Spurs boss Mourinho says Arsene Wenger didn’t mention him in his book ‘because he never beat me’ 

Jose Mourinho says he ‘understands perfectly’ why his name does not appear in Arsene Wenger’s new book and that is because he often won when their teams met.

‘It’s because he never beat me,’ smiled Tottenham boss Mourinho, when asked why he didn’t feature in Wenger’s autobiography My Life in Red and White.

‘You are not going to do a chapter about 12 or 14 matches when you never win one. Why should he speak about me in his book?

Jose Mourinho has put the boot into former rival Arsene Wenger after being left out of his book

The Tottenham boss said he was not included because the Frenchman ‘never beat me’

‘A book is a thing to make you happy and make you proud so I understand perfectly the situation.’

The two successful managers shared an explosive and bitter rivalry, especially in the years when Mourinho first arrived at Chelsea in 2004.

Wenger’s Arsenal were the best team in the country, having just created history by winning the Premier League title without losing a single game.

Mourinho had a tense relationship with Wenger while manager of Chelsea and Man United 

Mourinho seized the title from them in his first season to make Chelsea champions for the first time in 50 years and made a habit of flinging insults across the capital city in the direction of Wenger as his team dominated for two years.

When he returned for a second spell at Stamford Bridge in 2013, he liked to remark how Wenger enjoyed the safest job in football, even though his team did not win trophies any more.

Mourinho dubbed him a ‘specialist in failure’ and his Chelsea team beat Arsenal 6-0 to wreck Wenger’s 1,000th match in charge of the club he served for 22 years.

The animosity thawed slightly in their later years.

Mourinho once called Wenger ‘a specialist in failure’ thanks to his superior record over him

Wenger left Arsenal in 2018 and is now employed by FIFA and has just released his first book.

While Mourinho enjoyed some dominant years against Wenger, with nine wins and seven draws, Wenger has in fact enjoyed two wins over him – once in 2015 as Arsenal beat Chelsea in the Community Shield.  

He then secured his first competitive victory against a Mourinho side as he beat Mourinho’s Manchester United 2-0 at the Emirates in 2017, ending a 13-year wait.

Wenger finally ended his hoodoo over Mourinho by beating his Man United side 2-0 in 2017

Mourinho was not Wenger’s only Premier League nemesis as he revealed on Friday that his tense exchanges with ex-United boss Sir Alex Ferguson ‘turned him into a monster’.

Speaking on The Graham Norton Show, to be aired on BBC One on Friday night, he said: ‘He was my biggest rival for 10 years. Competition is real – it’s you or me.

‘Pain hurts and the biggest pain is to lose a football game. I was physically sick when I lost. When I was a young manager, I thought I would not survive in the job because the tension is so high and the pain so big when you lose. 

‘It was painful to look back and realise what a monster I was and how selfish I was because I lived my football with 100 per cent intensity.’