I watched the whole press conference yesterday in a state of awed disbelief.
When I started supporting the club, in the Bobby Campbell, Dave Webb and Ian Porterfield days, managerial comings and goings were documented by a grainy small picture if you were lucky three pages from the back in the papers. There was not even a mention of a first press conference. For a young boy sat at home desperate for news in a age far removed from the internet or anything similar, the papers and ubiquitous Teletext Page 302 was my only link to the club, but somehow I coped.
The cataclysm of media glare, the dozens of cameras and nationalities in the press room at the Bridge yesterday blew my mind a little bit.
It was one of those ‘we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto’ moments, that have sporadically and jarringly characterised the Roman Abramovich era at Stamford Bridge since 2003.
Can this really be the same football club I grew up loving and idolising? The one where a good season was not getting relegated, and a decent cup run was a huge and memorable bonus? You have little moments when you realise in stark terms how far the club has come in the last 16 or 17 years and the sheer scale of the change can take your breath away sometimes.
Sometimes the club changes right as you are watching; you can feel things change and move tangibly, right in front of your eyes.
I think yesterday’s press conference was one such seminal moment.
Now, I’d like to explain at this point that I’m not in PR professionally. Far from it in fact. Even so, years of supporting Chelsea and latterly reaching exec/board level at what I do for a living (at a young age) has taught me better than most the value of good PR. I say supporting Chelsea has taught me, and that’s true. I think we can all agree what a hapless, amateurish disaster zone the club’s PR has been at times, whilst at others it has been fairly well done.
So I watched Jose’s press conference and from the first minute or so it became clear that he was being extremely clever.
Jose can see, as we all can, that there are knives being sharpened in the media and Jose gave a masterclass in disarming the press yesterday. They rolled up to the Bridge in their dozens and dozens, spoiling for controversy and for headlines they can use to drive a wedge into Jose and the club, and he fielded them excellently. Instead of the blood and guts and fire and brimstone self-promotion exercise they were expecting and hoping for, he was calm, complimentary, candid, considered and cool.
He gave precisely zero, in all the time he was there, for them to try to beat him with. He answered everyone’s questions truthfully and with a smile even when they were asked two or three times by an assembled press pack not listening to each other’s questions.
He gave them a soundbite, he gave them honesty with a couple of extremely well-judged compliments, and left them drooling for more. They had no option but to react to him, but to be passive to him, and here the real genius lies. The key to good media relations is to have the press reacting to you in areas you control. Fergie was a master at that. Jose has learnt a lot from him, you can tell.
Of Fergie, it was strange to see his shadow cast long over the room in some ways. Jose recognises that there is now a power vacuum at the top of English football previously dominated by the irascible Scotsman. He knows that he can fill it as long as keeps the media onside and reacting to him, reporting what he wants them to report. Its really clever.
I believe we saw the first instances of Jose cultivating a new, wise, omniscient elder statesman persona with the English media yesterday. It was telling to see Jose push an agenda of ‘stability’ and ‘happiness’ – these were his two most used words. Part of the exercise will have been to get across to everyone, including us fans, just how much older, wiser and smarter he has become since he was last here, but without losing any of that classic, unstoppable, irresistible Jose charm. He had understated charm by the bucketload yesterday, and he still knows the value of a slow, film-star smile into the cameras. They absolutely adore him.
PR exercise magnificently accomplished, I believe.
The assembled press pack went away with their quotes and their careful truths but with no real insight, and so were desperate for more from Jose. They know they will only get it on his terms. On our terms.
It was an absolute masterclass.
The press need not worry though. The controversy and drama will come in time, but underpinning the whole press conference was the implied, unspoken assurance that the drama and controversy will take place on Jose’s terms, on Chelsea’s terms, and not the media’s. They wanted it to happen in a close-season press conference, and Jose has very cleverly avoided this.
One can only wonder what Buck, Tenenbaum and Gourlay were thinking from the sidelines as Jose held court, keeping the media in the palm of his hand. THIS is what good PR looks like, chaps. I don’t know if it was Jose himself who came up with yesterday but if it wasn’t, we should hire whoever did as Head of Media Relations at Chelsea because the person is a genius. I’d be amazed if it wasn’t Jose.
It is telling that some members of the press have chosen to attempt to force the battlelines this morning with copy directed at furthering the agenda that Jose is somehow not the manager he was, that he is weaker and less powerful, and much less happy, as some have quoted this morning.
Well if you are determined to play to the millions of football fans in this country who hate him, are worried by his arrival and are desperate to clutch at any straws possible that he/us will fail, and all you have to go on is that ‘he says he is happy but he didn’t look very happy really’ – I call that a nice PR job.
And they know it of course. Such spiteful and rather tenuous copy thrown at the club, as much, we suspect in frustration at being manipulated and not being given what they want, merely proves Jose’s point.
I’ll leave this with one observation I made from yesterday which is perhaps the cleverest piece of PR of all.
Jose says he is The Happy One. Its the definition of a hyper-usable soundbite.
When we lose a game, the team doesn’t play well – how are the press going to report it?
‘Luiz shocker as blues falter again’
or
‘Jose is not so happy now’
?
Exactly.
He wants them talking about him during times of negativity – taking the heat off the team and ensuring losses do not unduly affect confidence. Its classic Jose Mourinho.
Jose, you clever, clever man.
Welcome back mate.
CAREFREE.
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