Jose Mourinho joined leading figures from football and the media to pay tribute to one of the most significant sports journalists of his generation, former Mail on Sunday reporter Simon Greenberg, who died last week at 52 after a short illness.
Roma manager Mourinho saluted the man who paved the way for modern sports news reporting with a string of exclusives and award-winning stories at this newspaper in the Nineties.
Mourinho, who became close to Greenberg during his time as communications director at Chelsea, said: 'Simon was my shadow, my friend and a man of trust during my first spell at Chelsea.
Jose Mourinho has led tributes to former Mail on Sunday sports journalist Simon Greenberg
Greenberg, named sports editor of the Evening Standard at 29, died at the age of 52 last week
'We laughed together, we celebrated together and we also disagreed on occasion. But as good as he was, and as hard as he tried, he couldn't convince me to love cricket. I will miss him. Rest in peace, my friend.'
Prior to his role for Chelsea, it was at The Mail on Sunday where Greenberg came to prominence, working on arguably the biggest sports story of the decade.
Amid a swirl of unsubstantiated rumours concerning bungs in football, he revealed then Arsenal manager George Graham was being investigated for a £285,000 gift from agent Rune Hauge.
Though many speculated at the time about which high-profile managers might be drawn into the scandal, Greenberg, working with then financial editor Lawrence Lever, was the first to name Graham, a story which eventually led to the Arsenal manager losing his job.
Greenberg, then 25, won a string of awards for his revelation, which came amid a Premier League investigation into the culture of agents oiling the wheels of transfer deals with gifts to managers.
Greenberg (left) worked alongside Mourinho (right) as director of communications at Chelsea
'When you think of Simon and everything he did, it's impossible not to recall the George Graham bung story,' said Roger Kelly, who was his sports editor at The Mail on Sunday and hired him from the Hornsey Journal.
'It was one of his greatest successes, and written at a very young point in his career. It was ground-breaking in the way it opened up a whole new world of investigative stories in sport, based on painstaking research into financial records. Simon helped to establish this new way of doing things.'
Greenberg's extraordinary networking saw him write several exclusives for the paper.
Having been rejected by Cardiff University's post-graduate journalism school, he thrived on City University's journalism course, where a fellow student was Will Lewis, the future editor of the Daily Telegraph and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, who became a lifelong friend.
The Mail on Sunday's former chief sports writer Patrick Collins recalled: 'When Simon started at The Mail on Sunday, I was asked to introduce him to people in various sports, especially in football and track and field.
In response to his death, the Portuguese declared: 'I will miss him. Rest in peace, my friend'
