Mourinho has lost a lot of his luster in recent years thanks to some notably difficult spells at clubs in England, Italy and Turkey, but he\'s back at Benfica hoping to turn back the clock and prove his critics wrong.

The stock explanation from Mourinho\'s haters is that he\'s a dinosaur whom the game has passed by and whose antics -- from hiding in a laundry basket to sneak into a game for which he was suspended, to reminding a proud footballing nation like Turkey that he \"reached more European finals in the previous seven years than the entire country in its entire history\" -- have grown stale. He doesn\'t intimidate, he doesn\'t manipulate, he plays to his own crowd. Like confronting English referee Anthony Taylor in a car park after losing the Europa League final with Roma on penalties, or talking about how the Turkish league \"smells bad.\"  Playing the victim of conspiracies -- whether driven by referees or clubs who don\'t acquire the players you want -- can win you credibility among supporters for a while, but the \"us vs. the world\" schtick wears thin pretty quickly.  We marveled at how Mourinho used his \"dark energy\" to get an edge in a world of marginal gains when he was dominating at Porto, Inter, Chelsea (the first time anyway) and Real Madrid (for a while). But maybe we were the suckers all along. It wasn\'t his Machiavellian \"by any means necessary\" routine that made those clubs great -- it was the fact that he had excellent players, and he coached them very well. Once he got stuck with worse players at more dysfunctional clubs, the siege mentality didn\'t really move the needle much, despite being really entertaining in a WWE kayfabe sort of way. At least not when it comes to week-in, week-out consistency of the sort needed to do well in league settings.