If Ernesto Valverde can finally defeat one of the most vilified coaches in modern European football on Wednesday, then it will have been one hell of a few days for the Athletic Club boss after beating Villarreal in LaLiga at the weekend.

This week of European football, nowhere will there be a greater contrast of personalities than when Valverde, the chess-playing, cycling-loving, talented photographer who loves playing Rolling Stones covers with his group, faces Jose Mourinho again.

The occasion: Bilbao’s red and white Basque club travels to the game against Turkish giants Fenerbahce for the first time in the club’s history. (Basque refers to the 2.8 million people who were born in or come from this northern semi-autonomous region of Spain.)

The competition: the UEFA Europa League, which neither Valverde nor Athletic won (two finals lost for the 60-year-old as a player and coach, including one for the club in 2012), against the Süper Lig team coached by Mourinho, which won in 2003. In this competition he brought his successful but always polarizing personality into the football world.

Times are good for Valverde as the Athletic Club recently defeated Spanish and European champions Real Madrid for the first time in a decade and then, four nights later, defeated their most threatening rivals for fourth place in LaLiga (Villarreal). And the millions that Champions League qualification would bring. Should Los Leones If the Lions beat Fener this week, it would at least keep them in second place in the 36-team Europa League table and qualify directly for the round of 16 in March, where they will go straight through the unwanted playoff round in February.

Considering Athletic are the reigning Copa del Rey winners, fourth in LaLiga and second in the European rankings, and the absolutely sensational San Mames Stadium will host the Europa League final in May, these are in the Happy times indeed. But it’s a test trip to Turkey this week and while Valverde will pay absolutely no attention to the past, his direct record against Mourinho is poor: P3, L2, D1.

Mourinho has now trained against Athletic six times and won all six times – with a pretty brutal goal ratio of 23:3.

So there is sport”morbo” in this, as the Spanish like to say. (An expression that expresses that a sporting duel exudes a special fascination for many juicy reasons.)

But sport wouldn’t captivate us with its constant siren song and then make us addicted if it weren’t for human interest dramatis personae which continually add the most glorious soap opera backstories to elite-level sporting confrontations. It’s a heady, powerful, voyeuristic mix.

Valverde and Mourinho are polar opposites, not just for the simple fact that the Spaniard was a great professional player who was signed by Johan Cruyff for Barcelona and who made 360 ​​senior appearances, while the Portuguese fought his way into the sport , by Sir Bobby Robson becoming a translator.

Their personalities are also anathema to each other.

Your opinion on Mourinho may be different to mine (and you are welcome to have your opinion) as some people use trophy success as a get out of jail card to excuse abhorrent behavior. And there is no denying that the man who desperately wanted to be known as ‘Special One’ at Chelsea but now deserves to be called ‘Special Once’ has a glittering trophy record.

But I base my description of him as offensive and unsympathetic on the following: his false accusations against referee Anders Frisk in 2005, which led to death threats against the Swedish referee and Frisk’s subsequent decision to take early retirement; his pursuit of referee Anthony Taylor into the VIP car park at Budapest’s Puskas Arena last year and his abusive insults directed at the man after Sevilla beat Roma in the Europa League final (which earned Mourinho a four-match UEFA ban ); his cowardly and dangerous poking of the eye of Barcelona coach Tito Villanova during the 2011 Clasico; his alleged sexual harassment and verbal abuse of Chelsea FC doctor Eva Carneiro (Chelsea and Mourinho have settled their claim for constructive dismissal); And the list goes on and on until he said last month that the Turkish league “smells bad.”

Rather than completely detracting from Mourinho’s coaching ability and trophy success, it is more a parallel pipeline in his career – a stream of silver accompanied by a stream of sewage.

Valverde simply couldn’t be more different.

He has published several glossy hardcover volumes of his own photography with great success, but when asked if he was proud of his skills and achievements, he replied: “Proud? I don’t like that word and I don’t like it.” All of this is about being proud. I enjoyed the process of putting the books together, I love taking photos, I did my best, but they are big, expensive books – I probably only sold about 10 of them and bought half of them!”

The ultimate in self-irony.

Valverde loves telling stories against himself. For example, he once admitted to Relevo magazine: “It’s true that every now and then I miss the name of one of my players during a team talk, but it’s because the people around me know what I’m like. They say ‘De Marcos’.” !’ and I’ll say… ‘..that’s what I meant…!’ “I spent months accidentally calling Mikel Vesga (who may start in Turkey) Kepa because that’s his father’s name and we played together when I was younger.”

Valverde also told his great friend Lu Martin for Relevo that he truly believes that he has some kind of magnetic pull on the police and always has.

As a teenager in the 1970s, he and a group of friends were playing in the local hills and were mistaken for a terrorist unit; He was arrested and taken to the police station for taking photos in an abandoned factory in Vitoria (his hometown). However, he was released when a neighbor noticed the arrest and alerted Valverde’s mother, who called one of the factory owners who lived in the family’s neighborhood.

Even when Valverde was appointed Espanyol coach (which was the last time he reached the Europa League final in 2007, a penalty shoot-out defeat to Sevilla at Hampden), he was stopped at a checkpoint by Barcelona police officers because They thought he had stolen the flashy car he was driving matched the description of an engine they were looking for.

He is also in awe of the club he works for, but is a little cynical about the myth of great coaches, a myth that Mourinho wants to not only spread but dominate.

Valverde says: “No one should doubt that the determining factor in whether a group of players works together or not is the extent to which they believe that you can help them to improve or not. From the moment you play.” Take charge of the locker room. They are super intelligent at weighing you up and figuring out what you can and can’t do for them.

On the club he loves and is taking with him to Istanbul this week: “It is a small miracle that Athletic is one of only three Spanish clubs, despite always being committed to using only Basque-born or Basque-educated players.” To never have been relegated! The one year when things go badly and you get relegated according to the inexorable logic of probabilities has happened to everyone except us, Madrid and Barcelona.

Neither victory nor defeat in Istanbul will change Valverde’s personality in the slightest – nor would the great idea that he could win Athletic’s first ever European Cup on his own La Catredal next May in Bilbao.

But I admire him very much and even though you have complete freedom to decide who you cheer for this Thursday, you can be sure that I’m rooting for the good.