EPL News

So in an effort to do two important things, namely to stimulate a bit more interest in the blog AND deliver timely news about the greatest football league in the world that unfortunately gets so little coverage (or maybe even none whatsoever) in areas where most of the family lives, I’m going to try a bi-monthly English Premier League report for all the footie fans in the family.

The biggest news this past week was that Chelsea Manager Jose Mourinho has agreed to part ways with the club, apparently by “mutual consent.”

As always, the press had about a hundred different explanations for this kind of breaking news, but the announcement was particularly shocking given Mourinho’s success with the club since he joined in 2004, including two league titles in the first two seasons and an FA cup win last season.

I think some of the main reasons though are that Mourinho has been in disagreement with (corrupt) Russian owner and oligarch Roman Abramovich since the lack of funds to sign new players during last January's transfer window. Others think further disagreement occurred when Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko were brought in at the beginning of the season, reportedly against Mourinho's wishes and one other comment from a former Chelsea player was that "He's a very individual man and he thinks he should be the power at the club." So even though there were other rumours that some of the players on the team betrayed him, I think no matter how you look at this situation, this quote was interesting and maybe not far off the mark:

"If you put someone of that ego, and I say that in a likeable way, in charge and then you tell him you're not quite in charge, then I think it was a recipe for disaster."

Although I’m not a Chelsea fan (I think how can anyone support a club that has been funded primarily from dirty Russian oil money??) and think Mourinho did have a huge ego, I sometimes couldn’t help but admire him for how good he was as a manager and also was intrigued by how intense he sometimes became during some of the games, including some of his celebrations after Chelsea goals. He will probably be missed in the EPL, but then again there are already rumours that he might join another club so we’ll see what happens.