Football journalist and author Guillem Balagué provides his expert insight on what the reported appointment of Jose Mourinho could mean for Real Madrid.
The dressing room is on fire. Players aren't speaking to each other. Tchuameni and Valverde ended up in a physical confrontation that put the Uruguayan in hospital with head trauma. Valverde issued a statement simultaneously apologising and denying a fight had taken place, and then, in the same breath, confirming that it had and complaining about a mole in the dressing room leaking it to the press.
Kylian Mbappé flew to Cagliari on holiday while injured (nothing wrong with it apart from the look of distance and coldness that projects) and landed in Madrid twelve minutes before the league match against Espanyol. Rüdiger slapped Carreras. The previous coaching staff called the dressing room a nursery. Arbeloa couldn't change the dynamics.
And the solution Real Madrid are seriously considering is José Mourinho.
This is the logic of an institution that has stopped thinking clearly: when everything is burning, add someone who arrived with a flamethrower.
Before getting to Mourinho, it is worth understanding how Madrid got here, because the collapse did not happen overnight and it was not primarily tactical.
The problems flow from the top. Florentino Pérez — without question the most relevant president in Real Madrid's history alongside Santiago Bernabéu, the architect of six Champions Leagues, the man who rebuilt the stadium and turned the club into a global brand — is in charge of a club suffering a creeping erosion of confidence, a diffusion of authority. The president who once ran a tight ship now watches water come in from multiple directions.
That has consequences. When Xabi Alonso was dismissed in January, having taken the job knowing the dressing room was already difficult, the signal sent was that player power — specifically Vinícius's very public act of defiance when substituted in the Clásico — would not be confronted.
Since then, under Arbeloa, nothing has improved. Valverde was no longer deployed as a right back, which had been Xabi Alonso's call against the player's wishes. Vinícius was never substituted. Both men got what they wanted and Real Madrid, despite being 5 points ahead of Barcelona after the first LaLiga Clásico, eventually lost everything they played for. Two years without winning anything is long. They had shorter ice ages. The season collapsed with a dressing room that by May resembled a collection of competing factions leaking information to the press. Marca and AS became a bulletin board for internal warfare.
The cultural rot goes deeper than this season. The departure of Kroos, Modric, Nacho, Lucas Vázquez — players who understood what it meant to be secondary to the collective — left a vacuum that the new generation was not ready to fill. Mbappé arrived and was handed everything. Bellingham carried weight but was young. Valverde and Vinícius, gifted as they are, became leaders by default rather than by character. Ancelotti had managed to paper over the cracks, as he was one of the few human beings on earth with the emotional intelligence to keep that specific collection of egos pointed in roughly the same direction. When he left, the cracks became craters.
And so now they want Mourinho.
The logic, as it is being articulated inside the club, goes like this: immature squads need authoritarian managers. The dressing room is ungovernable. Therefore, bring in the iron fist. It is a clean narrative. It is also, as Jorge Valdano has noted more than once, historically false — pacifists have generally outperformed authoritarians at the Bernabéu. Zidane won three consecutive Champions Leagues on trust, serenity and an ability to make players feel respected. Ancelotti won the league and the Champions League in 2024 with a dressing room he described as free of runaway egos. Del Bosque.
Mourinho's first spell ended in a dressing room divided, a squad with deep personal fractures, and a bitter, public falling-out that left scars on the club for years. He is brilliant. He is also the manager who has not won a league title in over a decade. The idea that he will walk into Valdebebas, stare down Vinícius and Mbappé, and restore order is the kind of thinking that makes sense when you're panicking.
What it actually amounts to is adding dynamite to a bomb and calling it engineering.
The more serious question — the one Real Madrid seem either unwilling or unable to ask — is what kind of club they actually want to be.
Because the Mourinho candidacy says: we believe in hierarchy through fear, in control through conflict, in winning by making people smaller rather than larger. It is the opposite of what built Barcelona's golden years. It is also, increasingly, the opposite of what built Real Madrid's best moments.
There is a version of this summer that looks like reconstruction — a president who acknowledges that something deeper than tactics has gone wrong, a sporting structure that rebuilds with patience and it might include Kroos, a manager who can develop the next generation of leaders rather than simply dominate a dressing room full of reluctant followers. That version requires Florentino Pérez to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about his own role in the decline.
Mourinho’s return will be one of the great soap operas of modern football. And perhaps that is part of the appeal: the noise of his arrival drowning out the harder questions.
The mechanics of it are already in motion. Mourinho has a release clause at Benfica worth three million euros, active within ten days of the club's final match of the season, and his contract runs until the summer of 2027. He has not spoken directly to anyone at Real Madrid, but his agent Jorge Mendes has, and Mourinho is expected to finalise things as soon as the window opens.
It would be lazy to dismiss him entirely. Madrid are planning a significant squad overhaul — four or five players leaving, two or three starters arriving, with central midfield and centre back the priority positions. A more coherent squad. Mourinho's ability to impose structure and extract petrol from imperfect groups is genuinely useful. He has done it before.
But the problem that no new signing solves — and no managerial authority fully resolves — is Mbappé and Vinícius. The club wants to keep both. That decision alone may define whether anything Mourinho builds holds together.
They are not incompatible in theory. Two elite attacking players always find a way to coexist on paper. But both are more interested in the end product — the goal, the moment of individual brilliance — than in the fluid, selfless work that makes a team genuinely dangerous. They operate in parallel, two soloists sharing a stage without quite playing the same piece. The runs in behind that create space for each other, the work to get the ball back, the assists, these are the details that neither has consistently delivered when both are on the pitch together.
Mbappé's problem goes beyond attitude. He has missed roughly half of Madrid's most important matches since he arrived — games against Barcelona, Atlético, Manchester City — through injury. When he is fit, the numbers are there. But a player of his cost and status who is absent for the fixtures that actually matter is a different proposition to what was advertised. Off the pitch he inhabits his own world and there is a sense that the club exists to accommodate him rather than the other way around. The phrase used by those close to the squad is telling: he lives in his own little cocoon.
Vinícius, meanwhile, is a different player without him. Freer, more central, more decisive. Whether that is coincidence or chemistry is the question Mourinho will inherit.
The fuse is lit. The question is whether Madrid want to put out the fire, or whether, with Mourinho in the dugout and those two on the pitch, they have simply found a more spectacular way to watch it burn.
