Former Manchester United manager José Mourinho has bemoaned the level of support he was offered during his time at the club, saying that results could have been better had he been afforded the trust and support that Erik ten Hag has enjoyed.
Mourinho coached United from 2016 to 2018, winning a Europa League and Carabao Cup in that time, but was sacked with his team 11 points adrift of the Champions League places in December 2018. He told The Telegraph that his rapport with then chief executive Ed Woodward made achieving results more challenging.
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"My relationship with [former chief executive] Ed Woodward was good. Good as in the personal point of view," Mourinho said. "Even now we send an SMS. But from a professional point of view it was not the best. I am who I am. I am a football man. Ed comes from a different background and what Ten Hag has in his time at Manchester United I didn't have.
"I didn't have that level of support. I didn't have that level of trust. So I left sad, because I felt I was in the beginning of the process. In some moments, I felt if they trusted me and believed in my experience things could be different."
Mourinho added that there are members of United's squad now that he wanted to get rid of during his tenure owing to their lack of professionalism.
"There are still a couple of players still there I didn't want five or six years ago," he said. "I think they represent a little bit what I consider not the best professional profile to a club of a certain dimension. But I did my job there. Time always tells the truth. I would love Manchester United to succeed."
Mourinho's time at United was punctuated by fallouts with senior players, including Paul Pogba and Bastian Schweinsteiger, who said last week that the Portuguese manager exiled him from the dressing room without cause.
Asked by The Telegraph about Pogba's four-year suspension for a doping offence, Mourinho expressed his sympathy for the 2018 World Cup winner's situation.
"I am not enjoying Paul's situation at all," he said. "The only thing I say is that it happens with almost everybody in some moments of your career: you lose a little bit the sense of who you are and what you have to be.
"The season after France won the World Cup, I think Paul came back different. The World Cup brought him into a dimension where football was not the most important thing for him."
Ten Hag's future at United remains up in the air following Jim Ratcliffe's investment in the club and subsequent revamp. They reached the FA Cup final for a second successive season on Sunday, requiring penalties to overcome Coventry City despite having led 3-0 against the lower-tier opposition.