Jose Mourinho has said David Moyes paid the price for taking charge at Manchester United just as the Premier League was becoming ultra-competitive, but added that he would have relished the chance to take over the team Moyes inherited from Sir Alex Ferguson.
Sunderland manager Moyes returns to Old Trafford on Boxing Day for the first time since being sacked by United in April 2014 after just 10 months in charge.
The Scot has since said he was not given the time to rebuild the squad left by Ferguson — a team that won the Premier League title in Ferguson’s final season — and that the difficulties experienced by his successors, Louis van Gaal and Mourinho, emphasised the task he faced after leaving Everton.
But while Mourinho accepts that Moyes had a tough challenge to follow Ferguson, he said he also had a squad of proven quality at a club with a winning tradition.
“I wouldn’t mind to be at a club with great expectations, but to have Ryan Giggs and ‘Chicharito’ [Javier Hernandez] and [Nemanja] Vidic still in the team, [Patrice] Evra too… I wouldn’t mind,” Mourinho said.
“I don’t feel it [United’s expectation] as a burden. I feel the great history of the club as only a positive thing and not a negative thing. The problem is whether you have the conditions to follow that success of history. If not, then that’s a different story.
“There are generations and in a certain period, when David came, the situation was not so easy to go in that winning direction. At the same time — I think this is even more important — the Premier League was changing.
“Periods of domination now belong to the past because the Premier League was going already in an incredible direction and it is what it is now.”
Moyes is reviving Sunderland after a difficult start to the season, with the club now just one point adrift of safety, and Mourinho said he was showing the importance of moving on from setbacks.
He added: “I think a manager that is not sacked is not a manager, or at least is not a good manager. We have to be sacked.
“So I think it was just a bad moment in David’s career and he has to do what I did, what we all do, move on — and he did that.
“I think after Manchester United he went to Spain, also a different experience for him, then back to England, back in the Premier League.
“I think he moved on and this is what we have to do. He has to move on, enjoy his family and a new job will arrive. I’m like this. I’m pragmatic. No problem. It’s part of football.”
Six months into his job at Old Trafford, Mourinho has yet to guide United back to a position of being title challengers, with the club sixth in the table ahead of Sunderland’s visit.
But the Portuguese stressed that his changes were beginning to have the desired effect both on and off the pitch.
“I can answer you in many different ways,” he said. “But if, if, if — and ifs in football are a no — if we [won] at home to Stoke, Arsenal, Burnley and West Ham, which we totally deserved to, we would be in this moment second.
“So it doesn’t matter, the reflections we do don’t matter, the opinions and ideas I give you. The reality is what we are now with eight more points that we totally deserve — even with the points we lost at home we would be second.
“But in football there are no ifs. We are in a position where this is a reality, we could be closer but we are not and we have lots of things to improve at lots of levels.
“For example, one thing is training sessions with a desert of grass where somebody kicks the ball and it goes 5km away. It is another thing now, you look now, it looks a proper training ground, very good conditions, protected from the winds, the intensity of the training sessions is much higher.
“That’s just a simple detail, and we have lots of details to improve.”
