Mourinho accuses Fifa of Ballon d’Or vote-rigging

José Mourinho doesn’t much care for awards or prizes. When he was at Chelsea, he famously threw his Premier League winners medal into the Stamford Bridge crowd. When another was hastily proffered, it too went into the stands.

But José Mourinho does like a conspiracy theory. His latest target is Fifa, which the Real Madrid manager accused in a radio interview Tuesday of allowing “irregularities” in the voting for best coach of 2012 at the annual Ballon d’Or awards, a prize picked up by serial winner Vicente del Bosque of Spain.

“One, two or three people called me saying they had voted for me but the vote showed up as cast for somebody else. For this reason I did not go [to the ceremony]. I accuse Fifa of irregularities in the election of the world’s best coach. There was a lack of transparency,” Mourinho said in an interview with Radio Televisión Portuguesa. “Fifa knew about these irregularities but did nothing about it.”

Del Bosque won the award with 34.51 percent of the vote. Mourinho garnered 20.49 percent and former Barcelona boss Pep Guardiola received 12.91 percent.

“Fifa confirms that the list of votes published on Fifa.com is accurate,” the world governing body said in a statement Tuesday.