Even at the worst of times, sacked by Tottenham Hotspur, AS Roma and Fenerbahce, finding himself back on the Europa League circuit or worse, one route back to the top table remained open for Jose Mourinho.
Through it all — the past nine years that have yielded a solitary trophy, the 10 years he went without winning a Champions League knockout tie, the 11 years he has gone without even coming close to a domestic league title — the possibility of a reunion with Real Madrid lingered, an old flame that still flickered away somewhere in the background.
His tenure in Madrid, between 2010 and 2013, was turbulent even by Mourinho standards, but Madrid president Florentino Perez still carried a torch for him, long after others among European football’s elite had dismissed him as yesterday’s man.
The prospect of a return to Madrid, as he approaches a break clause in his contract at Benfica, is fascinating in the context of Mourinho’s career arc. From the hip young gunslinger leading FC Porto, Chelsea and Internazionale to huge success, to the blood feud with Pep Guardiola and Barcelona during those streetfighting years in Madrid, to the bittersweet second spell at Chelsea and the diminishing returns over a decade spent drifting joylessly from Manchester United to Tottenham to Roma to Fenerbahce to Benfica … and now back to the Bernabeu? It feels like a morality tale where the anti-hero gets one last shot at happiness, one last chance to show the world he has been wronged.
As Real Madrid coach, Jose Mourinho had an intense rivalry with Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)
It is also intriguing from a Madrid perspective. How, from what looked like a position of rare stability as well as familiar success after winning yet another Champions League title under Carlo Ancelotti in 2024, has the biggest club in world football lost its way so badly over the past two years that turning to Mourinho has become, in the eyes of Perez, the only viable option?
The sense of dysfunction detailed here by The Athletic here, after a series of clashes at the training ground in the build-up to this weekend’s clasico against Barcelona, is alarming. The training-ground scrap between Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni was the nadir in a season marked by one episode after another as first Xabi Alonso and then Alvaro Arbeloa have tried and failed to impose discipline over the squad.
In that context, after a second consecutive season in which a richly talented group of players have fallen well short in both La Liga and the Champions League, Perez has decided it is time for a disciplinarian, a coach who will rule that dressing room with a rod of iron, hence Mourinho.
But does Perez really know what he wants? He appointed Alonso last summer, apparently convinced that his former Spain midfielder’s success with Bayer Leverkusen was something that could be replicated at the Bernabeu, but the president abandoned this “new project” at almost the first sign of trouble. He caused outrage across Spain by taking the national team coach Julen Lopetegui on the eve of the World Cup in 2018, but gave up on that after 138 days. The coaches who have thrived at 21st-century Madrid have been quieter, less intense, less interventionist types: Vicente Del Bosque, Carlo Ancelotti, Zinedine Zidane.
At Real Madrid, the perception is that superstar players, like Kylian Mbappe, hold the real power (Jose Manuel Alvarez Rey/Getty Images)
This is the world that Perez has created. Players are placed on a pedestal — that first wave of galacticos in the early 2000s (led by Raul Gonzalez, Roberto Carlos, Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and David Beckham), the next wave that arrived at the start of Perez’s second term as president (led by Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Alonso and Karim Benzema) and the new generation of stars led by Rodrygo, Vinicius Junior, Jude Bellingham and Kylian Mbappe) — and coaches are seen but far less often heard.
That is the culture in which Mourinho fought to impose his authority in his first spell in Madrid. The biggest confrontations came with Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos, but he also clashed with Cristiano Ronaldo, Benzema and others. And as with the other battles he engaged in — with Guardiola and Barcelona, with the Spanish football authorities, with various figures behind the scenes in Madrid — the effect was corrosive. He won some of those battles in the short term, beating Guardiola’s brilliant Barcelona to the Copa del Rey in his first season and La Liga in his second, reaching three Champions League semi-finals too, but he lost the war.
At times the margins were paper-thin. But by the difficult third season — it was always a difficult third season in those days when Mourinho used to sail through the first two — it had become clear to all concerned that he and his players had become sick of the sight of each other. As he said in February this year, preparing to face Madrid again as coach of Benfica, it was a “tough, intense, almost violent” period.
And that was at or perhaps just beyond the peak of his powers. That was the Mourinho whose relationships with the clubs and the players he managed were whirlwind romances: Porto, Chelsea, Inter. You knew it wouldn’t last, but the ride would always be worth the fall. Madrid was the first time it was possible to wonder whether, despite those two trophy successes, hiring Mourinho had been worth all the volatility and negativity that had come with him. It would not be the last.
Over the past decade, the successes (winning the League Cup and the Europa League with Manchester United in 2017, taking them to second in the Premier League a year later, winning the Conference League with Roma in 2022) have been far outweighed by the controversies and the sense of discord that is never far away. He lasted two-and-a-half years second time around at Chelsea, two-and-a-half years at Manchester United, 17 months at Tottenham, two-and-a-half years at Roma, 14 months at Fenerbahce, eight months so far at Benfica (where he would be welcome to extend his stay if he wished). There have been ups and downs in all of those jobs. What there has not been, for over a decade, is an achievement of the type he would have thought creditable back in the days when he used to sneer at managers who came second.
Over the course of the 2010s, a decade in which football came to be defined by the free-flowing possession football of Guardiola and the counter-pressing intensity of Jurgen Klopp, the Mourinho approach went stale. Whereas Guardiola and Klopp energised their players, Mourinho seemed exasperated by a generation that he felt lacked the toughness and never-say-die-spirit of Jorge Costa at Porto, John Terry and Frank Lampard at Chelsea, Javier Zanetti and Marco Materazzi at Inter and indeed Alonso and Arbeloa, two of his most trusted lieutenants at Madrid.
So if he is to take over at Madrid next season, how will he address the challenges of managing the likes of Bellingham, Vinicius Jr and Mbappe, who have been afforded the superstar treatment since their late teens? Or Valverde and Tchouameni, whose behaviour this week led to a disciplinary hearing on Friday at which both players were fined €500,000 (£432,100; $588,520)? Or, from a different perspective, Trent Alexander-Arnold, whose creative approach to full-back play could hardly appear less suited to the Mourinho doctrine?
On the subject of Vinicius Jr, it is less than three months since he was racially abused by Benfica supporters — and, he believed at the time, by one of their players, Gianluca Prestianni — during a Champions League clash in Lisbon.
Prestianni denied the allegation and was subsequently banned by UEFA and FIFA after admitting using a homophobic (rather than racist) slur against the Madrid forward. It might not be easily forgotten by Vinicius Jr and some of his team-mates that Mourinho’s immediate response, in a post-match interview with Prime Video, was to suggest that all of this ugliness could have been avoided had Vinicius Jr not “messed with 60,000 people in this stadium” by the way he celebrated scoring the only goal of the game.
Jose Mourinho confronts Vinicius Jr during a Champions League game earlier this season (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)
Reassuringly, sources close to Vinicius Jr, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, have indicated to The Athletic that they do not see a problem with Mourinho’s prospective appointment at Madrid. But that episode — and the PR fiasco as Benfica followed Mourinho’s lead — brought another reminder of the downside of Mourinho’s determination to fight his team’s corner at all costs. There were various instances of that in his first spell in Madrid: a siege mentality that initially galvanised his players and then spiralled out of control.
It is easy to suggest all of that is in the past and to imagine Mourinho pitching up at Madrid’s training ground in Valdebebas, saying all the right things and setting out clearly what he expects. It is easy to imagine an immediate buy-in from the club’s hierarchy, from the players, from the supporters and even from the media.
We have all seen the Mourinho cycle often enough to know how upbeat it can be initially, when he oozes charisma and an easy charm that persuades people he has mellowed with age. We have also seen it often enough to know that the real test will come once the honeymoon period is over.
The longer that has passed since his glory days, the more dated Mourinho and his methods have begun to appear. After Manchester United were knocked out of the Champions League by Sevilla in 2018, Madrid-based sports newspaper Marca likened Mourinho to “a washed-up rock star, one of those guys who goes around holiday hotels for pensioners, playing old hits on an organ with the bass and percussion playing on a tape recorder”.
That caricature seemed a little harsh at the time — to repeat, eight years ago — but those years spent slumming it in the Europa League and Conference League circuit, coaching in Turkey and now Portugal, only heightened the impression that his days at the very top of the game were well behind him.
The perfect ending to this story would have Mourinho swaggering back into the Bernabeu, rolling back the years, embracing the talent that abounds in the squad and turning an underperforming team into one that gets the basics right, performs week-in week-out and wins the biggest prizes, thriving on the right kind of competitive tension rather than undermined by petty individual agendas.
But the suspicion lingers that this apparent reunion would be doomed from its conception. If it was a mid-season firefighting appointment, a shock treatment designed to focus minds before the Champions League knockout stage, it would be understandable. But to turn to Mourinho with some kind of great cultural reset in mind, in 2026, appears questionable in the extreme. A box-office element is guaranteed. Box-office football is not.
