Jose Mourinho is back at Real Madrid: the pros, the cons, and what the players are walking into

Thirteen years after leaving the Bernabeu under a cloud of dressing room tension, leaked training sessions and a troubled final campaign, Jose Mourinho is going back. Fabrizio Romano confirmed the agreement on May 18, and ESPN reported Benfica will receive €7 million in compensation for a manager who had a contract with the Portuguese club until 2027. Real Madrid plan to make it official after their final La Liga game against Athletic Club on Sunday.

The Special One, who turned 63 in January, is heading to his second stint at the most decorated football club in the world, bringing with him 27 major trophies, a net worth estimated at around $120 million, and a career record of over 760 wins across 14 clubs in nine countries.

Whether it works the second time around is the question everybody at the Bernabeu is now asking.

Born in Setúbal, Portugal on January 26, 1963, Mourinho had a modest playing career in his home country before reinventing himself as a coach through a meticulous apprenticeship under Sir Bobby Robson and Louis van Gaal at Barcelona. His first managerial job came at Benfica in 2000, where he lasted just 10 games before boardroom politics pushed him out. He then went to União de Leiria, caught Porto's attention, and from 2002 onwards the football world never stopped watching him.

Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Chelsea again, Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma, Fenerbahce, Benfica, and now Real Madrid again. He is the only manager in history to win all three of UEFA's major club competitions, lifting the Champions League twice, the Europa League once and the Conference League once.

His La Liga title with Real Madrid in 2011-12, which ended Barcelona's stranglehold on the league, remains one of the most tactically well-constructed single seasons any manager has produced in Spain.

The pros: Why this could work

Real Madrid have gone two consecutive seasons without winning a major trophy, which is the longest barren run the club has had since before Florentino Pérez's second presidency. Xabi Alonso was sacked after 233 days.

Álvaro Arbeloa, his caretaker replacement, won zero trophies, lost La Liga to Barcelona, went out of the Champions League to Bayern, and surrendered the Copa del Rey to Real Sociedad. The Bernabeu squad is loaded with individual talent, Vinicius, Mbappe, Bellingham, Valverde, Tchouameni, among others, but it has no collective identity, no reliable defensive structure and no system that everyone in the dressing room believes in.

Mourinho, for all his faults, builds systems that players understand clearly. His counter-attacking model gives fast, direct attackers like Vinicius and Mbappe exactly the kind of transition game that suits their best qualities. He won a La Liga title with this club before. He knows the Bernabeu, knows the media, knows Pérez. His experience in high-pressure environments, having managed at Real Madrid, Chelsea, Inter Milan and Manchester United, is precisely what this squad needs after two seasons of managerial instability.

His record also speaks for itself in the best way possible. Mourinho has won league titles in Portugal, England, Italy, Spain and now has a Saudi Pro League win at Fenerbahce too. No, he left Fenerbahce after one season without winning the Turkish Super Lig, but his Benfica side finished third in the Primeira Liga this season in an unbeaten league run that confirmed he still has the tactical discipline to build competitive squads.

Jamie Carragher, speaking on Sky Sports News after the announcement, noted that Mourinho going straight back to work rather than taking World Cup punditry commitments tells you he is completely focused on the challenge. That hunger, at 63, is the one thing everyone who dismisses his appointment will struggle to argue against.

The cons: Why this is a risk

The first spell ended badly. After winning La Liga in his second season, the third was a disaster. Training sessions were reportedly filmed by someone inside the squad and leaked to Barcelona. His public fallout with Iker Casillas, one of the most beloved figures in the club's history, divided the dressing room so completely that senior players stopped communicating normally. Sergio Ramos gave interviews contradicting Mourinho's public statements. The atmosphere in the final months was described by multiple sources at the time as toxic.

Mourinho left the summer of 2013 and Casillas barely featured the following season, both of them visibly carrying the scars of what had happened. The players currently at the club are not the same people, but the culture of the Bernabeu, where big characters expect direct access to the coach and resist being told to play within defined tactical limits, hasn't changed.

The Mbappe situation is the specific flashpoint every analyst is watching. Mourinho was sacked at Tottenham in April 2021 in the week before a League Cup final, with multiple reports citing a loss of dressing room control and fractured relationships with senior players. His spell at Roma ended in January 2024, again amid reports of player unhappiness with his training methods. Mbappe, who was reportedly unhappy with Xabi Alonso's demands on defensive work, is not the kind of player who will silently absorb Mourinho's famously disciplined, detail-heavy approach to pressing and shape.

If Mourinho's system asks Mbappe to track back and press from the front, and Mbappe decides that is not in his interest, the confrontation will not be private. The Spanish press will know about it within a week.

Carragher put it directly: “Whether he is the right man to fix a dressing room, I don't know. For Real Madrid to go back to Jose Mourinho tells you there's not that quality out there.”

That is both a compliment and a warning in the same sentence, and it reflects the wider unease around this appointment. The coaching market has genuinely shrunk at the elite level. Ancelotti has gone to Brazil. Guardiola has just left City. Tuchel is at England. Simeone stays at Atletico. The options for Pérez were always limited. But choosing a 63-year-old manager whose last three club jobs all ended with some form of dressing room rupture, and whose tactical evolution has been questioned in the years since his Inter treble in 2010, is a decision that carries real risk regardless of the trophies attached to his name.

What the players can expect

Structured clarity is coming. Mourinho's teams know exactly what they are doing defensively, exactly where to be on the pitch at every moment of the game, and exactly what the consequences are for ignoring the plan. Players who want clearly defined roles and a coach who protects them publicly when results turn tend to thrive under him.

Bellingham, who handles pressure and tactical complexity exceptionally well, should do well. Valverde, who Mourinho has publicly admired, will be central. Players who want total freedom to express themselves without defensive accountability should prepare for a conversation they won't enjoy.

Vinicius will be an interesting case. Mourinho loves direct wingers who can isolate defenders one against one, which is precisely Vinicius's strength. If Mourinho builds the team around protecting Vinicius's attacking freedom while covering for him defensively through the shape of the midfield, it could work beautifully. If he demands the same defensive contribution from Vinicius that he demands from his right-sided midfielder, it won't last the first month.

Real Madrid's announcement comes after the final game of the season. The World Cup starts June 15. Mourinho gets roughly eight weeks to assess the squad, complete pre-season, integrate new signings and build the tactical foundations for a campaign that Real Madrid's hierarchy has said must end with trophies.

The Special One has done more with less in shorter timescales before. Whether a squad that has developed bad habits across two years of instability can absorb a coach as demanding and as uncompromising as this one, quickly enough to compete from August, is the question nobody at the Bernabeu can answer yet. The Mourinho we know will be convinced he can.