Chelsea vs Manchester United: Maurizio Sarri is the anti-Jose Mourinho, the man who remade the club he built

The subtle variations of approach between Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas or Rafa Benitez or Antonio Conte, have been revealed to be minor semantic quibbling in comparison to this night-and-day difference in styles

Jose Mourinho is wandering around a country that has changed since he used to rule it. English football has turned against his old ideas, and his old powers have lost their force. But the greatest challenge to Mourinho’s authority, and the strongest sign that his time has passed, is what he will find at Stamford Bridge on Saturday.

Mourinho built Chelsea into one of the dominant forces of early 21st century Premier League football. He won them two hugely impressive titles, and then left a template which his successors could use to win more titles. Powerful. Organised. Disciplined. Direct. Squeezing every last drop out of those big, experienced, senior players. It was the football of that era – that Jorge Valdano called “s*** on a stick” – almost perfected.

When Mourinho came back to Chelsea in 2013 the atmosphere was already changing. He tried to fit his old methods around a new bunch of players and it just about worked, but not for long. Chelsea won the 2014-15 Premier League title – although in truth there was not much competition – but his regime collapsed spectacularly in the first half of the following season. It was a rejection not just of Mourinho himself, but of his early-2000s methods that no longer fitted the modern game.

Three years on from the Mourinho season, Chelsea is a very different place. For the first time since he arrived 15 years ago, they are playing football that is utterly unrecognisable from the Mourinho template. The subtle variations of approach between Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas, or Mourinho and Rafa Benitez, or Mourinho and Antonio Conte, have been revealed to be minor semantic quibbling. Compared to the obvious night-and-day contrast of Mourinho’s football and that of Maurizio Sarri.

To watch Chelsea this season is to see a team try things they have never done in the Abramovich era. Sarri’s football is complex, fluid and expressive. It involves high pressing from the front and building up very deep from the back. The pivotal midfielder is not Claude Makelele or Nemanja Matic but the skinny Jorginho. Players interchange positions and it feels as if what we are seeing now in October is nothing like what the finished product will look like, next season or after that.

More than anything else, Sarri’s football is a clear rejection of the Mourinho template for tactics and for management. He is Chelsea’s first anti-Mourinho. And when Mourinho gets off the Manchester United coach on Saturday morning, and then sees the game begin, he might feel like a man returning to an old home that has been gutted and rebuilt beyond recognition.

Mourinho changed Chelsea beyond recognition upon his arrival (Getty)

Just listen to David Luiz, a man Mourinho never trusted and whom he sold to Paris Saint Germain in 2014. He loves Sarri’s embrace of the fun side of the game, something that was utterly alien to Mourinho. "Sarri is giving us a lot of happiness to play football, we are trying to enjoy it," Luiz said last month. "Every single day he says to us 'you have the best job in the world, so you have to enjoy'. You have to try to do this with a big smile. Many people in the world don't have this privilege."

Contrast that with the Mourinho approach, “confrontational leadership”, which is hammering his players in public and private, punishment droppings, humiliation substitutions, anything to try to get a reaction and to reassert his own authority.

Sarri has preached positivity from day one (Action Images via Reuters)

But then maybe we did not need the season to start to realise how different Sarri would be from Mourinho. You only had to be at his unveiling at Stamford Bridge on 14 July to get a sense of his mission to play football that had hardly been seen at Chelsea before. He kept speaking of football as something to be enjoyed, hoping to appeal to something in his players other than just obedience and fear.

“Ours is not a sport, but a game,” Sarri explained. “Anybody who plays a game started doing that as a child for fun, and the child in us must be nurtured because this often makes us the best. The professional aspect brings out the best, but 99% of the time, not 100%. So to create play that is fun is the first thing to obtain a style of play for a high-level squad.” That is not exactly Mourinho’s approach.

Sarri’s loyalty is to a very different form of football. He is very open in his reverence for Pep Guardiola, and Guardiola is himself a huge admirer of Sarri too. The men are both disciples of football legend Arrigo Sacchi, and he loves their work too. This summer, during the first week of the World Cup, Sacchi brought the two men together. At his favourite restaurant, Perla Verde, in Milano Marittima, a resort on the Adriatic coast, just south of Ravenna. Guardiola, Sacchi and Sarri posed for smiling photos afterwards. Weeks later, when Sarri was unveiled at Stamford Bridge, he called Guardiola “a class act, a champion, a genius”.

That change in English football, away from Mourinho’s ideals to something else, has been taken to another level by Guardiola and his Manchester City. Playing the opposite of Mourinho football – 71% possession – they smashed Mourinho’s 2004-05 Premier League points record last year. And if Guardiola is the culmination of that change, Sarri is the man who has brought it home to the club Mourinho built.