Thirteen years after a tumultuous exit, the legendary Portuguese tactician returns to a fractured Madrid dressing room.The idea that one day Mourinho might return to the Bernabéu, if not really as a serious possibility. Now the impossible is probable. Jose Mourinho and Real Madrid, a love-hate relationship, are reuniting again after 13 years of hiatus. After repeatedly threatening to bring Jose Mourinho back to the Bernabeu, Florentino Perez has only gone and done it. On Monday, widespread reports confirmed that Real Madrid had agreed a deal with Mourinho for him to return for a second spell as coach, 13 years after his first ended in acrimony.It was revealed just last month that Mourinho was top of Real Madrid president Florentino Perez’s wishlist to replace Alvaro Arbeloa, who had only taken over from the hastily-sacked Xabi Alonso in January. The timing is still shocking, though. Perez has reportedly invoked a 6 million euro release clause to bring the 63-year-old manager back to the Spanish capital from Portuguese giants Benfica. Madrid is a club in complete crisis, with an under-pressure president on the warpath, players being hospitalised by team-mates and millions of supporters signing a petition for superstar strikers to be sold. Adding Mourinho into the mix, thus, feels like pouring petrol on a dumpster fire.For a club that defines itself by silverware, the current reality is nothing short of a catastrophe. Los Blancos are staring at a second consecutive season without a major trophy, languishing a massive 11 points behind arch-rivals and La Liga champions Barcelona with one match to end the season. A recent, humiliating 2-0 El Clasico defeat was the final nail in the coffin, forcing Perez to turn back to the ultimate crisis manager. The Ghost of Bernabeu Past: The 2010-2013 SagaWhen Mourinho arrived in Madrid back in 2010, he was regarded by many neutrals as the No.1 coach in the world, having just won a treble with Inter, after enjoying similarly historic success at Chelsea and Porto. As he prepares to make his return, though, Mourinho hasn’t won a league title since 2015, while the Conference League is the only cup he’s won in the past nine years. In his only la-liga winning season, he amassed 100 Points, a then-record La Liga tally in the 2011-12 season. In his only successful season, he won the Copa Del Rey and the La Liga.He did remarkably well to break Barcelona’s stranglehold on the Spanish title during his first stint as coach, but his unsustainably turbulent tenure was still brought to a premature end because he lost the support of several key members of the dressing room, including two club icons in Sergio Ramos and Iker Casillas. The latter even argued against his potential return – but the former goalkeeper’s plea unsurprisingly fell on deaf ears.Thirteen years later, ironically the Madrid hierarchy is banking on that same fiery discipline to restore order to a fractured dressing room. Perez is utterly convinced that Mourinho is still the man and has effectively staked his presidency on that being the case. But this is not one of those gambles that’s likely to pay off spectacularly and it will be interesting to see how the arrival pens out. Reports of internal friction—highlighted by a recent training ground bust-up between Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni—have exposed a severe lack of emotional control in Madrid. Desperate times call for desperate measures, something different; the bigger the problem, the bigger the personality needed, someone with the authority to address the egos and take on the internal and external enemies with which Pérez is preoccupied and Mourinho may be the perfect fit to manage the stars like Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius JR.
