How does Mourinho stop himself from falling out with Bale?

You may well be reading the title of this article and suddenly feel that you have missed rumours of a training ground bust-up between Jose Mourinho and Gareth Bale. You haven’t, nor is there anything to currently indicate that the Portuguese tactician and Welsh winger aren’t getting along at the moment.

Only, history suggests that it is only a matter of time before this happens given that Mourinho always falls out with his best players. 

On this occasion, however, he doesn’t have the luxury of imposing himself on Bale or the leeway to ask the on loan galactico to rein his attacking nature in as Spurs are desperate for Champions League football, and will only get that with a changing room that is in harmony with one another. Furthermore, if the Premier League odds on Betfair Exchange are anything to go by, Champions League qualification is far from guaranteed with Mourinho’s men at uncertain odds of 15/8 to get in the top four.

Indeed, the 57-year-old will need to keep Bale on his side if Spurs are to return to Europe’s top table but this is Mourinho we’re talking about, there are no sacred cows, even if the greater good depends on there being so.

Everywhere the Portuguese manager has gone he has ended up locking horns with his team’s most talented players. The list is long and makes for impressive reading, there was Mario Balotelli at Inter Milan, Ronaldo and Iker Casillas at Real Madrid, Paul Pogba, Luke Shaw, and Anthony Martial at Manchester United, as well as Kevin De Bruyne and Samuel Eto’o at Chelsea. You could almost make a formidable world XI out of the players that Mourinho has fallen out with over the years. 

Now it would be remiss and ultimately unfair not to point out that there probably isn’t a manager in the world that hasn’t fallen out with Balotelli. Indeed, the Italian forward appears to adopt the same method of conflict management as Mourinho; unwilling to compromise after he feels slighted and therefore prone to bust-ups soon after. 

Of course, it can’t be easy managing young multi-millionaires who hear the word no or any sort of rebuking very little outside of the confines of a club’s training ground. But then again, it can’t always be easy working under an uncompromising manager who has ended up winning trophies wherever he has gone. In Mourinho’s case and thanks to Amazon’s All or Nothing documentary, we’re able to deduce that his relationships become strained when he decides a player is not training to the standards expected of him.

That’s perfectly reasonable and you would expect most managers around the world to take issue with that. The added needle comes when Mourinho perceives it as an attack on himself and his career. When you have an ego the size of the 57-year-old’s, it’s hard not to take everything personally so from there, he slowly begins to freeze the player out by making them train away from the first team in order to make sure that their insubordination doesn’t spread to the rest of the group. In addition, Mourinho’s rhetoric in his press conferences will often only make the situation worse as he publicly questions the player’s commitment, causing the fans to turn on the outcast.

Some managers may then offer olive branches for the good of the club’s on-field results having made an example of the player, but once a relationship fractures with Mourinho, there is seemingly no way back, something that Dele Alli is currently finding out. So with everything we know: will Bale end up training with the U-23s at some point during his loan before going back to the Bernabeu?

Let’s finish off by looking at an interview that Bale did with Geoff Shreeves after he signed for Spurs in September to see if we can find some type of an answer to that.

It was during the end of this one-on-one when Shreeves asked whether the Welshman had any regrets about anything he did or said in Spain during his time at Real Madrid? ‘None’ was the answer. The truth is there was a long list of misguided indiscretions, holding up a flag that said golf was a bigger priority than Madrid, appearing to sleep on the substitutes bench and perhaps most harshly, not immersing himself in the culture by learning Spanish. 

Irrespective of where you find yourself in the debate over the 31-year-old’s Madrid antics, it’s clear to see that despite his reserved nature, Bale is a man that lives life his way and makes no apologies for it. 

You’d have to say that both Mourinho and Bale are on an inevitable collision course.