Jose Mourinho has admitted he was “blind” to spurn the chance to sign a teenage Diego Costa for Chelsea eight years ago.

Mourinho will hand summer signing Costa a debut at Burnley tonight in the Blues’ Premier League opener, and revealed he first scouted him when he was at Braga in 2006.

“To be fair when he was in Portu­gal I had a look at him, so everybody was blind, including myself,” said Mourinho, of the forward he signed from Atletico Madrid for £32mil­lion (Dh196m) this summer.

Mourinho claimed he will absorb the pressure – both internal and external – for silverware at Chel­sea this season, refusing to alter his plans.

“It doesn’t change my approach,” said Mourinho. “It doesn’t change my vision, my feeling.

“We can do nothing more than say, we can do nothing more than feel: we feel we are title contenders, we can’t add anything else to this.

“If the first team is better than us, if we are good, very good, but some­body is better than us, that’s foot­ball, that’s not a failure.

“But the only thing you can do is to be good. We have to be good, to be better than last season, in every­thing.

“We have to fight for titles, and after that if somebody is really bet­ter than us, it’s because they were fantastic.”

New boy Costa can only speak “10 words in English”, but Mourin­ho said his low-key personality and warm body language have already endeared him to his team-mates.

“He’s such a communicator, he’s such a group guy: he’s such a hap­py man that despite not speaking more than 10 words in English, he still speaks with everybody,” said Mourinho.

“He can have a conversation and interact with everybody, and he doesn’t understand one single word the person is saying.”