"He phoned me and he was crying." That's Sir Alex Ferguson, describing the night José Mourinho backed out of succeeding him as Manchester United manager in 2013. Not exactly the story United fans have been living with for the past decade.
Mourinho has revealed in the new Netflix docuseries about his life and career that he had verbally agreed to take the Old Trafford job after leaving Real Madrid, only to reverse course and return to Chelsea instead. Ferguson confirms it. The bombshell isn't that Mourinho wanted United — it's that he had already said yes.
"When I left Real Madrid, I signed to go to Manchester United after Sir Alex," Mourinho says in the series. Ferguson corroborates that version of events: "As far as I was concerned, he was accepting. And then, within hours, it changed."
A phone call that reshaped a decade of English football
What changed was sentiment. Mourinho's final season at Madrid in 2012-13 ended without a trophy, consumed by feuds with players, staff and the press. He was bruised, and Chelsea — where he'd already won two league titles — represented something Madrid hadn't given him: warmth.
"After Real Madrid, I needed to feel that I'm loved," he said. "One thing is love for football, another thing is love for a certain club. I think this is more powerful."
That's not an excuse. It's actually an honest explanation from a manager whose emotional state going into a job has always determined how it ends. A depleted Mourinho arriving at United in 2013, still raw from Spain, might not have been the silver bullet the narrative now implies.
David Moyes got the job instead — handpicked by Ferguson, sacked in less than a season, forever tagged "The Chosen One" in a way that stopped being ironic very quickly. The subsequent chaos: Louis van Gaal, then Mourinho himself from 2016 to 2018, then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, then Ralf Rangnick, then Erik ten Hag. United's post-Ferguson era has been one long, expensive audition with no satisfactory ending.
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He did take charge at Old Trafford in 2016, winning the League Cup and Europa League in his first season. But the Premier League title never came, his relationship with Paul Pogba deteriorated publicly, and he was gone by December 2018. The version of Mourinho who arrived in 2016 was already a different manager to the one who might have walked in off the back of his Madrid exit.
Whether a 2013 Mourinho at United changes anything is genuinely unknowable. What we do know is that the man Ferguson wanted — his actual first choice — turned him down to go back to London. And Ferguson understood the reason, even if he was "disappointed."
"For me to lose the chance to be the coach to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson was dramatic," Mourinho admitted. "But I don't regret it because it was a decision that I made with my heart."
Mourinho has since returned to Real Madrid this summer, re-appointed by Florentino Pérez thirteen years after his first spell ended. United, meanwhile, are still searching for someone to finally close the Ferguson chapter properly.
