New Biography Alleges Mourinho Once Threatened to "Break" Arsene Wenger's Face

It's safe to say that Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho won't be attending each others' birthday parties any time soon. No giggles and crumpets and jam for those two. Nope, their rivalry—launched with Mourinho's 2004 appearance in England—has gotten pretty heated over the years, and it doesn't look like it's in for any cooling after today.

In a new book, which is being serialized by the Daily Mail, reporter and Mourinho biographer Rob Beasley reveals that the Manchester United manager allegedly once threatened, "I will find him one day outside a football pitch and I will break his face," referring to Wenger.

As you might imagine, this story—true or not—is running rampant all over the British press today. The incident itself dates back to January 2014, after Mourinho had returned to Chelsea the previous summer. Beasley implies that everything started in a petty he-said, he-said series of quotes to the press.

First, Wenger said that Mourinho was downplaying Chelsea's chances of winning the league that year because of his "fear to fail." To which Mourinho snapped back, "You know, he is a specialist in failure. Eight years without a piece of silverware, that's failure. If I do that at Chelsea I leave London and I don't come back." Spicy, Jose. And that's when Mourinho allegedly followed up with Beasley in a private conversation about all that breaking Wenger's face business.

A few weeks later, on March 22, 2014, this happened:

Beasley makes sure to say about Mourinho's face-breaking threats, "Now I don't think Jose was ever serious about having fisticuffs with the Frenchman, he was just huffing and puffing and letting off steam," but that's going to do little to slow the British press from making up their own melodrama about their next appearance. It's just too bad that Manchester United and Arsenal's next meeting will be November 19th. That's a lot of time for the British press to stir the pot.