José Mourinho fights the bad fight, but ends up on the losing side

J osé Mourinho, perhaps, is a pleasure better remembered than experienced. We chuckled at him wearing a wire, at him laying into Daniel Levy with the scorn that only he can muster, progressing through a semi-final with an xG of 0.03. Classic José, we said with a smile. Still fighting the bad fight. Still harrumphing and provoking and spoiling. And then you actually watch his Roma play – and, as it turned out, lose. And that is dreadful.

For Roma, no doubt, the ends would have justified the means. Had they won, this would have been their greatest international success and that would have been all that mattered, all that they remembered. Mourinho, after all, is adored by Roma fans to a degree that is disconcerting to those who witnessed his final season at Real Madrid or anything in England after he had won the league with Chelsea in 2015.

Grouchiness, not even Mourinho-level high-grade grouchiness, is not enough to stop Sevilla in this competition: since 2006 they have been in seven finals and won them all. Perhaps Europa League Sevilla are simply a force that cannot be halted, but it’s hard not to think that Roma might have had a better chance by playing football than whatever it was to which they brought the game down.

Mourinho wasn’t the first manager to regard the press conference as a field of battle. He wasn’t the first to insist that black was white, to pick fights for some nefarious grander purpose, to cry conspiracy at every setback. It wasn’t he alone who poisoned the discourse, who ensured the vast majority of social media interactions about football would be infected by a one-eyed tribalism. But he certainly didn’t help.

He is a nihilist. Nothing matters for Mourinho but winning, not the game, not the