Manuel Pellegrini will have cursed his luck again this week when Tottenham announced Jose Mourinho as their new coach.
If there’s a first-game new-boss bounce for Spurs on Saturday against West Ham it could bounce the Chilean coach closer to the exit. He’ll be entitled to mumble ‘not you again’ as the two shake hands – if they shake.
Mourinho deliberately referred to his rival as 'Mr Pellegrino' in September 2014 after an ill-tempered draw between Chelsea and Manchester City, and there will be no love lost when the managers do battle at London Stadium.
Their story starts in 2010 when Mourinho took over from Pellegrini as Real Madrid coach, turning up like a flash new boyfriend replacing the jilted husband.
Pellegrini’s Madrid divorce had ended with him going to coach Malaga and when he took his team to the Bernabeu the following season Mourinho showed little grace towards his predecessor.
He was asked pre-match whether or not he feared the sack after one year if he did not deliver trophies – Pellegrini’s fate in the hot-seat.
He said that even if things went wrong for him as Madrid coach he would have offers from big clubs in England and Italy, and would never have to go and work at Malaga.
It was an insult to Malaga, and it was an attempt to belittle Pellegrini who had been hired at Madrid on the advice of Jorge Valdano, another of Mourinho’s enemies.
Pellegrini ended up getting Malaga into a Champions League quarter-final but his first season was tough and Madrid won 7-0 that night, reduced to 10-men with half an hour remaining, and suffering a Cristiano Ronaldo hat-trick.
Pellegrini’s single-season at Real Madrid rankles with him for many reasons. One is that when Mourinho swept in – hired very much, not by Valdano, but by Florentino Perez with whom he remains great friends. He was afforded many of the advantages that Pellegrini feels he did not enjoy.
The only campaign when Ronaldo failed to score 30 goals in the league was the year Pellegrini sat on the Real Madrid bench. He hates the fact that people only remember his failure to win a trophy and no one recalls how Ronaldo missed two months of the season with an injury.
There was also none of the warmth with the president that Mourinho enjoyed.
When Pellegrini was sacked, he received the news while having a cup of coffee with the director of Madrid’s famous Reina Sofia art gallery, Manuel Borja-Ville.
Borja-Villel has since recalled that when Pellegrini’s mobile rang he took the call and after the briefest of conversations hung up and said that it had been the Real Madrid president telling him he was fired.
Backed by the president, Mourinho did win a league at Madrid. Pellegrini would point out that he was given a second season to do it. Pellegrini meanwhile was rewarded for what he achieved at Malaga with the Manchester City job.
When he won the league at the Etihad it was Mourinho's Chelsea credited with handing the league to City by beating Liverpool at Anfield. 'Why was it Liverpool losing the league and not us winning it?’ Pellegrini told Sportsmail in an interview in 2015.
In October 2013 Pellegrini faced Mourinho again. Mourinho crowd-surfed when Fernando Torres scored a late winner and Pellegrini refused to shake his hand after the game saying: ‘I did not expect anything different from him.’
He says he is not his enemy, but neither is he his friend. It’s an honest appraisal of the relationship between two coaches who have been rivals for almost a decade but probably both feel they have almost nothing in common as managers and men.