Only a desperate football club would hire the 2026 version of Jose Mourinho. At Real Madrid, they have held the door wide open.
Mourinho remains a box office figure. The years have not dimmed his charisma. Watching him work a room when he brought Benfica to Chelsea earlier this season was to see evidence of that.
But as an elite-level football coach, Mourinho’s smarts have long since left the building. His last domestic title was with Chelsea 11 years ago. Subsequent spells at Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbahce and now Benfica have been notable largely for the noise and not much else.
His return to the Bernabeu will be colourful. At 63, he has lost none of his confidence. But the thought of the great Portuguese returning his old club to the pinnacle of Spanish and European football after a relatively fallow two years is very hard to conjure indeed.
At United and Tottenham they hired him as a gamble, a painful but necessary move that was supposed to act as a shortcut to silverware. He failed at both.
Footage from El Chiringuito shows Jose Mourinho leaving Benfica’s training ground today
At United, in particular, they couldn’t wait to get him out of the building. His in-house TV sessions were once described by a staffer as ‘the Mourinho hostage videos’.
The Real dressing room needs personality and substance and control. Mourinho will take a decent shot at that but for how long?
Mourinho has never done long-term projects – his longest posting is three seasons – and Real are a football club that needs some real stability as much as anything. They are behind Barcelona after successive Catalan LaLiga wins and the pressure to reverse what is threatening to become a trend will begin immediately.
Somehow Mourinho must build a team from chaos. Details of a recent fight between Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni are now publicly and painfully known. The damage was not only to Valverde’s head but also Real’s reputation.
And then there is the Vinicius Junior problem. It has been reported that the young Brazilian holds no grudge against his incoming manager despite Mourinho failing to strike anywhere near the right tone after one of his Benfica players – Gianluca Prestianni – was accused of racially abusing Vini Jnr during a February Champions League game.
Mourinho said Vini Jnr had provoked his players in the Real Madrid-Benfica racism row
Mourinho said Vini Jnr had provoked his players with a goal celebration, leading to the Kick It Out group accusing him of ‘gaslighting’.
Footballers can be pragmatic in their outlook. They can move past many things if they think it will help them play on a winning team. But matters of race are something else entirely. Vini Jnr may be prepared to shake Mourinho’s hand on the way in but what happens when the pressures of next season begin to be felt may well be another thing entirely.
Mourinho has history on his side in Madrid. He went to war with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona 15 years ago and landed some significant blows, winning the 2012 Spanish title. He was also chased from the building by the Madrid media – and indeed some of the players – when his first spell there all began to fall apart.
That’s how it’s always been with Mourinho. Boom and bust and get out. The problem is that in the back end of his career, the booms have been harder to find and even more difficult to maintain.
At Roma there was a Conference League success which was emotionally and gratefully received but over time there was no real improvement in league position.
The reality is that Mourinho has become a moments manager. The strange thing is that nobody at Real Madrid seems to have noticed that this one is not his.
