Mourinho’s return to Real Madrid a classic rebound

Not quite a month ago, nearly two million people lined the streets of Madrid to see the World Cup paraded by the Spanish national team. It might as well have been another lifetime.

By the time the Plaza de Cibeles was swept up and sprayed down, the country’s attention had shifted to the only thing — or person — it seemed anyone wanted to be talking about: José Mourinho.

And they haven’t stopped talking about him. He hasn’t let them.

On June 11, the same day the World Cup kicked off in Mexico City, Mourinho was appointed head coach of Real Madrid for a second time. In his initial stint at the sport’s biggest club, which had ended 13 years prior, he’d won the Copa del Rey his first season, La Liga in his second and nothing in his third.

Then a prime-aged manager of 50, he’d come to Spain on the back of a treble-winning season with Inter Milan. Now, at 63, he re-enters the Bernabéu on the back of a Netflix documentary.

Given that the miniseries had been two years in the making, the timing was a coincidence, albeit a fortuitous one. Netflix released the teaser on June 13, and all three episodes began streaming earlier this week.

“I was born in football,” says Mourinho at its outset. “I live in football every day of my life. Without football there is not something complete in place for me.”

It’s a revealing line. Though it says as much about Real Madrid as it does about him.

Mourinho’s most recent league title was with Chelsea in 2015. John Terry was still the captain back then; Didier Drogba led the line; Eden Hazard could actually play. Speaking of lifetimes ago…

His following stints at Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, AS Roma, Fenerbahçe and Benfica yielded all of an English League Cup and the Europa and Conference Leagues. It’s a trajectory of decline that was obvious to everyone — except, apparently, Real Madrid.

Now, it’s hardly surprising that a coach, any coach, would want to work for Los Blancos. So, even if Mourinho had lobbied for the job, determined to continue in the line of work that “completes” him, club president Florentino Pérez would have been under no obligation to take his former employee’s entreaties seriously.

And he shouldn’t have. Not when he could have had his pick of an impressive list of available coaches, nevermind the many young talents currently managing in Spain.

Why, then? Why tie your fate to a figure without any upside?

Desperation, for starters.

Madrid finished second to Barcelona last term — an unacceptable shortcoming. And having also been runner-up to the Catalans the season before that, the Madrid higher-ups, flailing for a familiar quick fix, latched on to someone they already knew, and who already knew them. The classic rebound.

But they also sought to punish a squad that not only failed to meet expectations, but also veered, with frequency, into dysfunction.

Mourinho, the thinking goes, or must have gone, will bring the firm hand of the disciplinarian into the dressing room, abiding no nonsense while applying some old-fashioned pragmatism during games. The Kylian Mbappé-Vini Jr. dynamic requires tending, as does the Denzel Dumfries-Trent Alexander-Arnold competition. There are problems in the midfield positions, too, and Jude Bellingham needs to be properly utilized.

Finally, and most decisively, there is the fact that Pérez is easily the most paranoid executive in club football. Nothing is ever his fault, and everyone from the referees, the media, other teams and the monster under his bed is dead set on sabotaging Real Madrid.

Mourinho understands this, because they’re out to get him, too.

In the Netflix doc he quite hilariously portrays his first Chelsea teams as plucky underdogs, undermined by a sort of football-specific deep state. This, despite the sport-altering sums that the Blues — funded by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich — spent to give him a dream team.

Nobody wanted him to succeed, he pouts, which is why he found himself in such adversarial situations as managing an Inter Milan side that had won three straight titles before his arrival in 2008.

He is football’s Don Quixote, tilting at whatever windmills his imagination can conjure.

But Miguel de Cervantes’ novel remains among the all-time best-selling works of fiction. Even in 2026, it seems that readers can’t get enough of his romantically delusional protagonist.

Nor Real Madrid’s, apparently.

Everything Mourinho says, every twitch of body language, is worth a write-up in the Spanish sports dailies, a segment on the radio, a feature on Real Madrid TV. Thing is, little of note comes out of his mouth; the uppity temperament that once made him interesting has long since mellowed.

Crucially, his tactics have not evolved, that once-famous man management reduced to the occasional bark.

Mourinho is only coaching because, like he says, he is incomplete without it. He’s only coaching at Real Madrid because it’s the only club as delusional, as Quixotic, as he is.

In the Netflix series, he tells the interviewer that no one would make a documentary “with a guy who wins nothing.” They also don’t make them with guys who are serious, busy managers at the heights of their careers. Retrospects don’t work that way.

There’s a quite telling moment in the first episode where Mourinho denies inventing the “Special One” nickname for himself, blaming the media for foisting the label on him.

The interviewer, chuckling, points out that Mourinho is making that comment while standing in front of a giant mural — of himself.

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