”. Another insists the courtship ran for weeks. Both agree on the direction of travel: Mourinho to Old Trafford felt not just likely, but inevitable.
Then the phone rang.
“One night, he phoned me and he was crying and he says: ‘Alex, I can't take it. I've given my word to Chelsea and I'm not going to break my word’,” Ferguson recalls in a new Netflix documentary charting Mourinho’s career, released on 11 August.
In that moment, the future of Manchester United swung on emotion, loyalty and a promise already made.
Family, Abramovich and a London pull
Mourinho’s explanation was familiar. Family. London. A life already rooted in the capital since his first spell at Chelsea. He had been sacked by the club in 2007 but had vowed to return. He kept a family home there. His relationship with Roman Abramovich, while complex, remained strong enough to draw him back to Stamford Bridge.
Inside United, some still question whether family was the whole story. What is not in doubt is that, for a brief period, they believed they had their man. They believed they had the only manager big enough to carry the weight of what was coming.
Because this was not just about replacing Ferguson. It was about replacing Ferguson and David Gill in the same summer.
Gill, the chief executive, had been central to the way United operated. Ferguson was a one-man structure, controlling almost everything from a football perspective. With both men leaving, senior figures at the club knew they had to redesign how United worked while still competing for titles.
They wanted someone with broad shoulders and a hard edge to take that on. Mourinho fit the description.
Until he didn’t.
From Mourinho to Moyes
With Mourinho gone and Pep Guardiola already locked in at Bayern Munich, United pivoted. Quickly, and decisively, but not convincingly.
They chose David Moyes.
Moyes had Ferguson’s respect and shared some of his traits: work ethic, intensity, a belief in discipline and structure. But he had never operated at the sharpest end of the European game. At Everton, he had overachieved. At United, he was asked to inherit an empire.
United unveiled him as “The Chosen One”.
He just wasn’t.
The contrast is still jarring when you speak to people who lived that summer. Under Moyes, the transfer market became a place of hesitation and missed chances. Thiago Alcantara, whose move from Barcelona had been agreed in principle, slipped away. Marouane Fellaini arrived from Everton for £27.5m on deadline day, after United had failed to trigger a cheaper release clause earlier in the window.
Those close to the 2013 talks insist on one point: Fellaini would not have been a Mourinho signing. Thiago would have been.
Mourinho had already given United his views on potential targets, including Italy midfielder Daniele de Rossi. There was no sense he would have tiptoed into the job. He would have demanded, pushed, fought. That was the attraction.
Instead, United stumbled. Ferguson’s final title-winning side, a group widely accepted to have overperformed under him, collapsed to seventh. Even the players have struggled to explain how dramatic the drop-off became.
Many inside the club still believe Mourinho’s presence would have squeezed more out of that squad. He would have driven them, challenged them, confronted them. The feeling lingers: they would not have fallen so far, so fast.
Mourinho arrives late – to a different United
He did eventually walk through the doors at Carrington. Three years late.
In 2016, Mourinho replaced Louis van Gaal, who was sacked 48 hours after winning the FA Cup against Crystal Palace. By then, though, everything had shifted.
The dressing room was no longer Ferguson’s. Of the 18 players who had started 10 or more Premier League games in the 2012-13 title season, only six did the same in Mourinho’s first year: David de Gea, Phil Jones, Wayne Rooney, Chris Smalling, Michael Carrick and Antonio Valencia.
The club had changed. So had Mourinho.
He had returned to Chelsea and won another Premier League title, only to depart in December 2015 with the champions languishing in 16th place, one point above the relegation zone. The edge was still there, but the warmth had thinned. The volatility had grown.
At United, his record still splits opinion.
On one hand, he delivered the Europa League and the EFL Cup in his first season, and qualified for the Champions League twice. He calls his second-place finish in 2017-18 – 19 points behind Manchester City – one of the “best achievements” of his career. The 81 points United collected that year remain, by some distance, their highest total in the post-Ferguson Premier League era.
On paper, that looks like success.
On the ground, it felt more complicated. Mourinho clashed with players, most notably record signing Paul Pogba. He publicly questioned the club’s ambition and accused the hierarchy of failing to back him over Anthony Martial, a striker he wanted to sell. The atmosphere grew sour. The football grew heavy.
When he left, he left noise and fracture behind.
The great what if
So the argument rumbles on.
Was Mourinho at United a major success who dragged a drifting club back towards respectability? Or a combustible short-term fix who never delivered the title challenge his name promised and left the place in pieces?
Inside Old Trafford, another view has hardened over time: that the real missed opportunity was not what Mourinho did in 2016, but what he might have done in 2013.
Had he walked straight into Ferguson’s office, with that squad still intact and the authority of being the immediate successor, the story might have been very different. He would have believed he could improve on Ferguson. He would have behaved like it.
The transfer market would not have been a place of delay and doubt. The dressing room would have felt the full weight of his personality at a moment when it needed a new force to replace the old one.
Instead, United watched as their chosen heir rang Ferguson in tears and walked back to Chelsea.
In the documentary, Ferguson recalls that conversation with clarity and feeling. Mourinho’s voice. The emotion. The refusal to break his word.
For Manchester United, it was a sliding-doors moment that still shapes how their last decade is remembered.
And, some at the club quietly wonder, how long it will be before they truly step through the right door again.
