Hansi Flick's only chance to collect The Best FIFA Men's Coach award in future is if Bayern Munich find new competitions to win, Tottenham boss Jose Mourinho suggested.
Last season, Flick led Bayern to a Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal and Champions League treble, while they have also lifted the UEFA Super Cup and DFL Super Cup in 2020.
So, a few eyebrows were raised when Flick was overlooked for best men's coach at FIFA's annual awards ceremony on Thursday, with Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp retaining the prize.
Klopp led Liverpool to a first English top-flight title in 30 years last term, but when addressing the media on Friday admitted his own surprise by saying: "I'm grateful for it, obviously. From the first moment, like everybody else, I was looking at it a bit wide-eyed, like, how did that happen?"
Mourinho, whose Tottenham side were beaten by Liverpool 2-1 on Wednesday, was asked about the decision when previewing Spurs' clash with Leicester City.
"I think the only chance for Flick to win is that Bayern find two or three more new competitions to win it," Mourinho said with a laugh.
"So maybe if he wins seven titles in one season maybe he wins the award, because I believe he only won the Champions League, Bundesliga, Pokal, European Super Cup, German Super Cup - he only won five and the biggest one of all.
"So I think poor Flick the only chance is for Bayern to try and find two or three more trophies to see if he can win it."
Spurs' defeat to Liverpool saw Mourinho's side surrender top spot in the Premier League to the Reds, who they now trail by three points.
Many pundits have noted Tottenham's propensity to sit deep and play on the counter-attack this season, particularly in bigger matches.
Against Liverpool, Spurs had just 24.2 per cent possession, had 254 passes to Liverpool's 813 and had a pass accuracy of just 61.4%.
The numbers were not dissimilar when Spurs triumphed 2-0 against Arsenal in the north London derby on December 6. On that occasion they had 30.2% possession, 288 passes and 67.4% passing accuracy.
Indeed, Spurs' average of 48.01% possession is only 12th in the league this season, while they rank in the same spot for passing accuracy (80.39%).
Mourinho, though, is mainly interested in one statistic, which is how many goals a team scores.
"You love the word 'possession' and you love the stats," Mourinho said. "You [the media] in general. It is a little bit like the efficiency of players and sometimes you say 'the stats say player B had 92% of efficiency on his passing.'
"But the stats don't say that that player only made passes of two metres... they don't say that that player was a centre-back that only passed to the other centre-back or a number six who only passed the ball to number eight, and the guy who had 65% efficiency on his passes is the guy that made the assists... the guy that makes the tight passes, the guy that makes 60 metres passes to change the direction of the play.
"So the stats, many, many times are like an incredible piece of meat or fish but badly cooked. It doesn't tell me much. What tells me is the number of goals that you score and the number of chances that you create."
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