A celebration of Jose Mourinho’s remarkable achievements at Porto

Jose Mourinho is now one of the world’s best-known managers, having taken charge of some of the world’s biggest football clubs – but back in 2004 he shocked all of Europe with Porto.

What does a great manager do? Ideally, they take a group of players and make them greater than the sum of their parts. Perhaps never in the history of the game has a manager done that so well as Mourinho did in such a short time at Porto.

What is remarkable about that Porto team is how unremarkable it was. This was not a side that had been built up over many years: seven of the team that started the final against Monaco had been at the club for two years or less.

Nor was it a side of youngsters who would stay as a unit for years to come. The average age of that starting eleven was 27.7, and besides goalkeeper Vitor Baia, not a single one of them remained at the club beyond the summer of 2005.

Neither was it a group of wonderful individuals who, through either happenstance or great scouting, found themselves in the same place at the same time. Only the post-Porto careers of Paulo Ferreira, Ricardo Carvalho and Deco can be described as unqualified successes.

Even accounting for the presence of those three, this was not a side that screamed ‘Champions League winners’, as the post-Mourinho careers of the rest of that starting eleven attests.

Three (Costinha, Maniche and Derlei) went to Dynamo Moscow for unremarkable spells in 2005; Carlos Alberto went back to Brazil after just a year at the club and spent most of the rest of his career out on loan; Jorge Costa closed out his career with Standard Liege; and Baia was gradually phased out of the side before retiring in 2007.

Two of the players tried their hand in England to mixed results. Nuno