In soccer, coaches come and go. Some will do well and others will fail. And some who have done spectacularly well in one place will fail just as spectacularly in others. This makes it all the harder to say which coaches are good at their job.
And this is true for all sports.
In statistics-nutty baseball, for example, research has concluded that managers influence the outcome of slightly more than 1 percent of games with their decisions. And these managers -- through things such as pitching changes and pinch hitters -- play a bigger role than soccer managers do. Much of what is accredited to a manager, therefore, is down to either luck or things beyond their control.
But during Inter's 7-3 aggregate battering at the hands of Schalke 04 in the Champions League quarterfinals, which wrapped up its second leg on Wednesday, we did get that rare kernel of tangible proof of one coach's superior ability. And the proof, curiously, lay in Inter's dismantling.
Last year, Inter won the Champions League title, even outmaneuvering a seemingly unbeatable Barcelona in the semifinals. This year, the squad is virtually the same, with very little turnover other than Mario Balotelli's departure and the addition of a handful of players for depth. Yet whereas the 2009-10 Inter brand of soccer was defined by control and confidence, this year's version of it seems no better than a cheap knockoff that has stumbled frequently, and, especially on Wednesday, has fallen hard.
There was one notable difference, though: Jose Mourinho, Inter's coach in 2009-10, was no longer there.
Under Mourinho's replacements -- Rafa Benitez and, after his firing, Leonardo -- Inter has not looked like treble-winning world beaters but chronic underperformers. But when these two men fielded more or less the exact same players Mourinho did, in the same formation and with the same tactical instructions, they have fallen flat.
So what makes Mourinho, whose Real Madrid strolled into the Champions League semifinals on the same day, different? What makes this manager a certifiably great one? Sorry, make that Special One.
While the game has gotten increasingly complex over the past couple of decades, Mourinho's model seems to suggest that the success of the manager still comes down to a few painfully simple factors:
1. Do your players like you?
If appearances don't deceive, Mourinho has been wildly popular with his players no matter where he has managed. Inter playmaker Wesley Sneijder tellingly used his moment in the sun, when he was being named one of the world's 11 best players for the 2009-10 season during the FIFA Ballon d'Or award show this past January, to announce that Mourinho was the best coach in the world, visibly moving the silvery-haired Portuguese to tears. This devotion has always produced teams that, over the long span of a season, fight harder and want it more than their opponents.
2. Do your players like each other?
Soccer author Simon Kuper has written that Dutch coach Guus Hiddink, who masterminded South Korea's improbable run to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup, has a finely tuned ability to allow for male bonding and foster brotherhood among men. Mourinho has this people skill, too. He knows how to bring a group of strange, spoiled and touchy men together and get them to respect and defer to each other, yielding a harmonious collective.
3. Do you look the part?
Dutch national team manager Bert van Marwijk once said it's impossible to command the respect of a locker room if you don't dress well, if your sense of style leaves you open to ridicule. This sounds silly, but it proved very true for van Marwijk's successor at Feyenoord, Gertjan Verbeek, whose peasant-like clothing -- he worked on his own farm in his spare time -- and uncool demeanor caused him to be mocked. He was out of the club in a matter of months. Mourinho, to put it mildly, isn't prone to being accused of not being in touch with his inner fashionista.
This all suggests that the manager's job is less complicated than is assumed, at least in soccer. The effect of tactical acumen appears overblown, since many managers have been successful without seeming to have any grasp of the game's finer points. The manager's calling is straightforward -- keep your players motivated, happy and without reason to deride you, the way Mourinho does.
But achieving all this can't possibly be as simple as it sounds, for there is only one Jose Mourinho. And he isn't with Inter anymore.