José Mourinho makes his competitive return to Real Madrid on Saturday night against Espanyol, sixteen years after he first walked into the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu as coach in the summer of 2010, fresh off winning the treble with Inter Milan.
This time he arrives after Benfica, after Fenerbahçe, after Roma, and after two trophyless seasons at the club he is now trying to fix. Neither party is at their peak, but the combination has renewed optimism around the club’s training ground around Valdebebas.
Yet the question remains, what actually counts as success this year, and how quickly does Real Madrid need to see it? Would stability after three coaches in 12 months be enough? Is silverware a demand after two years without a trophy?
Mourinho answered that question directly in his first pre-match press conference since returning to the club. “There are many ways to look at it,” he said. “The only way to be pragmatic is to focus on results. We can improve a lot on many levels, build up the structure, and there’s a lot that needs to change, but results are what count. We have three competitions plus a small one. Finishing without any trophies at Real Madrid is not a successful season.”
That is a low floor and a high one at the same time. Low to some Madrid fans, because it does not require the Champions League specifically. High, because it rules out the kind of transitional, rebuilding campaign that might be tolerated at almost any other club in Europe. Real Madrid have gone two seasons without a major trophy, their longest drought in over a decade, a stretch that has coincided with Barcelona winning back-to-back league titles under Hansi Flick.
Former Real Madrid midfielder turned TV pundit Steve McManaman, speaking this week at an ESPN x La Liga season preview alongside ex-Barcelona captain Carles Puyol, framed the job in almost identical terms before Mourinho had said a word publicly.
“He needs to win. It’s as simple as that,” McManaman said. “He needs to beat Barcelona. He needs to win the league. I don’t necessarily think he needs to win the Champions League, but I certainly think he needs to finish above Barcelona.”
McManaman was blunt about why the timeline is short. “Real Madrid can’t go three years without winning anything,” he said. “And your nearest and dearest rivals are in Barcelona winning everything.”
A Squad Assembled in Fragments
Part of what makes this opener unusual is the condition of the squad Mourinho inherited after the World Cup. “There are players who’ve had 36 training sessions and 6 games, and others who’ve played just a few games and had five training sessions,” Mourinho said. “I’ve been able to tailor the training for everyone.”
Puyol, who won the World Cup with Spain, knows about that test as a player.
He offered a note of caution on the mental transition players face after a summer like this one, one that applies just as easily to Madrid’s returning World Cup contingent as it does to his own club’s players. “You’re up in the clouds to win a World Cup,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing, but also you have to know how to manage it, because everyone says you’re very good, but you shouldn’t believe it. You have to continue to work and you shouldn’t relax, because match day one is as important as match day 36.”
It is a reminder that “success” this season starts from an uneven baseline that has nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with a compressed calendar. The most structurally interesting challenge facing Mourinho is not personnel volume, it is fit. Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior, and Jude Bellingham have still not excelled under a coach tasked with building a system around all three simultaneously, and Mourinho was unusually candid about the difficulty of that.
“Ancelotti has found the perfect fit for Vini, Deschamps for Kylian, and Tuchel for Jude,” he said. “It’s harder to find the perfect fit for all three under Mourinho. They have to do it because they believe he can make it work.”
McManaman, watching from outside the building, described the same tension as a man-management issue as much as a tactical one, given the scale of the egos and contracts involved. “It’s a huge balancing act for Jose Mourinho,” he said. “It’s half the battle with managers now, keeping the players happy. Making sure none of them are sulking on the bench unhappy.”
The Midfield Question Nobody Agrees On
Real Madrid’s midfield has been a subject of debate since the club sold Claude Makélélé in 2003 and reinvested in attacking talent instead, a decision Zinedine Zidane later mocked with a line that has followed the club for two decades, “why put another layer of gold paint on a Bentley when you don’t have an engine?”
More than twenty years on, the same question resurfaced ahead of this season, and Mourinho and outside observers do not agree on the answer. McManaman was direct, saying, “they haven’t got a number six yet,” pointing to the gap Madrid still carry at that position relative to a team like Barcelona, who added Rodri from Manchester City this summer.
Mourinho rejected the premise outright. “I don’t think we have a shortage,” he insisted. “A midfielder would be the icing on the cake. When you have Tchouameni, Bernardo, Arda… we don’t have a problem.”
Whether that is genuine confidence in Aurélien Tchouameni, Bernardo Silva, and Arda Güler, or simply a coach declining to air a structural concern in public before a ball is kicked, is one of the more testable disagreements of the opening weeks.
Espanyol as the First Data Point
None of this gets resolved in the abstract. It gets tested on Saturday night, when Mourinho takes his seat in the Real Madrid dugout for a competitive fixture for the first time since 2013, against an Espanyol side he described with real respect ahead of kickoff.
“They’re a good team,” he said. “Teams that have had the same coach for a long time are well-prepared, with established routines and dynamics. They play well and with ambition. I really liked their first game.”
Mourinho stated in his press conference a line that best captures how he is measuring the season ahead, tying results directly to Madrid’s traditional celebration point in the city. “Every point we win brings us closer to Cibeles,” he said.
For a club with Real Madrid’s history, that has always been the only scoreboard that matters. Two seasons of falling short of it is why Mourinho is back, and Saturday is where the counting starts.