Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more combustible at the Santiago Bernabeu, here comes Jose Mourinho. With a deal reported to be close for the 63-year-old to make a sensational return to Real Madrid, a club who were desperate to move on from him 13 years ago, Mourinho is doing little to cool speculation.
“My future should be decided this week,” Mourinho reported in the post-match press conference after Benfica’s final game of the season, a 3-1 win at Estoril that ensured they finished the season unbeaten but failed to secure the top two finish that would qualify them for the Champions League. “I need time. I need space. I need time to make my decision. This week, I think, will be very important.
“I don’t have a proposal from Real Madrid. But to hide, to say there is nothing, I cannot do that. There is something. But not with me directly.”
It is likely that formal confirmation will come soon, given that Mourinho’s Benfica contract includes a clause that will allow him to depart for around $3.5 million in the 10 days after their season ends.
No wonder then that at Real Madrid they are talking about the so-called Special One as a when, not an if. The man who has been keeping his seat in the dugout warm over the second half of the season, Alvaro Arbeloa, reported this weekend that Mourinho “is number one.”
“If he comes back next year, I’ll be very happy to see him back home,” Arbeloa added. Not a view, it is fair to say, that would be shared by several of those who played under Mourinho at a time when 100-point seasons did not entirely seem worth the aggravation their manager inflicted on the club.
At least that iteration of Mourinho won things. It is now 11 years since the last of his eight league titles, a period of ever-decreasing returns. A Europa League and second-place finish with Manchester United in 2016-17 looks rather impressive given that club’s recent history and less so considering the talent lavished on the manager. After Old Trafford, Mourinho has served to accelerate the decline of the clubs he is leading. Neither Tottenham nor Roma finished above sixth with him in charge. Finishing second with Fenerbahce and third with Benfica might reasonably be considered failure, particularly given how he shepherded both clubs away from the Champions League.
So, why are the powers that be at Madrid suffering from this Mourinho derangement syndrome? It can’t all be because Anatolii Trubin scored that goal against them back in the Champions League league phase, can it? Well, the first issue here is that term: “powers that be.” We’re not really talking in the plural here. This is about Florentino Perez and his intent to wrangle back a club that has fallen off its pedestal with two titleless seasons.
For a sense of why Perez has gone back, one need only examine his press conference last Tuesday. Paranoid, rife with complaints at referees and intent on presenting his club as the victim of a conspiracy: this was straight from the Mourinho playbook. He has seen his club torn apart by dressing room infighting, culminating in the huge fines meted out to Aurelien Tchouameni and Federico Valverde after a bust up that the latter denied ever actually “came to blows.” Meanwhile, Kylian Mbappe is claiming that Arbeloa has demoted him, something that the head coach himself has pushed back on. All that follows on from key players, including Vinicius Junior and Jude Bellingham, not taking to Xabi Alonso, who bombed out after seven months.
That the Madrid dressing room needs wrangling back into shape is beyond doubt now. Mourinho retains a reputation as a man who can do that, despite the evidence of his second tenure at Chelsea or his very public difficulties coaching Paul Pogba. The best that can be reported of his man-management style is that he is extremely capable of rallying a core around him in the dressing room. Woe betide those who find themselves outside that inner sanctum. And hasn’t that been Madrid’s problem in recent years, that every coach almost inevitably has to play favorites between Mbappe and Vinicius?
The latter would be entitled to already take against Mourinho given his comments after the Champions League playoff first leg earlier this season, when the Benfica head coach suggested that Vinicius should have tempered celebrations amid claims that he been racially abused by Gianluca Prestianni. He also suggested that Benfica, as a club, could not be racist because their greatest player was black.
For many, his handling of such a demanding moment ought to be a disqualifying factor. Suppose that you, instead, care only about results. Mourinho is not getting those. His Benfica side might not have lost this season, but they drew 11 of 34 league games and had the worst defensive record of Portugal’s big three while scoring 15 fewer than Sporting CP. In Turkiye, Fenerbahce took one point from games against Besiktas and Galatasaray, never getting close to pipping the latter to the title.
These tripolar leagues are about as decent an approximation for La Liga as you’ll get in Europe right now, and Mourinho seems no more able to bend these to his will than he did the Premier League and Serie A beforehand. He had his time, those dozen or so years when his charisma bewitched Europe and he delivered the biggest trophies of them all. That time has long since gone. What is left is not a winner and therefore, inevitably, not a manager for Real Madrid. It won’t be long before that is proven beyond debate.
