Mourinho

Joe Pearlman made his name with music documentaries, Bros: After the Screaming Stops, Robbie Williams and Lewis Capaldi: How I'm Feeling Now, films about performers negotiating fame on their own terms. Mourinho, three episodes released by Netflix in August 2026, is his first work on sport. It comes from Ventureland, the London and Los Angeles company of John Battsek, a double Oscar-winning producer for One Day in September and Searching for Sugar Man, whose Beckham set the template for the prestige football documentary.

Shot over two years, the series sits Mourinho down for long interviews and follows the decade that made him: the unfancied Porto side that won the Champions League, the arrival at Chelsea as the self-declared special one, Inter, and Real Madrid. Around him Pearlman assembles an unusually deep roster of witnesses, from Frank Lampard, John Terry and Didier Drogba to Zlatan Ibrahimović, Iker Casillas, Javier Zanetti and Sir Alex Ferguson. Archive is cut briskly, and the structure is chronological, built around the tension between Mourinho's account of himself and everyone else's.

Audiences took to it quickly, with a strong IMDb response within weeks of release; critics were more divided, several finding that Mourinho's control of his own story limits how far the series can see past it. The filmmakers have been candid in interviews that their subject was managing them throughout. That friction is part of the interest: a portrait of a man whose genius was always, in part, a performance.