Well, isn’t that just typical? I spend a full season chronicling the first season in Turkey of a manager, and then less than a month into the next season, the typically-trigger happy Turkish club presidents have made the ultimate decision. And so it has come to past, after failure to qualify for the Champions League proper, after a pretty poor showing en-route to elimination by Benfica in the play off round, Fenerbahce have called time on Jose Mourinho’s ‘Turkish Delight’. And whilst any manager leaving their football team before we even get to September may seem quite a shock, for anyone who has paid any attention to the last year or so of Mourinho’s career, for anyone who read any of my previous Turkish Delight series posts, and pretty much anyone who knows about Jose Mourinho, this is probably the LEAST shocking “shocking” sacking of a football manager we have seen for some time.
Mourinho brought his chaotic tour of European football to Turkey last summer to a TONNE of fanfare. Fenerbahçe were trying to pick up the pieces of missing out on the domestic league title in the most agonizing way possible, having ended the previous season on 99 points and still NOT winning the title (beaten to the crown by Istanbul-city rivals Galatasaray who finished on a monstrous 102 points). Fener needed to respond, and turned to Mourinho to lead them back to glory. On the face of it, it seemed to make sense; Jose had failed at his last few clubs, and was maybe at the level under the very elite of European football these days, coming to Turkey gave him a new kingdom to try and rule at the helm of club desperate for success once more. Surely winning just one Turkish league title would instantly elevate Mourinho to God-like status in the eyes of Fenerbahce fans, and doing so would lift Mourinho’s stock back up (much needed after the aforementioned repeated failures at his most recent clubs). Sounds easy right? Well, it would’ve been, until the moment which instantly snakebit Mourinho’s entire time in Turley for me. The transfer deal that changed it all, and it wasn’t even a Fenerbahce deal.
It would’ve been tough for Fener to top their great rivals (who were on the back of having won the last 2 titles and favourites to win a 3rd already), but when you add one of the world’s top forwards, you could’ve basically handed them the league title once more right away. From the very start, Mourinho was on to a loser. And if history has taught us anything, its that when Jose Mourinho’s team aren’t winning enough matches, and aren’t top of the table, the soundbites and controversy follow, and in abundance!
It would be difficult to know where to start when trying to describe EVERYTHING Mourinho said an did during his time as Fenerbahce manager, any one of these things happening in the Premier League from the manager of any club would make headlines for weeks in England and around the world, it seemed at one point that after every match SOMETHING would happen… And it never seemed to paint Mourinho in the best light, all whilst results were… meh… and speculation around his future only continued and increased in intensity, it was always when not IF he would depart his latest post.
So why don’t I just list the various points of reference during Mourinho’s time as Fener boss, and you can pick your favourite:
- Criticised UEFA for sanctioning the synthetic surface of Lugano during their Champions League qualifier, saying that “The ball doesn’t move as it should, players struggle to dribble, and the game’s pace slows significantly”.
- Said he felt disrespected after skipping his post-match presser (following Champions League elimination to Lille), because he had to wait 75 minutes after the match for the press conference to start.
- Was shown a yellow card after showing footage on his laptop to the television camera, appearing to show that Edin Dzeko’s goal against Antalyaspor was incorrectly ruled offside.
- Was shown a red card in a match against former club Manchester United for repeated verbal abuse to the officials. After the match Jose doubled down, stating that “During the game, at 100 miles per hour, he had one eye on the penalty situation, and he had one eye on the bench and my behaviour”.
- He repeatedly lamented the quality of Turkish football, saying that “Nobody abroad wants to watch the Turkish League… it’s too grey. it’s too dark, smells bad…”.
- Before posting footage of a controversial penalty incident in a match to his INSTAGRAM page, in the immediate after said match, Mourinho said the VAR official was the man of the match, and that the actual referee was “just a little boy that was there on the pitch, but the referee was Atilla Karaoglan (the VAR offcial)”.
- He would again criticise VAR officials after a draw against Lyon, “The VAR is there to help the referee when the referee makes a mistake, and he didn’t call him, because if the referee goes to the screen he gives the red card… It was Mr. Paolo Mazzoleni, very famous in Italy by the way, that didn’t call the referee. The referee’s mistakes on the pitch are acceptable, the VAR is there to work and it didn’t.”
- He received a one match touchline ban from UEFA, for delaying his player’s return to the pitch for the second half of the Lyon match.
- Mourinho mocked the ‘poetry skills’ of Alain Saint-Maximin after the midfielder posted on social media after he was dropped from the Fener squad that travelled to face Rangers. Jose suggested the player was lazy in training and overweight.
- He appeared to slap his opposite number after being eliminated from the Turkish Cup by their great rivals Galatasaray. This prompted a quite extraordinary social media mock-up video from Gala about Mourinho, and Mourinho was later banned from matches and fined by the Turkish federation.
- He pointed out that he had been in more European finals in the last 7 years than Turkish football had seen in its entire history
So that was Mourinho away from the pitch, but what about his team’s results on it? 2nd in the league (a fair distance behind Galatasaray), quarters of the cup (eliminated by Galatasaray, who went on to win it), didn’t even make it into the Champions League proper, before a last 16 elimination to Rangers in the Europa League. So not exactly a roaring success, or to such an extent that you could maybe excuse or mildly tolerate some of his actions mentioned previously. If you look at each team’s squads (Fener and Gala), it’s not really a shock that the season played out as it did, but Mourinho would’ve known what he was getting in to. Albeit each time before when he has not walked in to the best team in a country, he has been backed significantly in the transfer market, and whilst he did recruit in Turkey, it wasn’t enough quality that was really going to bridge that gap to a rival team that was already better, and strengthened further more. So what happened this summer? And how did Fener try and prepare to topple Turkish football once more? Well in came Jhon Duran from Saudi Arabia, Nelson Semedo from Wolves, Archie Brown from Gent as well as previous loan signings Sofyan Amrabat and Milan Skriniar joining the club permanently. Meanwhile Dzeko, Tadic, ASM and Kostic were among those that departed, overall was there a significant imporvement in the quality of the Fenerbahce squad? I would say no. And this is something Mourinho would later go on to speak about… Before the second leg of the play off tie with Benfica…
“If the Champions League was vital to my club, something would have been done with the transfer window between Feyenoord and Benfica,’ Mourinho said before the play-off second leg with the Portuguese club. ‘I don’t think Fenerbahce has a transfer list.”
So how have we not even made it out of August in the 25/26 season, and Mourinho has been disposed of? Well, whilst on the basis of it, it appears to be solely down to their Champions League elimination at such an early stage, with everything I have written already in mind, I don’t think it’s as shocking as it appears at all. The Benfica match was a really sad, yet typical way for Fenerbahce to have their last match with Mourinho at the healm; against Benfica (so in LISBON of all places), Fener had ZERO shots on target, and fell to a dismal 1-0 defeat. A red card for Talsica 8 minutes from time was about the most eventful thing Mourinho’s team did in what would turn out to be his final match at the helm.
And as you can imagine… Jose wasn’t best pleased after the match… (SKIP TO 1:40 FOR MOURNIHO):
So on the morning of 29th August 2025, Jose Mourinho’s ‘Turkish Delight’ officially came to an end; A club statement was as follows:
“Our Professional Football team has parted ways with Jose Mourinho, who has been serving as head coach since the 2024-2025 season. We thank him for his efforts for our team thus far and wish him success in his future career”
Turns out, the Champions League was in fact important to the club… maybe… An early exit from European competitions already took one manager from one of Istanbul’s top clubs this week (Solskjaer sacked by Besiktas after their conference league play off defeat), and now it took the biggest of the lot!
So… now what? Well for Fenerbahce, I suspect they will already have a name lined up (possibly ex goalkeeper Volkan Demirel who was linked with the post last season), and they will desperately try and recruit reinforcements in the final few days of the transfer window, and I’m pretty sure they’ll end up falling short to Galatasaray as the season progresses anyway. As for our topic of discussion and his future…
Since coming to Fenerbahce, he was linked with jobs in Saudi Arabia as well as the Portuguese national job (which I think he will be continuously linked to until the day he takes the job), as well as flirting with the idea of a return to English football. Right now you would say perhaps Nottingham Forest and West Ham United would be the most obvious possible next destinations if Mourinho was to once again come to these shores to ply his trade, Russell Martin has had his own Champions League humiliation in his early days as Rangers manager, and a move to Scotland was also something Jose commented on previously. His compatriot Ruben Amorim is under significant pressure also at Manchester United, albeit I think id be writing another blog about the day pigs flew if Jose was put back in the Old Trafford hot seat, and I’d be even more shocked than I was when I wrote about John Cena turning heel in WWE! But as always with Jose, who the fuck knows?
One thing I am sure of though with Jose Mourinho, is that he WILL be back! And my will we hear ALL about it when he does return!
Josh.