"They have two very good teams. One playing and another one on the bench and in the stands. A fantastic squad and fantastic players. [Manuel] Pellegrini has an unbelievable squad of players." -- Jose Mourinho, Oct. 25
"The team with more responsibilities to win it [the title], because their squad is quite unique, is Manchester City." -- Jose Mourinho, Dec. 4
"City, in terms of power of the squad, are in another dimension. You can't compare their situation with any other club. The number of players they have at the same level is amazing." -- Jose Mourinho, March 14
"I think that Manchester City are the best team. They have the best players." -- Jose Mourinho, March 19
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has produced many teams of reliably effective winners, yet none, it transpires, has proved quite as consistent as the Portuguese himself. Mourinho has had a mantra, a theme of this season, that Manchester City have the best team and the strongest squad in the Premier League. They have spent much more than anyone else, he argues, and their season would be a failure if they are not crowned champions.
Mourinho is certainly convincing: He is charismatic, eloquent and witty, and while he has overplayed his hand by suggesting his side are underdogs -- a claim that attracts ever more mockery -- he has shaped opinion. Mourinho's views on City have become part of received wisdom.
The Portuguese manager has won the argument, partly because City manager Manuel Pellegrini, apart from one botched attempt to respond, has not taken part in it. Lacking Mourinho's quick wit, his sense of mischief or, indeed, his fluency in the English language, Pellegrini has adopted a preferred, if utterly ineffective, tactic of trying to pretend his bête noire doesn't exist.
Yet the more pertinent issue is whether the words Mourinho says are right, or if he has simply succeeded in his goal of applying far more pressure on one of his title rivals.
You can argue that City really are a class above the rest: View their two emphatic derby wins against Manchester United, their 6-3 defeat of Arsenal, and their 6-0 thrashing of Tottenham, and it appears that way. Yet since City's autumn eviscerations of other members of the elite, their peers have been similarly devastating: Liverpool have beaten Tottenham, Everton and Arsenal by at least four goals each, while Chelsea, supposedly devoid of firepower, put six past Arsenal.
So the statistics are inconclusive. A subjective judgment is that City's 4-1 display against United at the Etihad Stadium was the finest of the campaign, yet Chelsea's 1-0 triumph against Pellegrini's side on the same ground -- a counterattacking, defensively resolute, tactically perfect display -- was the best of its type. And Liverpool's 20-minute, four-goal blitz against Arsenal was the most destructive spell anyone has managed.
Move on to the question of personnel. Is City's superiority as pronounced as Mourinho insists? Not entirely. This view is that Pellegrini possesses the premier starting XI, but only just.
Consider the four main departments of the City side: Keeper Joe Hart was dropped in November and December after making a series of costly errors, and while he has proved more reliable since his return, it is ridiculous to suggest he is the Premier League's foremost goalkeeper this season.
As anyone who witnessed Vincent Kompany's colossal performance in the Camp Nou can testify, he has a claim to be crowned the outstanding defender in England. Yet the pre-eminent unit, as their defensive record shows, is Mourinho’s superbly drilled back four. It is impossible to imagine aging City defender Martin Demichelis as a first choice for Chelsea's defence.
There is no such weak link in City's midfield. When David Silva, Samir Nasri, Yaya Toure and Fernandinho play together, there is no quartet of such physical and technical capabilities. Toure and Fernandinho, in particular, are the most powerful and potent duo in the middle. Yet Chelsea found a way to beat them, fielding five midfielders to outnumber them.
In attack, meanwhile, the early-season debate about the merits of three strike duos -- City's Sergio Aguero and Alvaro Negredo, United's Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie, and Liverpool's Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez -- has been resolved. The Anfield alliance contains the league's two top scorers; Liverpool's strikers are without peers.
Another strand to Mourinho's argument, as the quote at the top illustrates, is that City have the outstanding understudies. When Pellegrini's men eliminated Chelsea from the FA Cup, it did not escape Mourinho's attention that one of the scorers was 24 million-pound, fourth-choice forward Stevan Jovetic. If the Montenegrin has a rival in that respect, it is Javier Hernandez: No one else has such an able striker so far down the pecking order. But Jovetic has been injured for much of the season, so he has been an expensive irrelevance.
While City have a strength in depth that Liverpool, for one, lack, it does not equate to meaning they have two similarly superb sides. Actually, as their January bids for FC Porto’s Eliaquim Mangala and Fernando highlight, City have recognised the need for another central defender and central midfielder. Indeed, Fernandinho's absence meant Demichelis was pressed into service in midfield when Chelsea won at the Etihad Stadium, but the Argentine proved an inadequate deputy for the injured Brazilian.
Only a few days earlier, City were unwilling to meet Porto’s asking price for Mangala and Fernando. While Mourinho has made veiled references to "dodgy FFP [financial fair play]," if money were no object, success might have been bought with their purchases. Or, indeed, City could have signed the costlier Pepe from Real Madrid instead of the cheaper Demichelis from Atletico Madrid last summer. Nor did City bid for striker Edinson Cavani before he joined PSG, with Pellegrini preferring Negredo, who came at a third of the Uruguayan's price.
As Mourinho has noted, City, with an outlay of about 90 million pounds, were the biggest spenders that window. As Pellegrini spotted -- escalating the game of pretend poverty by flagging up others' expenditure -- Chelsea's January buys meant they have forked out the most in the past 12 months. And as Mourinho, mocking his City counterpart's math, retorted, the sales of Kevin de Bruyne and Juan Mata meant they are in the black for their 2014 dealings, even if he neglected to mention they have signed Kurt Zouma for next season.
It came during February's bout of horseplay after Mourinho branded Chelsea the "little horse" in the title race; Pellegrini's response -- "little but very rich" -- has some credence. City's current squad cost the most in the division, about 350 million pounds, but the pool of players at Mourinho's disposal have arrived for some 300 million pounds. Factor in the injured Marco van Ginkel, the loaned-out Romelu Lukaku, and the sold Mata and De Bruyne, and the men Mourinho has picked in the Premier League were actually acquired for more money than Pellegrini's.
It is not Mourinho's fault, of course, that Chelsea paid 50 million pounds for Fernando Torres, but he was willing to commit a substantial sum to take Wayne Rooney to Stamford Bridge before he opted to stay at United. Instead, Jose came up with a different sort of target: Pellegrini. Deploying his powers of persuasion and a selective interpretation of the facts, Mourinho has cleverly fashioned a narrative where City, rather than being slight favourites, ought to have a huge advantage.
There are teams in Europe for whom a second-place finish would be failure, but they are Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain (Olympiakos in Greece if you look further down the leagues). The Premier League is altogether closer than that, as the congestion at the top of the league table shows. The "very good teams" Mourinho should have talked about are not City and City reserves, but City, Chelsea and Liverpool.