There is one scene that says everything about José Mourinho. It is June 2013, the final match of his first spell at Real Madrid, a 4-2 win against Osasuna. When he looks behind him one last time, he discovers that only three people are still standing beside him: Diego Lopez, the goalkeeper he used to humiliate Iker Casillas; Michael Essien, loyal disciple since the Chelsea days; and a Luka Modric still too young to understand what was happening around him. Cristiano Ronaldo is not there. Sergio Ramos is not there. Pepe is not there. Casillas is not there either, but that part was expected.
Three hundred and sixty-five days earlier, that same team had won La Liga with 100 points.
Now Mourinho appears to be on the verge of returning to the Santiago Bernabéu. Thirteen years later. Florentino Pérez wants him, talks are reportedly advanced, Fabrizio Romano confirms it. Real Madrid are coming off their worst season in years: eliminated from the Champions League, La Liga lost to Barcelona in the Clásico, a fight between Valverde and Tchouameni during training, Mbappé watching the match from home while pretending to be injured. A dressing room split into rival factions, like something out of a low-budget gangster film. And Florentino, in the most Trumpian press conference of his career, declared that “they will have to shoot me” to make him leave, before calling snap elections and rewriting the club’s statutes so that almost nobody could realistically run against him.
In this context, José Mourinho feels almost inevitable.
The character swallowed the coach
There is a precise moment when Mourinho stops being primarily a coach and becomes primarily a character. It is difficult to date exactly, but if one had to choose a turning point, it would probably be that press conference after Chelsea-Leicester in December 2015, when cameras caught him with red eyes, swollen eyelids, an unshaven beard, one hand behind his neck. He talks about betrayal. He talks about players elevated “to a level too high.” He searches for solidarity in the reporter sitting in front of him.
That Mourinho no longer resembles the man who made Materazzi cry and convinced Ibrahimovic he would kill for him. He no longer resembles the coach who controlled the height of the grass at the Bernabéu to slow Barcelona down. He no longer resembles the man who managed to make even Cristiano Ronaldo defend and press, an achievement many considered impossible.
He looks like someone who has lost the thread.
From that moment onward there would still be occasional flashes of greatness, but the trajectory became obvious. Manchester United: Europa League won, then sacked. Tottenham: a near-Champions League final run, then sacked. Roma: a Conference League, an Europa League final lost on penalties, then sacked. Fenerbahçe: failed Champions League qualification against Benfica, then dismissed with a fifteen-million-euro severance package. Four consecutive sackings. And then, with the kind of diabolical timing only Mourinho knows how to construct or stumble upon, Benfica sack Bruno Lage after a home defeat to Qarabag. Mourinho is already waiting.
“I made a mistake by going to Fenerbahçe,” he will say during his unveiling press conference at Benfica. “It was not my cultural level, it was not my footballing level.” A sentence that works simultaneously as confession and self-defense, a mea culpa already carrying its own absolution inside it.
The Mourinho system
To understand what may happen at Real Madrid, it is worth revisiting how the Mourinho system actually works. Not the tactics, which have always been simpler than his supporters like to admit: solid defense, vertical counterattacks, exploiting pace on the wings. Tactics are merely the pretext. The real system is psychological.
It works like this: Mourinho arrives, identifies a sacrificial victim, publicly destroys them to establish who is in command. At Porto it was Vitor Baia, the monumental goalkeeper, suspended for a month without apparent reason. “He needed a target to establish his leadership, and that target was me,” Baia would later recall. “It was all part of a plan.” At Chelsea it was Joe Cole, publicly criticized after scoring the winner against Liverpool and being named Man of the Match. At Real Madrid it was Pedro Leon, bought from Getafe for ten million euros and dismantled in front of his teammates in a monologue worthy of a Sorrentino film: “Here at Real Madrid everyone gets five minutes to show what they can do. You already had yours.”
Then he builds the clan, the us-against-the-world mentality. He pushes players against the press, against opponents, sometimes against federations or referees. He creates an atmosphere of permanent pressure in which loyalty to him becomes the only currency that matters. Results, at least in the early seasons, follow. The Liga with Real Madrid, the Treble with Inter, league titles with Chelsea: none of it was accidental.
The problem is that the system deteriorates. The sacrificial victims multiply, alliances collapse, factions start fighting each other. At Real Madrid the destruction cycle accelerated rapidly: first Casillas, then Sergio Ramos, then Pepe, then Ronaldo. When Mourinho left in 2013, he had three players left. Three.
The unsolvable Casillas question
Among all Mourinho’s battles, the one with Iker Casillas remains the most revealing, because it shows the exact point where control turns into self-destruction.
Casillas had called Xavi in an attempt to create a détente strategy between Real Madrid and Barcelona, worried that tensions between the clubs could damage the Spanish national team ahead of the European Championship. It was a responsible gesture, almost statesmanlike. Mourinho interpreted it as betrayal: his players could not speak with the enemy, and the Spanish core of the dressing room could not have direct access to Florentino Pérez. The us-against-the-world logic had to be absolute.
From there came the cold war, then the open war, then the farce of Diego Lopez becoming first-choice goalkeeper after Casillas injured his hand, then Vilanova’s Barcelona winning La Liga by fifteen points while Real Madrid watched Robert Lewandowski score four goals in a Champions League semifinal.
Casillas has written on social media that he does not want Mourinho back at Real Madrid. “I believe there are other coaches better qualified to manage the club of my life. Personal opinion. Nothing more.” It is a diplomatic sentence concealing thirteen years of resentment. Mourinho probably considers it a medal.
Why Florentino wants him
Real Madrid in 2026 dangerously resembles the Real Madrid of 2010 that first welcomed Mourinho: a dressing room with too much power, a squad of stars difficult to manage, a president in need of someone capable of restoring hierarchy. The Valverde-Tchouameni fight, rival gangs inside the dressing room, Mbappé watching the Clásico from home, Arbeloa nicknamed “the cone” by his own players: the picture is that of a group that has dissolved.
Florentino thinks according to the logic of total control, the same logic that pushed Mourinho to become what he is. He needs someone who speaks to microphones with the same authority he speaks with inside the dressing room, someone capable of absorbing controversy, someone charismatic enough to make chaos appear manageable. He does not need a tactician. He needs someone capable of imposing order.
It is not the first time this logic has prevailed at the Bernabéu: the reasoning resembles the one that brought back Ancelotti and Zidane. Real Madrid is a universe apart, Florentino says, and what matters here is knowing the place. It hardly matters what Mourinho has done outside Madrid over the last thirteen years. What matters is what he can do here, now, with this fractured dressing room.
The problem is that the first time he left the dressing room even more fractured than he had found it. But apparently, inside Florentino Pérez’s office right now, that consideration does not weigh heavily enough.
The man who cannot stop
There is something almost tragic in Mourinho’s trajectory when viewed from a distance. A man who built his entire identity around the idea of control, and who has spent the last ten years watching that control slowly disintegrate. Not catastrophically, not all at once, but piece by piece: one player at a time, one press conference at a time, one dismissal at a time.
And yet he cannot stop. He cannot stay away from football even for a single full season. When Fenerbahçe sacked him, paying fifteen million euros simply to get rid of him, he was already preparing for the next phone call. When Benfica lost to Qarabag, he was already on the line.
Jonathan Wilson, who may have written the smartest thing ever written about Mourinho, once posed the right question: “One of the problems with Mourinho is that, the moment you start arguing he is a manipulator, you have to stop and ask yourself: is he really a manipulator, or is that simply what he wants people to think he is?” There is no definitive answer to that question. And that is precisely why Mourinho still works, why football continues to embrace him, why Florentino Pérez is waiting for him.
The character swallowed the coach. But the character, now, might be enough for Madrid.