Jose Mourinho defends Chelsea's revolving door business

With Kevin De Bruyne set to enhance Manchester City’s forward line, there’s also an interesting line to be drawn from the Belgian attacker’s departure from Chelsea through to the present: Jose Mourinho initially sold De Bruyne to sign Mohamed Salah and complement Andre Schurrle, and then sold Schurrle and loaned out Salah to sign Juan Cuadrado.

Now, the likelihood is that Cuadrado will be moved on, as Pedro has been brought in to keep up with a City side that thrashed Chelsea 3-0 last week.

It doesn’t look like the best business from that perspective. Yet Mourinho insisted these moves do not represent mistakes in the transfer market — and that the initial De Bruyne decision was correct due to his situation when he was at Stamford Bridge.

“If you think it’s my mistake that Eden Hazard is worth more than £100m, then everything is my mistake. What I cannot do is bring us up to a certain level and then not play him. If I don’t play Hazard and play De Bruyne or Schurrle, for sure they would have been playing for Chelsea, but Hazard wouldn’t. This is the situation we have.”

The situation is that Chelsea have struggled to successfully integrate a series of alternative forward options, with something stale hanging over their attack. Why?

“You know, many factors, many reasons. The players in front of them are not easy to replace. To arrive and have an immediate impact is not easy too. To come from different football cultures is not easy too. Their own philosophy and mentality, it’s hard for them to come from clubs where they are first names and to come and fight for a position, is not easy. So, an accumulation of factors sometimes makes it difficult.

“Many times, you have to sell, even if you don’t want to, because the players get into a certain dynamic where they are not happy to stay. The same for De Bruyne. If you have a player knocking on your door and crying every day he wants to leave, you have to make a decision.

“At that time, Chelsea did well. If De Bruyne stayed here, not happy and not motivated, and we’d sold him after a year, we’d have got less... so we sold him. At that moment, it’s very good business.

“Compare with today... it looks from the eyes of the world that it’s bad business from us. But, if he was at Chelsea and not at Wolfsburg, he wouldn’t have reached this level. It was like a wall, a block. He was not ready to compete. He was an upset kid, training very bad. He always said he had trained well in his life, but he needs motivation to train well by playing every game. Schurrle a bit the same.”

The question is whether Pedro will be different, if he will finally offer Chelsea that different option. The signing does does have another telling dimension to it: it represents yet another occasion when Mourinho has done business with Barcelona and persuaded one of their players to join him, despite his infamous hostility towards the club — and individuals like Pedro — when manager of Real Madrid between 2010 and 2013. The Portuguese downplayed that factor, while admitting he and the winger had “insulted” each other in the past.

“It was not hostility between 1996 and 2000 when I worked there. I loved it there. I had four fantastic years of my career and my life in Barcelona. Then I came to Chelsea, played against them six times. I played them four times at Inter. I played them in the cup final, the Super Cup, the championship, the Champions League at Real. It’s the club that crosses my career so many times.

“Maybe I insulted him or he insulted me. But, for football people, that’s not a problem. It’s a problem for non-football people. In football, people forget. Of course.”

Now, he wants to forget the feeling of defeat from the start of the season.

“I’m not happy with my form. Because I used to get better results than I’m getting now. This is the start of everything.”