Jose Mourinho is set to return to Real Madrid after 13 years, marking the beginning of a new era for the club. Real Madrid president Florentino Perez held a press conference filled with tension and conspiracies, signaling the challenges ahead.
Key points
Jose Mourinho is returning to Real Madrid after 13 years.
Florentino Perez held a tense press conference.
The club is facing significant challenges.
Mourinho's return marks the start of a new era.
Mentioned in this story
Jose MourinhoReal MadridFlorentino Perez
Guillem Balague column byline
[BBC]
There are press conferences and then there are spectacles, not always matching communication strategies.
What Real Madrid president Florentino Perez staged on Tuesday - emerging after more than a decade without a press conference to rage against journalists, invoke conspiracies and warn that they would have to "shoot him out" of the Bernabeu - was a man in a bunker, surrounded by enemies real and invented.
It was the starting gun of a new era. Because hovering over that entire chaotic hour was the truth everyone in the room already knew: Jose Mourinho is coming back to Real Madrid, 13 years after his previous explosive stint.
And here is the darkly fitting thing: Mourinho's entire managerial philosophy - the siege mentality, the us-against-the-world framing, the weaponisation of grievance, the use of media as the enemies - is perfectly calibrated for the climate Perez has spent years cultivating.
A president who is highly critical of referees, who believes the media wants to destroy him, and that Barcelona are favoured by La Liga has finally found his ideal coach.
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Jose Mourinho
Jose Mourinho is returning to Real Madrid after 13 years away [Getty Images]
The paranoia runs in the corridors of power at the Bernabeu and will now be in the dugout with Mourinho - although, in fact, predecessor Alvaro Arbeloa has bought that vision of the world already.
That, more than anything, is why this appointment makes sense in Perez's mind.
Madrid's dressing room is fractured. There have been fights between players. Vinicius Jr got what he wanted when Xabi Alonso was sacked as manager. Kylian Mbappe is not loved and seems a strange body in the club.
Then add to that the squad finished a second consecutive season without a major trophy.
Into this chaos walks a man with an iron fist, a famous surname and zero tolerance for insubordination. For a president who cannot control his own stars, the appeal of Mourinho is obvious.
But appetite is not the same as wisdom. And before Madrid celebrates the return of the 'Special One', it is worth asking a harder question: will he make the same mistakes again?
Past wounds haven't healed as return divides fans
The numbers are not kind. Mourinho has not won a league title in 11 years. He has been sacked - or effectively pushed out - in five of his last six jobs.
At Tottenham, the Amazon documentary All or Nothing captured something instructive. Training sessions were described as tedious. Players disengaged. His half-time team talks veered between indifference and screaming.
After defeats, he blamed his players publicly. By the end, the dressing room had fractured into three camps: a small group of loyalists, a larger group who actively resented him, and a numb majority who had simply stopped caring. He won nothing and left the club worse than he found it.
At the core of those failures was something beyond tactics. It was culture. Mourinho's great blind spot has always been the assumption that his personality - his aura, his force of will - is sufficient to override the values an institution has built over decades.
At Spurs the club's identity, fragile as it was, disintegrated around him. Parts of his diagnosis of the situation, as at Manchester United, were spot on - but he possibly used the wrong medicine.
Real Madrid is not Spurs, not even Manchester United or Chelsea, not Roma. It is a club with its own culture, its own hierarchy of pride, and its own very particular expectations of what winning means.
When Mourinho was last here, between 2010 and 2013, he left behind relationships so damaged that he himself, in January this year, described that period as "almost violent".
The wounds from a spell that brought one league title and Copa del Rey did not heal cleanly. The fans are divided. But Perez, the guiding light, has told them already: we do have enemies and I will fight. Cue Mourinho entrance.
Controversy, fractures and conspiracies
Jose Mourinho with Real Madrid president Florentino Perez
Jose Mourinho with Real Madrid president Florentino Perez [Getty Images]
So what would a wiser return look like? The areas where Mourinho must improve are not mysterious.
He needs to recognise that winning is a shared vision, not a slogan he imposes. The bullet points from his Spurs and Manchester United tenure read like a manual of 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 victories while offloading blame for defeats.
There is also the matter of an incident that, in Spain, never quite became the scandal it perhaps should have.
Mourinho responded to allegations of racist abuse from Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni directed at Vinicius by invoking Eusebio, arguing, clumsily, that a club whose greatest legend was a black man could not be racist.
It caused a stir and then, remarkably, disappeared. It has barely surfaced in the debate about his return to Madrid, which perhaps tells you everything about the current mood at the club, so desperate for a solution that certain questions get quietly filed away.
At Madrid, with Vinicius and Mbappe already in a fragile coexistence, with a dressing room that has been allowed to run its own politics for two years, any repetition of them falling out might produce a quick catastrophe.
The Vinicius-Mbappe problem deserves more attention. Three managers - Carlo Ancelotti, Xabi Alonso, Arbeloa - have been unable to make them function as a partnership.
The chemistry that was supposed to make Madrid the most feared attack in Europe simply has not materialised. Mourinho's record with difficult combinations or personalities is mixed, but let's go with the hopeful.
He made striker Samuel Eto'o play as a right winger at Inter Milan and they won the Treble. He managed the Cristiano Ronaldo-Karim Benzema dynamic at Madrid, keeping them functional if not always comfortable.
He can do this. But only if he's willing to manage with empathy and communication rather than authority alone.
His demands have already been outlined. He wants input on signings - not names necessarily, but positions, areas of need.
He has identified imbalances in the squad. In his first Madrid spell, he pushed for Luka Modric, Sami Khedira and Mesut Ozil, and history would vindicate all three choices.
He also wants his staff around him, his own people in key roles. The club wants to retain their medical and physical department. Whether Mourinho can not only accept but work with that hybrid structure - his coaches, their doctors - will be an early test of how much he has genuinely changed.
What is also real is the weight of what he is inheriting.
Two titleless seasons and a squad that played without intensity and finished below the top 10 in the Champions League group phase - twice.
Perez's media conference yesterday named none of this. He spoke about the press, about conspiracies, about his enemies. He always does it in private, never so openly before.
He was singing from the Mourinho songsheet. He did not speak about the football.
Mourinho will have to do so. And beyond speaking about it, he will have to solve it by earning trust with his pupils. By managing culture rather than bulldozing it. By understanding that the club he is joining is bigger than any one person.
The press conference yesterday may well have marked the beginning of something. Whether it is a renaissance or a relapse depends almost entirely on whether Mourinho has learned anything from the last decade.
