To clarify the legend, José Mourinho never called himself The Special One. At his introductory press conference, the beginning of his first spell at Chelsea’s helm back in 2004, he laid out his credentials to the assembled journalists: “Please don’t call me arrogant, because what I’m saying is true. I’m a European champion... I think I’m a special one.”

It’s a small thing, the difference between the definite article and the indefinite, but delineating the limits of Mourinho’s self-regard requires fine measurements. The Portuguese clotheshorse was at least entertaining the idea that he wasn’t all by himself in the echelon of great managers. One imagines Mou, if he cares for music at all, doesn’t have time for anything post-Victorian, but what he said echoed a Jay Z record from 2001: “If I ain’t better than Big / I’m the closest one.”

Mou’s second tenure at Chelsea concluded Thursday morning “by mutual consent,” as if Mourinho walked into Roman Abramovich’s office a couple days previous and they both agreed, without raising their voices to one another, that their arrangement wasn’t working out, and parted ways with a resigned handshake. Put more bluntly and truthfully, Mou was fired. The axe came down because Chelsea are a mess this season—16th in the league table!—and because Mourinho has spent the past few months publicly gaslighting his own staff and players in an attempt to deflect blame from himself. The first time Mourinho exited Chelsea, it was because Abramovich exasperated him with constant meddling and undermining of his authority. Maybe Mou made up his mind then, in September of 2007, that if he ever returned to the London club, he would leave it with an empty jerry can tucked under his arm and comic strip rage marks hovering above the heads of everyone involved.

No one would argue that Mourinho doesn’t have a keen tactical mind or that he isn’t extraordinarily charismatic, but he also verges on being unemployably temperamental. Since 2004, he’s accepted four managerial jobs and three of them have ended in hurt feelings. The one that didn’t was a two-year gig at Inter Milan that concluded with a Champions League title. (You might say Mou and the Italian giants knew when to quit each other.) It’s undeniable at this point that Mourinho is incapable of holding a position for more than a couple seasons without sowing discontent and torpedoing his players’ morale. This isn’t a Chelsea-specific problem. On the way out Real Madrid’s door, Mourinho had managed to alienate Cristiano Ronaldo, Iker Casillas, and Sergio Ramos. He practically split the club’s fanbase in two: Madridistas and Mourinhistas.

Here’s a stab at a unified theory of Mourinho. The uptick that Mou provides whenever he joins a clubs is based in both hyper-rational thought and screaming lunacy. In certain ways, there is not a more practical manager in the world than Mourinho. He doesn’t have any pretensions about what soccer should or should not be; his style is an argument against the importance of style. He just wants to win soccer matches, however he needs to, and because of that, his teams tend to play with dominant responsibleness. They defend with intelligence, attack with speed, and wring the life out of games in which they’re leading. It’s not always thrilling, but it almost always works.

What works for only a set amount of time are Mourinho’s motivational tactics, which involve transforming his team into an extension of his own vanity and paranoia. He tells his locker room that the only thing standing between them and greatness is a minefield of haters and saboteurs. This is a powerful message, but it doesn’t have legs because it’s both hilariously false—teams fail on their own merits all the time—and severely exhausting. After a while, Mou’s players either discover the lie or fatigue. They win for a couple years—a European cup here, a league title there—but in the end, the only person who can brook Mourinho’s worldview is Mourinho. When his charm wears off, he begins to pick fights with the players themselves. He accuses them of being haters and saboteurs, just like the press, just like the referees, just like the chairman and the fans. He leaves the club shortly thereafter, in a huff, confident that he’s been wronged.

The question facing Mourinho, at this point in his career, is not who would want any part of him, but who would want the whole package: the brilliance and the bratty behavior. He burned his bridges at Real Madrid, and he’s too big a deal for Valencia. Bayern Munich have spent the past two-and-a-half years picking poor Pep Guardiola apart even as his team wins nearly every match 3-0. One can only imagine how poorly Mourinho would handle that indignity. Manchester United, maybe? Or City?

Mou will be hired by some club or another in the next year or so, because he’s too good at what he does not to, but it will be a strange, conflicted decision for whoever makes it. Who wants to hire someone knowing for certain that, while it might begin well, it’s definitely going to end in a spectacular meltdown? All you can do when you bring in José Mourinho is enjoy the success while it lasts and keep half a mind on how you’re going to clean up the mess left behind. In a perverse way, Mou is right about himself. He is a special one. No other manager could act like he does and still find work.