FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

This Gordon Ramsay-Jose Mourinho Meme is Perfect

The way Ramsay treats kids vs. adults on his cooking shows exactly matches Mourinho's managing style.
Photo by Peter Powell—EPA, Flickr user gordon-ramsay-4

The first rule about working in a kitchen is that you don't fuck with the head chef. What they say goes. Sure, it's a tyrannical rule that only makes sense in a Kafka kind of way, but the head chef is the one with the big knife, so best do as they say. In this way, head chefs and soccer managers aren't so different at all.

One brilliant meme-maker and Manchester United fan applied a compilation demonstrating the amazing juxtaposition between how Gordon Ramsay treats kids vs. adults in his two MasterChef shows to Jose Mourinho's tenuous tenure with Manchester United. Echoing the Key & Peel Obama handshake meme, player names are overlaid over appropriate scenes (e.g.: Ramsay blows his stack and Paul Pogba's name comes up.).

Advertisement

First of all, it's kind of shocking to only just make this connection—it's so perfect and has always been there. Ramsay and Mourinho feel not only cut from the same cloth, but the same stencil. Sure, this softer side of Ramsay for his kids in MasterChef Junior was probably manufactured a bit to save a bit of face from his profanity-laced rants against aspiring adult chefs. But that balance is exactly the line that the Portuguese manager straddles.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in England, Mourinho is dealing with his own disastrous kitchen in a tyrannical fashion. With Manchester United hovering at 10th in the Premier League at 3-1-3, the manager's head is on the chopping block and his biases towards his players are coming into full relief.

Just look at this icy interaction from last week between Mourinho and Paul Pogba—who had a magnificent showing as a champion in the World Cup with France. (Mourinho has been keeping Pogba on the bench far too much for what the player contributes.)

Aside from comparing Ramsay's "Fuck me? How about fuck you?!" rant to Mourinho's feelings toward Pogba, Namanja Matic—who played under Mourinho at Chelsea—gets the opposite treatment.

Mourinho: "You know who my favorite chef is?

Matic: "No."

Mourinho: "It's you."

Pitch perfect.