Success Quote by Jose Mourinho

Mourinho slips a shiv into a sentence that, on paper, sounds like humility. He’s not just lowering expectations; he’s rewriting the emotional baseline of a club so that glory becomes an aberration and struggle the default. The line is built on an almost bureaucratic idea of “normal,” a word that pretends to be neutral while doing heavy psychological work: it inoculates a fanbase against entitlement and tells players that history is not a promise.

The subtext is classic Mourinho. He positions himself as both realist and disruptor, the man who understands the club’s “true” station and therefore deserves credit for any spike above it. By invoking “two consecutive European cups,” he’s pointing to the rarefied air of dynasties - Real Madrid’s mythmaking, Milan’s eras, the kind of sustained dominance that most teams only borrow for a season. He’s implicitly saying: if you want that level of repetition, you’re asking for something structurally unnatural. Don’t confuse a miracle with a new norm.

Context matters because Mourinho’s career is a running argument with memory. He’s often arrived after a high point and had to manage the hangover: boards expecting constant transcendence, supporters treating last year’s trophy as a down payment on next year’s. This quote is a preemptive strike against that fantasy. It also contains a subtle power play. By framing failure as “normal,” he makes success synonymous with his methods - and any dip, conveniently, can be blamed on the club’s gravitational pull back to earth.