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Adapt or Fail for José Mourinho as Manchester United Coach

2016; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Alain Ndedi,

Sports and Physical Education Research

Some newspapers called his appointment at Manchester United coach as special, reference to his self-styled named Special One. Jose Mourinho is taking over from Louis van Gaal as the new manager of the English Premier League side Manchester United Football Club. The ‘Special One’ has been hired for trophy hunt, as he has been charged with restoring United to its former glories, with the club having struggled for success since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013. Mourinho is known for his winning mentality, with an impressive CV, having won two European Champions Leagues as well as league titles at Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid. The Portuguese will be desperate to make an impact at United after being sacked by Chelsea in December 2015 following a disastrous start. And this sacking followed previous sackings at Chelsea and Real Madrid with the Portuguese coach being accused of lacking to deal with the unpredictability that exists in Football. Therefore, one thing that the 53 year old coach needs to work on is adaptability. Adaptability is the ability to change something or oneself to fit to occurring changes. With adaptability, the system is open to new ideas, new ways to conducting the business, new managerial styles. With adaptability, comes an open system that is able to fit its behaviour according to changes in its environment or in parts of the system itself. Adaptability shows the ability to learn from experience, bad or good, and improves the fitness of the learner as a competitor.This paper focuses on the term adaptability, and show how like in business, it can be applied to Jose Mourinho new style of managing players and team in order for him to deal with the unpredictability that exists in football. Failure will be the result of lack of adaptability of Jose Mourinho.