Whenever Jose Mourinho has a pop at anyone it’s usually from a position of insecurity – great or small – on the Portuguese’s part.
And that will certainly have been the case on Sunday, when he used his programme notes to get under Ronald Koeman’s skin.
Mourinho reckoned Everton ought to be a top-four side this season given their summer spend.
That prompted exactly the sort of response he’d have wanted from the Dutchman, who argued his club can expect roughly the same as last season when they finished seventh.
Mourinho knows Everton aren’t going to challenge for the Champions League places.
So that was just a shot across the bows and one that no doubt harks back to the days when the pair were assistants to Louis van Gaal at Barcelona.
Koeman, a former Barcelona star, was and is revered at the Nou Camp, where Mourinho, disparagingly, was known to the players as ‘The Translator’.
Mourinho will never get anywhere near Koeman in terms of his football pedigree or credibility within the walls of the Nou Camp.
So Sunday’s jibe was his way of letting Koeman know who is the boss in the managerial department, intensified by Manchester United’s start to the season.
The truth is that United and Everton aren’t going to be looking at the same trophies this year or next year.
Perhaps, depending on how much money Farhad Moshiri puts in, Everton might start laying down markers for the years ahead.
But they didn’t sign the 20-goal-a-season striker they needed before the summer transfer window closed – even though Koeman wanted one.
You only have to look at what Romelu Lukaku has done at United since his move from Everton to see how important reliable goalscorers are to teams.
The Belgian has hit the ground running, he’s confident and he’s getting the goals which are breeding confidence throughout his team.
I can understand Everton wanting to flesh out their squad with the Lukaku money in the summer – but unless you’ve got goals in the side you’re not going to break into the top four.
Arsenal have Alexis Sanchez, Liverpool have Sadio Mane and Mo Salah, while United will have four options up front when Zlatan Ibrahimovic is back, and Manchester City four or five.
So not until Everton have a Lukaku and a Marcus Rashford-type figure coming through to get 40 or 50 goals between them will they make the leap from Europa League to Champions League.
I was surprised they didn’t push hard for Fernando Llorente, who has a great pedigree, or David Villa, who is scoring goals for fun in New York and has just been brought back into the Spain squad.
Could they have given Ibrahimovic’s agent a cheeky call and offered him a three-year deal?
Any of them would have made a difference and had even one of them signed then Koeman might have been a little bit more inclined to agree with Mourinho’s assertion, or Mourinho less inclined to make it in the first place.