How Jose Mourinho forged Brendan Rodgers into a manager in three years at Chelsea
Ask Brendan Rodgers about his three years under Jose Mourinho at Chelsea and he will liken it to being at Harvard University. He was the student, the Portuguese his meticulous professor.
In 2004, Mourinho was new in the job and on the lookout for an ally who could handle the academy. Steve Clarke, then a respected coach at Chelsea, had a suggestion.
Clarke mentioned an up-and-comer at Reading called Brendan Rodgers, who had spent time studying the game in Spain and Holland and trod a fine line between confidence and cockiness.
Brendan Rodgers (right) spent three years working under Jose Mourinho (centre) at Chelsea
Rodgers is now a master tactician in his own right, and is in charge of third-placed Leicester
An interview was arranged. Mourinho admired how Rodgers, like himself, had not had a noteworthy playing career and he took to his ‘nothing’s gonna stop me’ desire to reach the top.
It was only later that the Northern Irishman, then 32 years old, admitted he was a bag of nerves at that meeting after studying his potential new boss’s exploits at Porto so closely.
But Rodgers got the job and got to work, initially as a youth-team coach – in which he was told to use 4-3-3 – before later being promoted to manager of the reserves.
The keen learner, who would occasionally stand at the back of press conferences and study how Mourinho handled the media, brought with him a few outside-of-the-box ideas.
If a player was left out of a squad, for example, he might lift spirits by pulling together a video package to remind him of how good he is. Even John Terry experienced this.
So Rodgers was not your typical British coach – he would spend time speaking to players about their former clubs in a bid to learn what other tacticians were teaching around Europe.
Mourinho is now at Tottenham, but Rodgers learned a lot from him during their time at Chelsea
He already spoke Spanish, too, despite having never lived there – Rodgers received lessons twice a week from a tutor called Julio Delgado, the father of the British tennis player Jamie.
He encouraged Chelsea’s kids to follow his lead and learn other languages on the side, explaining how it would boost their future career options (Rodgers still wants to manage abroad someday).
One additional anecdote worth mentioning comes from 2005, when Rodgers turned up at the training ground on his birthday and in the canteen was a rather large cake.
He figured it was for him, not realising he and Mourinho shared the same birthday – both born on the 26th of January, 10 years apart. No harm done.
One former employee who worked at the training ground told Sportsmail how Rodgers would never hide his determination to make it to the top – to be a manager by age 38.
Rodgers (background) watches Mourinho from the bench during his formative years in London
He was 35 when he got the Watford gig, taking Frank Lampard Snr there with him as an adviser.
All this brings us to Saturday lunchtime, when Rodgers’ Leicester face Frank Lampard Jnr’s Chelsea in a battle between the Premier League’s third and fourth at the King Power Stadium.
To this day, Rodgers still applies the same methods he learned in his first few months at Chelsea.
One of those is to do with proper preparation for training sessions. Don’t rock up pretending you know what you’re doing – prove you do by providing your players with detailed diagrams and data.
This will not be something cobbled together on Paint. This will be a detailed collaboration, with a different daily theme. Buzzwords like ‘organisation’ sound boring, but for Rodgers they are key.
Rodgers watches his Leicester players in training this week, ahead of a big clash with Chelsea
There was always a determination to ensure his players left feeling they had learned something new, like how to starve an opponent of the ball or the proper way to press.
After being promoted to boss of the reserves in 2006, a further invitation to join the first-team staff followed. He declined, apparently preferring to call the shots in training himself.
This commander of tiny details promised Mourinho in their initial meeting 16 years ago he was a go-getter and it would be hard to argue against that. Rodgers has previously spoken fondly about his father being a nice man, but perhaps too nice for his own good.
‘I always thought that if I was going to be successful, I was going to have to go and get it myself,’ he said. ‘I was determined that whatever happened in my life, I was going to create it.’
His four-year education at Chelsea was his first step on that path towards elite management. Now he faces his alma mater, a student-turned-master in the Premier League.
