Manchester United: 5 mistakes Jose Mourinho has made already

4. Setting the tone – badly

As the manager of your club, it’s up to you to set the tone for everybody else to follow. You are the leader. As goes you, so, too, does everybody else. So when Mourinho humiliated Juan Mata by bringing him on as a substitute in the Community Shield win over Leicester City, before then dragging him back off again, he set a bad precedent.

Players don’t like that. To fans, it’s neither here nor there. Do whatever you need to. But players find it, pretty much, the ultimate humiliation. Something a manager should never do unless extreme circumstances. This was certainly not that.

Mourinho needs the players on side. Player power is very real in 2016 and managers live and die by their charges actions. Just look at Mourinho at Chelsea last season. You have to maintain control without upsetting the squad, and this move with Mata was not the best way to do that.

Of course you don’t hear anything of it at the time – the team won. But you lose a few games and, all of sudden, players start showing their displeasure at your methods.

Another example came just this week. Mourinho said before United’s Europa League game with Feyenoord that United needed to ”find the motivation,” because the Europa League is not the ”big dream of every player.”

That went down well, didn’t it? United labored to a 1-0 defeat the following night. Another example of how not, as the leader of the club, to set the tone for everybody else to follow. Everybody is following, alright. That’s the problem.

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