Pro Sports Teams & Their Interfering Owners

The tabloid press in Britain is going crazy at the moment thanks, almost entirely, to the recent resignation of the incredibly successful Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho. He may not be a household name on this side of the pond but just one look at his stats will give you an idea of what he has done for this team. He took over an underachieving Chelsea side in 2004 and in the 3 years since has managed to win 2 championships, 2 League Cups, 1 FA Cup and The Charity Shield, all of which is an incredible achievement but apparently one that is not good enough for billionaire Russian owner Roman Abramovich. It has long been rumored that he has been unhappy with the team's recent results which has led to many an argument with Mourinho that finally reached a breaking point resulting in the resignation. You have to think that if he is unhappy with these results then there is very little that will brighten his day. It's just another example of a big money team owner who thinks they know more about the sport than the professionals they hired to do the job. Let's take a look at some others.

In football you need look no further than Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders and Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys to find a couple of guys that aren't just happy to sit back and rake in the huge money that owning a football team provides. Davis' issues have been both legal, in moving his team back and forth from Los Angeles to Oakland, and managerial as his incessant need to poke his nose into the workings of his coaches has led to multiple resignations and firings and has created a situation where great coaches will simply not consider working under him. Jones has created a similar atmosphere in Dallas and even when they were winning Super Bowls in the 90's, he was very quick to claim that it was his skills that led the team to those titles rather than the efforts of Jimmy Johnson and his staff. He now seems quite happy to hire "yes men" as his head coach and the results of that policy have played out on the field as the Cowboys have failed to live up to expectations under any of these coaches.