Jose Mourinho: Why the ‘Special One’ is returning to Real Madrid
So what would a smarter spin look like? The areas where Mourinho needs to improve are no mystery.
He needs to realize that winning is a shared vision, not a self-imposed slogan. Highlights of his tenure at Spurs and Manchester United read like a handbook on what not to do: failing to fully adapt his methods to his squad, ignoring the needs of some of the people around him, taking credit for the defeats while taking credit for them.
There is also an incident in Spain that never became the scandal it should have been.
Mourinho responded to claims of racist abuse leveled at Vinicius by Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni by appealing to Eusebio, clumsily arguing that a club whose biggest legend is a black man could not be racist.
It created a stir and then conspicuously disappeared. This has barely surfaced in the discussion about his return to Madrid, which perhaps tells you everything about the current mood at the club, so desperate for a solution that some questions are quietly brushed aside.
At Madrid, where Vinicius and Mbappe already have a fragile union and the dressing room has been allowed to direct its own politics for two years, a repeat of these disagreements could lead to rapid disaster.
The Vinicius-Mbappe issue deserves more attention. The three managers of Carlo Ancelotti, Xabi Alonso and Arbeloa have failed to make themselves work as a partnership.
The chemistry that was expected to make Madrid the most feared attack in Europe has not yet materialized. Mourinho has a mixed record with difficult combinations and personalities, but let’s stick with the hopeful.
He played striker Samuel Eto’o on the right wing in Inter and they won the treble. In Madrid, he mastered the Cristiano Ronaldo-Karim Benzema dynamic and made them functional, if not always comfortable.
He can do this. But only if they are willing to get by with empathy and communication, not just authority.
Their demands have already been announced. Requests information about signatures; not names, but positions and areas of need.
He identified imbalances in the staff. In his first season at Madrid, he opted for Luka Modric, Sami Khedira and Mesut Özil, and history would bear out all three options.
He also wants his staff to be around him, his own people to be in key roles. The club wants to maintain its medical and physical department. Whether Mourinho can accept this hybrid structure (coaches and doctors) will be an early test of how much he has truly changed.
What is real is also the weight of what he has inherited.
Two title-less seasons and a squad that played without intensity and twice finished below the top 10 in the Champions League group stage.
None of this was mentioned in Perez’s media conference yesterday. He talked about the press, conspiracies, his enemies. He always does this privately, he has never done it this openly before.
He was singing from Mourinho’s song sheet. He didn’t talk about football.
Mourinho will have to do this. And beyond talking about it, he will have to solve this problem by gaining the trust of his students. By managing the culture rather than bulldozing it. By understanding that the club he joins is bigger than any one person.
Yesterday’s press conference could be the start of something. Whether this is a renaissance or a relapse depends almost entirely on whether Mourinho has learned anything from the last decade.
He says it is. Madrid is about to find out.
