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Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger square up again on Sunday for the 19th — and perhaps the final — time.
It is not the final showdown either would have wanted. This was the rivalry that, for a brief period after Mourinho’s arrival in England, defined the Premier League. Sunday’s meeting, though, lacks much meaning — second against sixth, with nothing much to play for on either side.
“If he respects me even 50 percent of what I respect him, we can even be friends in the future,” Mourinho said after Wenger had announced last week that he will leave Arsenal at the end of the season. “I have lots of respect for him, but the reality is that he was at Arsenal, he was the champion, and I came to the country in 2004 and wanted to steal his title. That’s football.”
And Wenger was successful. In 2003-04, Arsenal won the league unbeaten, the only crack in their supremacy coming from a loss to Claudio Ranieri’s Chelsea in the quarterfinal of the Champions League.
Arsenal, recognizing the financial might of Manchester United and the need for a bigger stadium to generate revenue, had begun their move to the Emirates, only for Roma Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea to render the old financial model redundant. That crack, with Mourinho’s help, soon became a fissure and Arsenal have not won the league since.
If Mourinho really does respect Wenger, he has a strange way of showing it. The rival managers’ early years were marked by constant attacks on each other. The line as to what is acceptable in such exchanges is always subjective, but as is so often the case, Mourinho seemed frequently to be on the wrong side of it.
In 2005, after Wenger had obliquely criticized Chelsea’s style of play, saying, “I know we live in a world where we have only winners and losers, but once a sport encourages teams who refuse to take the initiative, the sport is in danger,” Mourinho responded by calling him “a voyeur… He is someone who likes to watch other people. There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families. Wenger must be one of them — it is a sickness. He speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea.”
Wenger responded by saying Mourinho was “disconnected with reality and disrespectful. When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.”
And so it went on, reaching a peak after Mourinho’s return to the Premier League. In February 2014, Wenger wondered aloud why so many challengers for the title were downplaying their chances. “It is fear to fail,” he said.
“Am I afraid of failure?” Mourinho asked. “He is a specialist in failure.”
Finally, in October 2104, the verbal spats spilled over into a physical confrontation, with Wenger shoving Mourinho on the touchline. Asked afterwards if he felt sorry for his action, the Arsenal boss was typically wry. “What is there to regret?” he said, his disdain for Mourinho clear.
What made it worse for Wenger, was that he seemed unable to beat Mourinho. His 1,000th game in charge, at Stamford Bridge, should have been a celebration, but ended in a 6-0 defeat. Not until August 2015 did Wenger get the better of Mourinho, and even then it was only in the Community Shield, a success overshadowed by the psychodrama of the beginning of the end of Mourinho’s reign at Chelsea. He beat him again last season, Arsenal overcoming Manchester United 2-0 at the Emirates, but by that stage of the season, Mourinho was firmly focused on the Europa League.
This time it is Wenger who has a European semifinal on his mind, and the chances are that he will rest several players at Old Trafford, a ground on which he has suffered two of his most humbling defeats as Arsenal coach. Mourinho, perhaps, will want to wish his great rival farewell with another thrashing.
But, really, the fascination of Sunday is how little it matters, with two giants, both diminished in status, seeking to rekindle some of the old hostility. Mourinho still clings on at the highest level, but the truth is that Wenger long ago fell behind.