Real Madrid is a club overrun with over-inflated egos, one more won’t make any difference. Jose Mourinho can just slot right in alongside the real gaffer, Kylian Mbappe, Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Junior et al, and glory in the specialness of it all.
Whether it will be enough to placate the fans and avoid a second trophyless season is another matter. Since his initial three-year stint at the Santiago Bernabeu ended 12 years ago, Mourinho has become a football itinerant, as well as irritant, wringing the last drops of that once-powerful cache to maintain what relevance he can.
In terms of coaching significance and ideas, the Mourinho manual has little application left. His brand of minimalist, joyless, utilitarian football began to erode during his second spell at Chelsea. Despite being unbeaten since his return to Benfica in September, they trail Sporting Lisbon by seven points in Liga Portugal.
Madrid is so unlike any other institution since the coach is secondary in importance to the real centre of power, the players. Or make that one player, Mbappe. Like Cristiano Ronaldo before him, Mbappe embodies absolutely a galactico culture that goes back all the way to Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas.
Mourinho is more effective at lesser clubs where the star power inheres in him alone, where the need is theirs for him. Clearly at Real Madrid and Manchester United, the special ones wear boots. It is the players who forge the brand. Even Sir Alex Ferguson understood that.
Though control is sacrificed, there are compensations. The coach at Madrid enjoys the same structural advantages Mourinho identified at Manchester City in his recent takedown of Pep Guardiola. In other words it is hard to fail if you play by the rules, which means following Mbappe’s orders and drawing media fire where necessary.
It was too much for Mourinho to acknowledge the greatness of Guardiola, the zeitgeist monster at Barcelona during their shared seasons in La Liga. Yeah, sure, a great coach, beautiful football and all that, but, he claimed, no Ferguson, who built the infrastructure that delivered the team as well as the methodology that coached it.
So what would Madrid be getting? Brand? Tick. Previous club experience? Tick. Theatre? Tick. Compliance? Tick. Deference? Tick. Vision? Don’t be silly.
At Manchester United, the touchline-skipping energy that helped forge the Mourinho mystique during Sporting’s Champions League victory at Old Trafford 22 years ago, had reduced to parking the bus. He was frankly a disaster, his shrunken vision wildly at odds with the United way and the grandiose sense that he had of himself.
The gathering poverty of his football at Old Trafford was camouflaged by a League Cup and Europa League double in his first season. Ultimately it was this that persuaded Tottenham Hotspur to give him a go in 2019 after United got rid following a desultory 3-1 defeat at Anfield.
They loved him at Roma. Well, Serie A, where he burnished his early reputation at Inter Milan, is perhaps best suited temperamentally to Mourinho’s counter-culture values. Moreover, victory in the Conference League put a European trophy in a Roman boardroom for the first time since Caesar controlled the Forum.
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For all that, the trajectory was unmistakably downward. Twelve years on from arguably his greatest achievement, winning the Champions League with Inter, here he was framing Conference League victory as elite success when in reality it was a low grade token at third tier European stock.
His brief, 14-month spell with Fenerbahce was searingly apposite, perfectly reflecting the taciturn malcontent he has become. The football was pedestrian and colourless, he fell out with the board and could not lay a glove on Galatasaray. He left by mutual consent, which was a polite way of saying get outta here and don’t darken our door again.
Florentino Perez is exercising his presidential prerogative to push for Mourinho’s return. In the context of a disappointing campaign in which Xabi Alonso came and went and Alvaro Arbeloa respectfully put the bibs out, Mourinho at least represents familiarity and carries sufficient legacy power to win over the gullible until something better turns up or he forgets himself and tries to bin Mbappe.
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