Jose Mourinho has insisted that he wasn’t the person behind the exits of Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah from Chelsea.

The two players represented Chelsea while Mourinho was head coach during his second spell at Stamford Bridge.

They played a handful of games, but never quite reached the pinnacles of their careers before they were sold.

Mou has often been blamed for the departures of De Bruyne and Salah, who have since gone on to conquer football with Manchester City and Liverpool, respectively, but the Portuguese coach insists they were simply impatient.

“To be honest, they left because they wanted to leave,” Mourinho told the Obi One podcast. “They left because they didn’t want to wait.

“History proves that their option was good because they’ve had the careers they have and reached a high standard, but sometimes kids make decisions like that because they can’t wait, or they don’t have the patience to be calm and to wait for the right moment. Sometimes their career goes in the wrong direction.”

Mourinho added: “When people say I let Salah go, I say exactly the opposite. I bought Salah. I was the one who said buy that guy. He was going from Basel to Liverpool, and I made a fight, I made a war, to make him come to Chelsea.

“Then comes the part when, to be a Chelsea player, you have to perform, or you need to wait. He didn’t want to wait, he wanted to go on loan. And then Chelsea, at a certain point, decided to sell. He went to Fiorentina and Roma, and that was not me deciding to sell. I was saying let him go on loan if he feels he needs to play every minute of every game.”