‘Jose Mourinho invited me into his house to join Chelsea – Former Chelsea midfielder reveals how Mourinho lure him to his Chelsea team
Former Chelsea midfielder Steve Sidwell has opened up about his hilarious first meeting with Jose Mourinho at the now-Roma boss’s home.
Back in the spring of 2007, Sidwell was a star player for Reading and was attracting interest of bigger clubs, including Chelsea, the side he supported as a child while growing up in south-west London.
The midfielder received a shock phone call from his agent informing him of Chelsea’s interest which led to an invite to Mourinho’s home, although that initial first meeting didn’t quite go according to plan, as he explained during an appearance on That Peter Crouch Podcast.
“I left training and my agent called me and said Peter Kenyon [Chelsea’s CEO at the time] had called [and said] ‘they want to sign you’,” he recalled.
“All my family and friends are Chelsea fans. I was born in Wadsworth, grew up in Tooting, so I was like ‘can Jose call me?’. I got home, it was a hot day, I was sweating and pacing up and down in my living room with the mobile waiting for him to call.
“The phone goes and I was like ‘oh, hello Jose’. We had a two-minute chat and he said ‘what you doing tonight?’ I said ‘nothing’ and he said ‘right, you’re going to come to my house’. He sent a car to come and get me and my missus.
“We pulled up outside his house, had to walk down the mews, walked down this road, into his house. The door was already open so we’ve gone in his house, straight into the living room and sat down, me, my wife and my agent.
“His wife’s cooking in the kitchen, the dog’s running around. Ten minutes go past and we’re thinking ‘no one knows we’re here’.
“No one had obviously given him the heads up. We’re thinking ‘what do we do?’ I don’t want to go and tap his wife on the shoulder. She doesn’t know who I am.
“All of a sudden, you see these two legs coming down the stairs, [wearing] pair of jeans, pair of slippers.
“You then hear him go ‘what, what, he’s here already?’ He comes in and apologises. This is when he was in his prime. The missus is like [open mouth at meeting], the Portuguese God.
“We had a chat and he said ‘this is Chelsea’ and he got out this big book which said ‘Chelsea, July 2007’. It was mapping out pre-season every day, the schedule, the whole lot.”
Sidwell said it was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down and insisted he could have earned more money if he had stayed at Reading.
“People said I went for the money but Reading offered me more money in the end to stay than I got at Chelsea, and that’s true, I’ve got the contracts at home,” he insisted.